Pride Angel

Faith Haugh claims she doesn't have a maternal bone in her body - yet she has helped to create 19 children after donating the most eggs in the world. In total, Faith has been through a staggering 41 donor cycles, which has involved her undergoing hormone injections to boost the number of eggs she produces.

The medication given to egg donors is similar to that given to women going through IVF so the same complications can occur. A reaction to the hormones used to make a donor produce more than one egg can cause ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) and, rarely, liver failure or even ovarian cancer. The 41-year-old from Melbourne, Australia, has not suffered any side effects since she started donating her eggs 17 years ago after seeing an advert in the paper.

The advert was placed by an anonymous infertile couple who went on to have twin girls after Faith donated her eggs at an IVF clinic. She went on to donate to a further three unidentified couples through a local hospital, which produced three boys and one girl. Faith has also helped to create another 13 children for couples she has met through classified adverts and online infertility groups. It is thought she has set the record for the most donor children in the world, topping egg donors from her native Australia, the US and UK.

In America, where donors are paid, the number of donor cycles an egg donor can go through is limited to around six. Faith's quest to help childless couples has even led her to travel as far as India to help a couple. She said: 'I was looking in the paper for a second job when I saw this huge advert for an egg donor. I didn't know anything about egg donation but I knew I was fertile so offered to help.

'For me, the most amazing thing is the parents. I see these people from the start when they think that they have little or no chance of having a child. They sit across from me, looking very tense and defeated and not holding out much hope.

'I will never forget one husband who called me from the delivery room. When I asked him what sex the baby was, his voice cracked and he started crying as he was so excited he forgot to see if he had a son or daughter. 'These are the rewards of donating my eggs.'

Faith, who is married to Glenn, a butcher, has a daughter, Ashlyn, 22, from a previous relationship and is a grandmother to two-year-old Charlotte. Glenn, 46, also donates his sperm and is the biological father of four children.

Faith, who works in customer services, said: 'I have never ever found it emotionally difficult to donate my eggs. I am simply passing on a cell by donating my eggs in the hope that they go on to form embryos and end up as a viable pregnancy. 'I may sound a little distant but as I'm not the one desperate to become a mother, I don't get emotionally invested. 'I just tell myself that the eggs that would usually go to waste each month now goes on to hopefully helping a couple achieve the dream of parenthood.'

Her act of kindness is made even more remarkable by the fact that it is illegal for egg donors in Australia to receive payment - although they can be reimbursed for out of pocket expenses. Of the 19 donor children, Faith sees sees half of them and keeps in regular contact with others.

She said: 'All of my donor donor children are being raised to know to know they are donor conceived and the ones who don't know me personally are being given my details of contact at 18 years old. 'I get photos emailed all the time as well as photos of the children on their first day at school and Christmas cards. 'These people know I don't view their children as mine.'

In Australia, like in the UK, egg donors, are not allowed to donate to more than ten families so Faith no longer donates. But she volunteers her time as a medium between potential donors and infertile couples all over the world. A spokesman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in the UK, confirmed a UK egg donor has yet to match Faith as the most generous egg donor.

He said: 'According to our records the most number of children born from a single egg donor is 11 children - eight boys and three girls.'

Article: 31st May 2011 www.dailymail.co.uk

Read more about finding an egg donor or helping couples create a family, visit www.prideangel.com

The age-specific blood levels of the Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) can predict when women will reach menopause. This makes family planning easier, say fertility researchers from the University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands. Their findings were published online May 26 in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Generally, women enter menopause between the age of forty and sixty. A woman's fertility, however, ends ten years prior to this and in the most unfavorable circumstances occurs around the age of thirty. With regard to family planning and a career, it is extremely valuable for women to know the expected length of their fertility.

Predicting menopause
The study included 257 healthy women who were monitored for as long as eleven years. The Dutch researchers linked AMH levels to the point when the women entered menopause and based on these data constructed a model to predict the menopausal age. Using age and AMH, the age range in which menopause will occur can be individually predicted.

For example, the predicted median age at menopause of a 30 year old woman with an AMH concentration close to 0.15 ng/ml will be 48.8 years. On the other hand, the predicted median age at menopause of a 30 year old woman with an AMH concentration close to 4.38 ng/ml will be 55.3 years. These findings may only be translated into clinical practice after a thorough assay standardisation.

Postpone having children
The research was conducted under the leadership of gynecologists Professor Frank Broekmans and Professor Bart Fauser. "Women often postpone having children until their career has been well established. However they may find that it is difficult to get pregnant at this time. It could therefore be very useful for women to know beforehand up to which age they remain fertile. As far as we know, we are the first researchers worldwide to succeed in making long term predictions for individual women," the gynecologists say.

