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Triplet birth rate increasing, report says
LOS ANGELES — The rate of natural triplet births — those not resulting from assisted reproductive technology — is 2.5 times as high as it was in the 1970s, probably because of the increased use of ovulation-inducing drugs and the older age of mothers, Norwegian researchers reported Wednesday.
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is criticized
LONDON — An American infertility clinic seeking business in Britain prompted fierce criticism Wednesday by offering free eggs from a U.S. woman to one participant in a promotional seminar in London.
The event has sparked a debate in Britain about the ethics of an event that many said violated the spirit, if not the letter, of a European Union law forbidding fertile women from being paid for their eggs.
It is not illegal for Europeans to pay for eggs overseas, and for years infertile European women seeking eggs have traveled to other countries like America.
As part of a marketing push in Britain, the Virginia-based Genetics and IVF Institute held a seminar for about 100 British attendants, where one randomly chosen couple won a free donor egg treatment. British fertility experts slammed the event as a publicity stunt.
"There’s something shocking in the association of a raffle and giving away a human product,” said Dr. Francoise Shenfield, a fertility and medical ethics expert at University College London.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
And despite improvements in prenatal care, the death rate for triplets is about 10 times as high as for a singleton, Dr. Anne Tandberg of the Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen and her colleagues reported in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
The researchers studied the records of more than 2 million pregnancies in the Medical Birth Registry of Norway between 1967 and 2006, examining all live births and stillbirths after the 16th week of gestation. The highest rate of triplet births was 3.5 per 10,000 pregnancies in the five-year period between 1987 and 1991, probably because of the increased used of assisted reproductive technology and in vitro fertilization. Following the introduction of new guidelines that called for the implantation of only one embryo during IVF, the number fell to 2.7 per 10,000.
The mother’s age at birth increased by 2.5 years during the period, while the cesarean-section rate for triplet pregnancies increased from 46.7 percent to 92 percent.
The study found it is important to prolong the triplet pregnancy beyond the 28th week, Tandberg said. Before that, the mortality rate is 50 percent, but beyond it the rate falls to 3.8 percent.
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
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