GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Social egg freezing adverts are often sheer puffery, claims bioethicist

viernes, 24 de noviembre de 2017

BioEdge: Social egg freezing adverts are often sheer puffery, claims bioethicist

BioEdge: Social egg freezing adverts are often sheer puffery, claims bioethicist

Bioedge

Social egg freezing adverts are often sheer puffery, claims bioethicist

by Michael Cook | 18 Nov 2017 |

Social egg freezing has become another money-spinner for fertility clinics as women try to reconcile their career ambitions and their desire to have children. In 2014, Facebook and Apple announced that they would subsidise their female employees’ elective — or ‘social’ — use of egg freezing. Since then other tech companies have jumped in the bandwagon, including eBay, Google, Uber, Time Warner and Intel.

But are fertility clinics advertising their product responsibly? According to a bioethicist who did a content analysis of internet advertising, the answer is No. Writing in The New Bioethics, Christopher Barbey, of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, reports that “many fertility clinics engage in biased advertising — i.e. they advertise the service persuasively, not informatively, emphasising indirect benefits while minimising risks and the low chance of successfully bringing a child to term.”

Barbey studied advertisements of clinics servicing the San Francisco Bay area. He found that much of the advertising was persuasive rather than informative. Statements like “Everything changes. Life moves quickly. The future is unpredictable” or “Your reproductive potential will never be as good as it is today” fail to give this faintly alarming information proper context. As well, they fail to alert women to the fact that 94% of client end up never using their frozen oocytes.

These clinics utilise puffery — i.e. linking, through imagery, suggestive language, and the use of unsubstantiated claims, the utilisation of their service to traits that potential clients may desire. They also couple undesirable traits with the consumer’s condition prior to using the service. They use language that appears designed to potentiate any sense of anxiety a woman may hold about age-related fertility decline. This anxiety may engender a potentially outsized sense of need for egg freezing in the minds of potential clients. Clinics are also shy about including straightforward information about the success rates of the procedure, preferring to focus on the speculative indirect benefits of utilising the technology.

Several of our stories this week deal with end-of-life issues. For a bit of a change, how about an historical diversion?

“And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.” You might recognise this quote from the Bible. It is often used to illustrate the pain of infertility, which hurts no less 4,000 years later.

Jacob was a wandering pastoralist. But Turkish archaeologists announced this month that they had uncovered evidence of urban infertility in Kültepe, an Assyrian site in the centre of modern Turkey. It is a clay tablet with cuneiform script with a prenuptial agreement – also 4,000 years old. It may be the first pre-nup in recorded history.

If, after two years, the bride has still not borne a child, the tablet says, the wife will allow her husband to use a female slave as a surrogate mother to produce an heir. The slave would be freed after giving birth to a son.

Many ethical issues in the Reproductive Revolution have precedents, but it’s amazing to see that today’s surrogate mothers were anticipated by Assyrian slave girls four millennia ago.