This knowledge will enable women who are predicted to become infertile at an early age to choose the option of having their eggs frozen. This means that they will still be able to have children if it turns out that they can no longer get pregnant spontaneously. University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands, offers people the possibility of having eggs frozen and stored in a human egg bank.

Article: 29th May 2011 www.sciencedaily.com

Test your fertility with FSH and ovulation tests.

Welcome to Europe’s first Premier Same Sex Parenting Magazine for the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender) community.

In these modern times more gay people are becoming parents than ever before as many in the LGBT community seek to fulfil their dreams of having a family especially with so many countries around the globe now making same sex marriage available. Pink Parenting is here to do just that. Bringing you everything you need to start a family from surrogacy options, adoption and the legal aspects of being a modern family to what’s the best stroller out there on the market.

A SNEAK PEAK INTO THE AUDIENCE: While we are feverishly working on getting the statistics for the UK & Europe, our research has shown that:
According to the 2000 Census - SAME-SEX COUPLES IN THE UNITED STATES
• Census 2000 identified same-sex couples in every state and virtually every county in the United States.
• Individuals living in same-sex couples not only live throughout the country, but share all of the other attributes of the U.S.'s population.
• Individuals in same-sex couples contribute to the economy: 71% of them are employed compared with 65% of individuals in married couples.
• 65% of SS couples one partner is a homeowner. By comparison, one or both partners are homeowners in 43% of different-sex unmarried couples.
• More than 39% of same-sex couples in the United States aged 22-55 are raising children.

Unlike many other gay magazines, our demographic is LGBT couples between the age of 30 to 45 that are more interested in modern day life and having a family and growing out of the gay club scene. We are also working with many LGBT organizations to promote and distribute the magazine. The magazine is also available through the www.Pink-Parenting.com website and will soon be available via www.prideangel.com

ABOUT PINK PARENTING MAGAZINE:
We have lined up Emma Cannon Bsc Hons Ac, MbBAcC as a guest contributor writing about “Cooking Organics” & “Pregnancy Health”. Emma is an Acupuncturist and author of ‘The Baby Making Bible’ & ‘You and Your Bump’. We are also excited to announce Ricky Martin Latin singing sensation for our launch “Celebrity Cover Interview Feature”.

We will provide information on the latest information (legal and steps) on Adoption, Fostering & Surrogacy as well as “Kids Nutrition” advice by Doctors, Top Parenting Professionals and Industry Specialists. Other features will include Book & Child Friendly Product reviews along with the latest News and gadgets, “Gay Travel w/wo family (pre parenthood, during & post pregnancy” & SPECIAL contributor Erika Tranfield of Pride Angel (helping single, lesbian, gay and infertile couples become parents through donor conception and co-parenting) writes on Home Insemination the good & bad.

The style the magazine is high colour, high gloss and quality paper to finish off its clean, sleek & trendy design making it Europe’s Premier Gay Fashionable Parenting Magazine and a definite one of its kind! Pink Parenting Magazine’s first issue is July/August 2011.

Please follow us on www.Twitter.com/PinkParenting

PARENTING plans developed before a child is born should not be legally enforceable and sperm donors should not have an automatic legal right to be on a birth certificate, the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby says.

''The paramount consideration when providing parentage/parenting orders is to protect the best interests of the child, not the expectations or interests of parents,'' a senior policy adviser at the group, Senthorun Raj, said.

''[However], there needs to be greater consideration on whether it is appropriate to broaden the scope of parenting plans, to permit greater recognition of donor fathers who wish to have an ongoing parenting role.''

His comments come after the Herald revealed yesterday the first case in NSW in which a lesbian former partner of a woman is taking the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages and a sperm donor to court to force the removal of his name from a child's birth certificate despite him seeing the child fortnightly for the past nine years.

The case, before the NSW District Court today, highlights the inadequacy of laws dealing with multi-parent families.

Five years ago, the NSW Law Reform Commission recommended that the legal status of known sperm donors be reviewed to help stop court battles over access to children after they are born.

Sperm donors do not have automatic legal parenting status. In 2008 that right was given to the partners of lesbian mothers who conceived using a sperm donor.

The commission's 2006 recommendation said policymakers should consider whether to enable same-sex families to register parenting plans, the recognition of multiple legal parents and whether to enable donors to be named on a birth certificate, without attaching legal parental status to that act.

Mr Raj said one of the difficulties is that hospitals did not supply the available gender-neutral birth registration form.

''We have supported the mention of a donor father on a birth certificate, where all the parties consent. However, donor fathers should not have automatic rights to be listed without the consent of the parents,'' he said.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Health Minister, Jillian Skinner, said: ''The minister will consider all information at hand in determination of whether or not possible review of the legislation is appropriate or required.''

