Anyone who’s listened to the news recently will have heard of the recent warning issued by Dr Hanevik suggesting that by performing IVF, we’re potentially propagating reproductive defects that should have been wiped out through the process of natural selection.
Well, as you can imagine, this has caused a bit of a stir in the IVF community and led to probably inadvertent yet unnecessary distress being irresponsibly placed upon patients who have had or are needing to have IVF treatment to conceive. One such patient is @myhopesquad who has written an impassioned letter to the expert to explain the repercussions of some of these comments and how upsetting this has been for people to hear.
When sharing any views that research has not proven, it is important, above all else, to be responsible about how this could be interpreted, and to put it into a bigger context. This I feel was lacking with the warning issued earlier this week and which has led to the upset in both the scientific and patient communities.
Let me be clear that I fully support research that aims to explore the impact of IVF on future generations, because, let’s face it, being 40 years old, this is still a relatively new yet progressive science. But it’s a science that has enabled many thousands of families to exist, and children to be born who will have the opportunities to change the world whether they become teachers, doctors, nurses, or engineers, creating legacies of their own that will help others in time.
Surely this in itself is the result of human endeavour and evolutionary science that has been called upon to help where there was no hope before. So yes, IVF is changing human evolution by encouraging us to go further and beyond what we ever thought possible in order to help the many thousands who suffer in silence.
To read @myhopesquad and my views on this which we both shared with @channelmum please go to the following link:
