The implantation of multiple embryos during in-vitro fertilization is causing children to be born unhealthy or disabled :
As he was about to head across Toronto for a national gathering of reproductive-medicine specialists Wednesday, Dr. John Barrett received a sobering reminder of Canada’s “epidemic” of multiple births, fuelled largely by those same fertility physicians. He was served with a malpractice lawsuit by the parents of triplets he had delivered — a couple now raising three disabled children.Dr. Barrett, an expert in multiple births with the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, told the doctors of the suit when he got to the meeting, then launched into a no-holds-barred lecture on the need to restrict in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a major source of multiple pregnancies and the often severe health problems that accompany them.
“What the IVF industry is doing is creating a population of sick babies . . . that is impacting all society,” he said after his address to the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society conference.
“If it’s so obvious the practice is doing harm, why do people still do it? I haven’t got the answer to that.”
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He rhymed off a litany of problems that come with such pregnancies: twins are four times as likely as singletons to die at birth; 25% of twins spend at least 18 days in the intensive-care unit and 75% of triplets spend 30 days or more in the ICU; the risk of cerebral palsy is four times higher for twins and 17-times higher for triplets; and women carrying twins are 2.6 times as likely to get pregnancy-related high-blood pressure.
