Repronews #49: European Coalition for Fertility launched

Egg donation economics; UK fertility collapse; cost-of-living Canada; polygenics 101; Dawkins' Book of the Dead; CRISPR prawns; NYT on breeding shorter people

A conference stand of Fertility Europe, a Coalition for Fertility member.

Welcome to the latest issue of Repronews! Highlights from this week’s edition:

• Repro/genetics

  • 12 organizations launch European Coalition for Fertility to tackle infertility, involuntary childlessness, and promote families

  • Eggonomics: the economics of the egg donation industry, including massive racial disparities

• Population Policies & Trends

  • British fertility rate fell fastest in G7 between 2010-2022

  • Poll: Canadians putting off having children due to job insecurity, cost of living, housing

• Genetic studies

  • Polygenics 101: The utility and current limits of polygenic risk scores in health

• Further Learning

  • Review: Richard Dawkins’s The Book of the Dead on how DNA tells us about each species’ ancestral environments

  • Israeli researchers breed the world’s first gene-edited giant river prawns to boost growth and disease resistance

  • Five-foot pundit Mara Altman argued in the New York Times in favor of breeding shorter people

Repro/genetics

12 organizations launch European Coalition for Fertility (CFE)

• Twelve European organizations have launched the Coalition for Fertility, an alliance fighting involuntary childlessness, including medical infertility.

• The Coalition’s collective statement on advocating for “comprehensive and inclusive fertility policies in Europe” calls for:

  1. Familial autonomy: Implementing the right to found a family.

  2. Inclusive fertility: Ensuring universal access to fertility services and knowledge, regardless of socioeconomic status, marital status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics.

  3. Breaking the silence on involuntary childlessness, including its impact on mental health.

  4. Fertility empowerment: Providing knowledge on fertility and family decisions.

  5. Equitable support: Providing targeted support to ensure marginalized and/or discriminated groups receive equitable fertility care.

  6. Family-centered policies: Adopting a “fertility-in-all-policy” approach, so that every policy is assessed for its impact on people’s freedom to build the family they desire. This would apply to both policies affecting biological fertility (e.g., chemicals and pollution) and to policies affecting the socioeconomics of family planning (e.g., employment, housing, and childcare).

• In an article in The Parliament magazine, the Coalition argues that “infertility and involuntary childlessness are critical challenges in Europe, affecting one in six couples, meaning we all know someone facing barriers to conception. These issues extend beyond personal struggles; they shape the future of our societies and test the European Union’s commitment to fairness and equality.”

• Access to fertility care is limited due to “[p]rohibitive costs, limited access to care, and inadequate sexual education.”

• The Coalition argues that the EU must “prioritize reproductive autonomy for all” during the 2024-2029 term of the new European Commission and Parliament.

“Eggonomics explores the racism, economic exploitation, and deceit in the egg donation industry” (Salon)

• Diane Tobert, anthropology associate professor at the University of Alabama, has written Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them, a book exploring the experiences of egg donors.

• Tober interviewed over 300 people in the United States, Spain, and other countries, asking questions about women’s decisions and experiences donating eggs, the immediate and longer term health conditions donors experienced, and how they came to view the children born from their eggs.

• According to Tober, Donors “reported significantly higher rates of immediate complications, like ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), than exists in most of the literature.” About 1% experienced life-threatening conditions like kidney failure as a result.

• Tober argues for standardized informed consent forms so donors are aware of all the risks and the possibility of one day losing anonymity due to ancestry testing.

• “Currently, many donor-conceived people are advocating for their rights to know where they come from and have access to their medical information,” Tober said. “Ancestry testing makes donor anonymity unsustainable.”

• There are significant racial disparities in the market value of eggs. The top rate for white egg donors in the United States was around $100,000, compared to the top rate for black egg donors being only $12,000. A “perfect” Chinese-American donor with a masters degree from MIT sold eggs for $250,000.

• “Donor profiles are the marketing tools used to attract intended parents, and those women who possess desired social and physical traits will sell faster to a wide range of intended parents than others,” Tober writes.

• “We don’t see these kinds of dynamics around donor selection in many other countries,” Tober added. “In Spain, where medical professionals choose donors based solely on the degree to which they look like the intended parents, all donors are paid the same.”

More on repro/genetics:

• “We need one Australian IVF regulatory system, not eight” (PET)

• “Indian court allows couple to use dead son's sperm” (PET)

• “White women aged 17-40 urged [by UK NHS] to donate stem cells” (PET)