In the days leading up to the Florida primary, Republican Presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called for a ban on embryonic stem cell research and the creation of a commission to study the ethics of in vitro fertilization.
According to the Washington Post, Gingrich was expressing concern about the excess embryos created in the IVF process and said, “I believe life begins at conception, and the question I was raising was what happens to embryos in fertility clinics, and I would favor a commission to look seriously at the ethics of how we manage fertility clinics. If you have in vitro fertilization, you are creating life; therefore, we should look seriously at what the rules should be for clinics that are doing that, because they are creating life.”
Barb Collura, executive director of RESOLVE, says the statements demonstrate a lack of understanding about the science and medicine behind IVF, as well as a lack of understanding about infertility. "He is not understanding this is a medical condition, this is a medical treatment, and now you're going to take one option that we have and say we're going to put this under the microscope and we may decide that there needs to be government intervention and government rules and government managing it," she says. "And that is really sad when we're looking at a private medical condition, a medical decision that people want to make, and now we're going to have government telling you what kind of care you should have, what the medical procedure should be.
"When we look at transferring embryos and freezing embryos, that's the standard of care," Collura continues. "How many embryos are you going to transfer, what are you going to freeze, what's the drug protocol you're gong to use to stimulate? Those are the standard of care questions."
This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here. 