ProLife.ie - We are an education and awareness organisation committed to the promotion of the culture of life.

An Irish IVF clinic is planning to offer eugenic screening of embryos. The controversial process, not previously available in Ireland, will inform parents if their child has an inherited disease such as cystic fibrosis. The move has sparked fears it could lead to embryos being screened for minor deficiencies, or even to sex selection.
 
Beacon Medical Group, in partnership with UK-based service Care Fertility, is opening a new clinic in Dublin where it plans to offer pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD. This involves testing embryos for conditions such as Huntington’s disease, haemophilia and cystic fibrosis, a practice increasingly used across Europe. A number of other clinics in Dublin and Cork are also planning to seek permission from the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) to begin offering the procedure later this year.
 
Pro Life Campaign spokeswoman Dr Ruth Cullen criticised the move. “Treating human life as a disposable commodity is a grave violation of the most basic human right, the right to life,” she said.
 
Prof Simon Fishel, managing director of Care Fertility, said the new process was aimed at achieving the best chance of pregnancy for patients. The clinic also plans to make other high-tech interventions available, such as immunology, chromosome screening and a new form of egg freezing, which the clinic said has higher success rates.
 
In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is not regulated in Ireland, but there are laws relating to use and storage of human tissue. While Beacon Medical Group plans to make PGD available soon, it has not yet been authorised to do so. The IMB said it has not issued any licence yet—and an authorisation would be issued only if it complied with legislation on tissues and cells.
 
In Britain, PGD is licensed for use on older women, women with a history of recurrent miscarriages and those with repeated IVF failure. The use of these procedures is likely to put a sharper focus on the destruction of unwanted embryos used in IVF.
 
Earlier this month another IVF centre was licenced to use a freezing process which it claims improves the chances of embryos surviving post-thawing. The IMB confirmed that the Merrion Fertility Clinic in Dublin is the first facility in the Republic which has been approved for vitrification, a technique that rapidly freezes embryos. The process can also be used to freeze eggs and the clinic intends to establish an egg-freezing programme later this year pending a further licence.
 
Dr Mary Wingfield, medical director of the Merrion Fertility Clinic, said that, with the traditional slow method of freezing embryos, about 75 per cent of them survived the thawing process. She said that in the vitrification method up to 95 per cent of them survived. “It means we can now freeze embryos using a method which has not been used in Ireland before,” she said.
 
It is thought that up to 3,000 babies are born in Ireland each year as a result of IVF and other forms of assisted reproduction. Assisted human reproduction has become a booming industry here with approximately 26 fertility clinics offering a range of fertility treatment from IVF to egg freezing and artificial insemination.
 
The technique was introduced to Ireland by Professor Robbie Harrison, a consultant obstetrician at Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital, and the first IVF baby was born at the Rotunda in January 1986. In the multi-million euro industry today, a standard IVF treatment can cost anything from €3,800 to in excess of €7,000 and has a 31 per cent success rate.
 
There are health risks involved for women who undergo the invasive procedure. These include ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a condition in which the ovaries swell and fluid leaks into the abdominal cavity and chest, can be severe and even fatal in approximately 2 per cent of cases.
 
F&L Comment: The lack of any law governing fertility clinics in Ireland is highlighted by the ease with which techniques which have proved highly controversial in other jurisdictions are being introduced. The human embryos killed in these processes are the victims of this lucrative industry. The clinics carefully avoid talking about the fate of those embryos that are weeded out by their quality controls—certain death.
The Irish Times. January 18. The Irish Times. January 11. Irish Independent. December 19. Family & Life. January 20.