I refer to the article MPs Reject Gozo Bishop IVF Appeal (April 2) where the reporter mentions that the IVF committee I chaired for a pre-set six- month term from January to June 2010 “had favoured embryo freezing”.
Well, this was not the personal opinion of three medical doctor MPs across party lines but the recommendation of the four hands-on experts we dealt at length with – two heads of departments at Mater Dei Hospital, the head of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) and a family therapy counsellor who had herself successfully undergone the process at Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust.
Until then, even recent legislation adopted in Italy had the Constitutional Court in 2009 declaring the constitutional illegitimacy of the words of article 14, s. 2 of law n. 40/2004 referring to “a single and contextual implant and, in any case, not higher than three”. The court emphasised that the declaration of unconstitutionality leaves in effect the principle according to which reproductive techniques shall not create a number of embryos higher than the one strictly necessary to proceed to a serious attempt to produce a pregnancy, according to the doctor’s evaluation.
It excluded the doctor’s obligation to proceed to a single and contextual implant, eliminating the unreasonable equality of treatment of substantially different cases and the necessity, on the part of the woman, to undergo several cycles of ovary stimulation. The conclusion reached by the court introduced a derogation to the general ban against any freezing of embryos, the doctor now being allowed to resort to freezing with regard to those embryos produced but eventually not implanted due to discretionary medical choice.
Incidentally, on June 30, 2010, in the ESHRE 26th annual meeting in Rome, whose proceedings were published by the end of 2010, Ana Cobo of Valencia presented unprecedented large, randomly controlled studies that “ongoing pregnancy rate in women who had received vitrified oocytes was 43.7 per cent as opposed to 41.7 per cent in the fresh oocyte group” even though “it was still to be ascertained that there are no adverse effects on children conceived from cryopreserved oocytes”.
The Times had reported in the June 17, 2011 issue how the Social Affairs Committee, at meetings in April-June 2011, in which I also participated, had gone through these developments with the leading local IVF practitioners and the Professionals Against Embryo Freezing, converging that while not more than two embryos should be transferred, embryo freezing should only be carried out as a force majeure. Since then even the most renowned centres in the UK are on board – the Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust states on its website: “Our services include IVF and ICSI; a donor sperm bank; egg donation treatment, egg freezing for women about to start treatments which might render them infertile; and a new method of freezing and storing eggs and embryos, known as vitrification, which is expected to lead to significant improvements in pregnancy rates following the use of frozen eggs or embryos.”
The issue remaining unresolved as I explained in a letter published on June 25, 2011 is whether egg vitrification can exclude the possibility of creating more than the exact amount of embryos targeted for implantation.
Assuring public opinion that the parliamentary committees I participated in did give due importance to moral standards, in my humble opinion, sensationalism, be it liberal or conservative, should keep out of this matter. I encourage the government to look into how foreign experts without bias are deciding this one crucial point.