Final Report (all chapters)

that an investigator may not be able to ascertain with a high degree of confidence whether an
observed higher incidence of certain conditions among ART children is attributable to the ART
treatment itself, or whether the cause lies with the parents.
Partly motivated by the recommendations contained in “Reproduction and Responsibility,”
and partly triggered by studies reporting a significantly higher percentage of birth defects in
children born through IVF and ICSI, 6 the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)
announced in 2003 that it was convening a panel of experts to thoroughly review the available
empirical evidence on the health and safety risks of ART treatments. The panel presented the
study’s main findings at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics
(ASHG). It identified more than 2,400 studies pertaining to the health and safety of ARTs,
selected 169 studies for further scrutiny, and ignored more than 2,000 studies that did not meet
the panel’s criteria for inclusion in the study. 7 Based on this evidence, the panel concluded that
there is no reason for concern, with a notable exception – they found “suggestive but not
conclusive evidence” that ART children may suffer from a higher incidence of two rare
disorders, Angelman and Beckwith-Wiedemann syndromes.
In theory at least, this review should have provided definitive answers to the question of
whether ART treatments expose ART children to elevated health and safety risks. Unfortunately,
definitive answers are not forthcoming. Although the study’s main conclusions have been
reported widely by the news media, as of this writing the report has not been made available to
the public, and it has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In addition, the experts
selected by the Genetics and Public Policy Institute to conduct the study represent the ART
industry itself; thus, the study in essence amounts to a self-evaluation. While this is not
necessarily a reason to dismiss the report’s findings, the self-evaluatory nature of this report does
cast some doubts on its credibility. In fairness, evaluative efforts often face a trade-off between
recruiting the best experts in a given field of inquiry and ensuring independence and credibility.
At the same time, the public release of this report certainly would have increased the credibility
of the panel’s findings.
As our report is focused on new reproductive technologies rather than on standard
reproductive treatments, we won’t delve into health and safety issues in great detail.
Conversations with reproductive endocrinologists have shown that the profession generally is
dismissive of any concerns about the health and safety of assisted reproductive technologies.
These same conversations also show that practitioners seem to be unaware of studies showing a
statistical relationship between ART treatments and increased health risks. For this reason, we
felt it important to include in this report several illustrations of elevated health and safety risks
associated with ART treatments, which are included in Appendix C. (Appendix C focuses
exclusively on IVF, which remains by far the most common standard ART treatment in the
6
7
Michèle Hansen et al., "The Risk of Major Birth Defects after Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection and in Vitro
Fertilization," New England Journal of Medicine 346, no. 10 (2002).
Tracy Hampton, "Panel Reviews Health Effects Data for Assisted Reproductive Technologies," Journal of the
American Medical Association 292, no. 24 (2004).
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