STUDY FINDS EVIDENCE OF IVF LINK TO BIRTH DEFECTS

CHICAGO, December 19, 2002 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Proponents of in vitro fertilization (IVF) maintain that there is no higher risk of birth defects among test tube babies. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies, for example, says IVF does not produce higher-than-normal defects. But now, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) website says a study funded by the National Institutes of Health has found the opposite.  In a registry of 65 children with Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome (BWS, “characterized by, among other features, an enlarged tongue and a predisposition for rare cancers”), three cases (5%) were IVF children. But in the general U.S. population, only 0.8% of cases are IVF births. “You’d expect maybe half a case [of BWS in the registry],” says Dr. Andrew Feinberg at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “Even *one* would be kind of alarming,” he said.  Feinberg’s report will appear in the January issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, but is already available online. Similar genetic problems have also arisen with cloned mammals, as reported by JAMA in September 2001.  For the JAMA report see:  https://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/current/ffull/jha20012-1.html   For the abstract of the article in the American Journal of Human Genetics see:  https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v72n1/024541/brief/024541.abstract.html   For the Sept. 2001 report on problems with animal cloning see:  https://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v286n12/ffull/jmn0926-1.html