It is three years since the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority reviewed its guidelines for sperm, egg and embryo donation in the appropriately acronymed SEED report. But reproductive medicine has moved on so swiftly that Professor Lisa Jardine, who took over last April as the authority’s chairman, believes that it is time to return to the issue. In an interview with The Times she called for a fresh debate on two of the most controversial aspects of donation. First on her agenda is the question of when family members should be allowed to donate to one another. She is concerned about intergenerational donation, such as in two cases in 2007. In one, a Briton aged 72 provided sperm to his daughter-in-law, while in the other a Canadian, Melanie Boivin, froze eggs for her daughter, Flavie, 7, who has Turner syndrome and will become infertile.
A longstanding ban on selling sperm and eggs should be reconsidered to address a national shortage of donors, the head of the Government’s fertility watchdog says. Payments to donors could cut the number of childless couples travelling abroad for treatment, Lisa Jardine, of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, told The Times.
The government says it will ban all private transplants of organs from dead donors in the UK. The move comes after media reports of overseas patients paying to get onto the waiting list for organs donated by British people. An independent report said organs were scarce and no one should be able to pay for transplants, to ensure NHS patients did not miss out. Surgeons said it should reassure people organs went to those in most need.
The government has announced a ban on patients paying for private transplant surgery using organs donated within the NHS. Ministers have accepted the recommendations of an independent report commissioned by the government after concerns that foreign patients were bypassing lengthy NHS waiting lists by paying up to £75 000 ({euro}90 000; $130 000) for a transplantation. Earlier this year it was revealed that the livers of 50 British NHS donors were transplanted into foreign patients over a two year period, with the bulk of the operations taking place in London at King’s College Hospital and the Royal Free Hospital.
Ask a couple struggling to conceive what they would want most in life and "a child" is the obvious answer. They want something money can't buy, even with all the money in the world. For a couple needing egg or sperm donation this reality might change. Money could buy at least the chance of a child if donors were to be paid, if that's one of the outcomes of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) donation review. Various issues are being reviewed in the HFEA public consultation, but payment of egg and sperm donors is high on the agenda.
Clinicians and egg donors have signalled their support for a rise in the amount of compensation paid to women who donate eggs to infertile women in the United Kingdom, as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority prepares to launch a public consultation on the subject.
OTTAWA — A Supreme Court ruling placing much of Canada's burgeoning fertility industry under provincial control leaves an enormous gap in the regulation of artificial procreation and exposes women who use the technologies and the children born from them to potential harm, critics say. A sharply divided court struck down key federal powers to regulate assisted human reproduction Wednesday, concluding that several parts of a new law fall under provincial jurisdiction over health care. The ruling effectively stops a federal move toward national standards and guts Assisted Human Reproduction Canada — an embattled federal agency that was struck four years ago to monitor how assisted procreation is carried out at more than two dozen fertility clinics across the country.
A serving High Court judge has told the BBC that he is approving commercial surrogacy agreements made by British couples abroad. Laws in the UK are designed to try to prevent such arrangements, but Mr Justice Hedley said his paramount concern was the welfare of the child. The most recent case the judge approved was last month, involving a baby born to a surrogate in the Ukraine. The judge said he was "extremely anxious" about the current situation. In Britain, the judge said, the only payment allowed to a surrogate mother was one of "reasonable expenses". However, he has agreed to give retrospective approval for commercial surrogacy on at least four occasions.
People who might never have known who their biological mother or father was will have that opportunity now that a B.C. Supreme Court judge has declared unconstitutional the legislation that denied donor offspring the same rights as adoptees. The ruling will make British Columbia the first province in Canada to ban anonymity for sperm and egg donors.
GPs have been paid for thousands of patients on their lists who have moved practice, died or been forced to leave the country, according to a report by the Audit Commission.