Following the BBC Panorama investigation on Monday night Inside Britain’s Fertility Business, Dr John Waterstone, Medical Director of Cork Fertility Centre, said it is all too easy to attract unsuspecting patients by quoting inflated (and unsubstantiated) success rates and then relieve them of several thousand more euro than they had anticipated spending in the course of an IVF treatment cycle.
These ‘add-ons’, he said are all expensive ‘but none likely to increase the chance of taking home a baby’.
“The Department of Health in Ireland needs to be aware that an aspect of assisted reproduction (AR), which urgently requires regulation, is the financial exploitation of patients desperate to have a baby.
“The increasing commercialisation of AR everywhere has not been addressed sufficiently by regulatory systems in other jurisdictions but needs to be in Ireland,” Dr Waterstone stated.
