Postponing Motherhood Places Too Much Faith in Reproductive Science: Experts
By Sharon Kirkey, Postmedia News,
Montreal Gazette
| 11. 17. 2011
The growing numbers of women postponing motherhood are placing too much blind faith in science to help them conceive when they're ready to have a baby.
That's the warning being issued by this country's pregnancy specialists.
The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada — which has just issued new guidelines to doctors on "advanced reproductive age" and fertility — worries that women are overestimating the success rates of artificial procreation.
Short of using a younger woman's donated eggs, no assisted baby-making technology today can get around the reality that the supply and quality of a woman's eggs shrinks over time — and that by the time a woman reaches her early to mid-30s, each egg offers less chance of pregnancy and a higher risk of miscarriage.
More women over 40 are now seeking treatment for infertility — even though the failure rate for that age group is close to 90 per cent, fertility experts say.
"Fertility treatments aren't a sure-fire route to pregnancy — their rates of success are greatly influenced by age-related declines in fertility," Dr. Allison Case...
Related Articles
By Courtney Withers and Daryna Zadvirna, ABC News | 12.03.2025
Same-sex couples, single people, transgender and intersex West Australians will be able to access assisted reproductive technology (ART) and surrogacy, almost a decade after reforms were first promised.
The landmark legislation, which removes the requirement for people to demonstrate medical...
By Rachel Hall, The Guardian | 11.20.2025
Couples are needlessly going through IVF because male infertility is under-researched, with the NHS too often failing to diagnose treatable causes, leading experts have said.
Poor understanding among GPs and a lack of specialists and NHS testing means male infertility...
By Grace Won, KQED [with CGS' Katie Hasson] | 12.02.2025
In the U.S., it’s illegal to edit genes in human embryos with the intention of creating a genetically engineered baby. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Bay Area startups are focused on just that. It wouldn’t be the first...
Several recent Biopolitical Times posts (1, 2, 3, 4) have called attention to the alarmingly rapid commercialization of “designer baby” technologies: polygenic embryo screening (especially its use to purportedly screen for traits like intelligence), in vitro gametogenesis (lab-made eggs and sperm), and heritable genome editing (also termed embryo editing or reproductive gene editing). Those three, together with artificial wombs, have been dubbed the “Gattaca stack” by Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency company...