Ethical debate brews over octuplets' birth

Los Angeles, January 31: Ethicists are opining about several ethical and moral concerns raised with the recent birth of octuplets on Jan. 27 at the Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center in California.

The entire ethicist community is questioning how the woman went through this pregnancy bearing eight embryos and how the doctors did not counsel her on the issue?

Multiple-fetus pregnancy is often associated with severe risk to mother and infant(s) and doctors say that risks associated with the babies include permanent learning disabilities, bleeding in the brain, intestinal problems, and developmental delays. They agree that it is morally incorrect to let someone go through this knowingly.

The 33-year-old woman is already a single mother to six children which include a set of twins too and stays with her parents. This is second case of octuplet birth in the United States.

Considering that she is a mother of 14 children now, many ethicists and doctors are wondering that how will this single mother with no financial support or back-up handle child-rearing, their educational and medical expenses as they grow and maintain her own health too.

According to bioethicist M. Sara Rosenthal from University of Kentucky's College of Medicine, "If she went to a fertility clinic, there's wide consensus from every single ethicist and fertility specialist that this was irresponsible and unethical to implant that many embryos. This is an outrageous situation that should not happen."

Rosenthal's comment came after the woman's mother, Angela Suleman, told a leading local newspaper that her daughter went through a fertility procedure which included implanting embryos in her womb. She added that the doctors gave her an option of reducing embryos selectively but she refused.

Sean Tipton from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine said: "A pregnancy resulting in this many babies clearly is not a medical triumph." A larger portion of medical fraternity is terming this incident as a 'medical disaster'.

However, it is still not known how eight embryos were implanted in her case. According to Robert George, member of the U.S. President's Council on Bioethics, many European countries including Italy and Germany have limited the number of embryos to be implanted at one time to three.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist from University of Pennsylvania, said: "Anyone who transfers eight embryos should be arrested for malpractice. If they superovulated someone and they detected many eggs available and they didn’t warn them about having sex, that would be a problem too."

American Society for Reproductive Medicine president, Dr. R. Dale McClure, said: "If this resulted from an IVF treatment, we can say that transferring eight embryos in an IVF cycle is well beyond our guidelines."

According to the guidelines, not more than two embryos can be implanted at a given time in a woman below 35 years of age unless there are "extraordinary circumstances".

Dr. Scott Slayden, from the Atlanta-based Reproductive Biology Associates, said: "It would be extremely unusual, very strange and hard to believe that somebody who is a professional would put that many embryos into a woman who is 33 years old who has children."

Slayden feels that the incident is a bad example for women seeking fertility treatment. They may be encouraged to go for multiple births by implanting large number of embryos, thereby putting themselves and their babies through high risks.