New reproductive technologies: news from France and elsewhere.

Synopsis – France is one of the Western countries in which the development of NRTs – and specially in vitro fertilization (IVF) – is most important, spectacular, and rapid. But the interests of the NRT’s practitioners are far from being those of women wanting to have a child. Thus, the practitioners generally do not say how low the success rates are, even in the best centers. Instead of measuring success rates by the number of deliveries per attempt, they use different ways to present their results: ways that are much more favorable for them. Furthermore, in order to increase the reproductive market, there is a trend to declare “infertile” and treat as such many women who are only “hypofertile.” Among the new indications being used for NRTs, IVF (which was first used for female infertility) is now prescribed sometimes as a treatment for male infertility. Thus this risky method is applied to the fertile women whose husband is infertile. Apart from the risks of egg retrieval for women, one must add those associated with hormonal stimulations. To be more precise, new drugs are being tested on large numbers of women: even if they don’t increase their chances of having a baby, they do allow the doctors to retrieve a very great number of eggs (which are very important as raw material for experiments), and they certainly do increase the risks for women. To conclude, the NRTs present many advantages for the practitioners: they enable them to make profits; they also provide a very competitive field of research, which gives some scientists and doctors the opportunity to become very well known. The amount of research and the number of scientific articles and symposia are increasing at an amazing rate. From this point of view, women are the best “guinea pigs”: unlike animals, they are intelligent, able to observe the effects of the treatments, they talk with the doctors, and ... they pay for that.