A spokesman for the shadow attorney-general, Greg Smith, said it was an issue for the shadow health minister, Andrew McDonald. Mr McDonald said it was a matter for Mr Smith.

Article: 26th May 2011 The Sydney Morning Herald www.smh.com.au

Read more about donating sperm in Australia and finding a known donor at www.prideangel.com

Men who are planning to have children one day may want to reduce how long they spend chatting on their mobile phones. Researchers from Queen's University, Canada, found that mobile use may lower sperm quality and lead to a decrease in fertility. The team found that electromagnetic waves (EMW) transmitted by handsets has a complex relationship with male hormones. Lead researcher, Dr Rany Shamoul, said: 'Our findings were a little bit puzzling.

'We were expecting to find different results, but the results we did find suggest that there could be some intriguing mechanisms at work.' The research team discovered that men who reported cell phone use had higher levels of circulating testosterone but they also had lower levels of luteinizing hormone (LH).

LH is an important reproductive hormone that is secreted by the pituitary gland in the brain. The researchers think that electromagnetic waves emitted by cell phones may have a dual action on male hormone levels and fertility. EMW may increase the number of cells in the testes that produce testosterone, however it could also lower the levels of LH excreted by the pituitary gland.

This may block the conversion of this basic type of testosterone to the more active, potent form of testosterone associated with sperm production and fertility. Dr Shamloul concluded more in-depth research is needed to determine the exact ways in which EMW affects male fertility. The research comes just two months after mobile phone users in the UK were advised by the Government to text or use hands free kits rather than make calls.

The Department of Health said this would reduce the user's exposure to reduce radiation emitted by the devices. In the first update to the UK Mobile Phones and Health leaflet since 2005, health officials added that further research is needed into the long-term effects of using mobile phones. It stated there had been no 'clear evidence of adverse health effects' from the use of mobiles or from phone masts. However, it added: 'As people have only been using mobile phones for relatively few years, the HPA advises that more research be carried out, especially to investigate whether there might be longer term effects.'

Article: 20th May 2011 www.dailymail.co.uk

Test your sperm count by using a simple home male fertility test.

Donor Unknown... a film about identity, genetic inheritance and the family of the future

JoEllen Marsh's life began 22 years ago in a pornography-lined, "collection" cubicle at the Los Angeles headquarters of California Cryobank, a private semen cryopreservation organisation. From there, the sample produced by her biological father, donor 150, was sent to Pennsylvania, where nine months later JoEllen was born to her biological mother, Lucinda Marsh.

Twenty years later, a remarkably accepting JoEllen is calmly recounting the story of how her innate desire to connect with her extended donor family has evolved into the subject of an absorbing documentary. Donor Unknown: Adventures in the Sperm Trade, is a compelling film that raises intriguing questions about nature versus nurture, modern medicine's evolving ethics and the shifting composition of contemporary families.

"Even when I was very young," says JoEllen, "I realised that my family wasn't like other families." Informed by her lesbian mothers from an early age that "a kind man they didn't know" had helped her to be born, the concept of a traditional father – or rather the lack of one – simply never arose.

"My upbringing seemed completely normal to me, as it was all I knew," says JoEllen, who grew up with a younger sister, Mollie, 16, born to the same mother but conceived from a different sperm donor.

But JoEllen had a lot of questions that couldn't be answered. "The way I moved was not like the rest of my family. And if you don't know who your father is, you wonder about the strangest things – what are his ears like? What is his forehead like? Why do I have these interests when no one else in my family does?"

When JoEllen was seven, she was shown her donor's profile and for the first time had tangible evidence of the paternal genetics of her own physiology and psychology. The profile makes illuminating reading and it's easy to see why donor 150 caught her prospective parents' attention: "Caucasian, aged 28, 6ft, blue eyes, light brown hair, guitar player, dancer and philosophy major."

The clincher, though, was the mission statement, donor 150's parting shot so to speak. "My deepest aspiration in life is spiritual," his declaration concludes. "This earthly life is transitory and the joys of this world are ephemeral. So keep your moment and, if sincere, great fortune will come."

"Reading the profile was incredibly exciting," remembers JoEllen. "To see what my donor had written about himself was really important and allowed me to begin creating a picture of what kind of person this man might be." The compulsion to track him down came later though. "I did wrestle with my identity a little when I was younger," admits JoEllen, "but my parents did a great job raising me and I don't think I would have turned out too differently if I'd had a father figure. "My solid foundation comes from having such a big, extended family, having very supportive parents and because I've never been made to feel embarrassed about my upbringing.

"If my mum had been embarrassed about it or had been shy in talking about it then I might have felt like it was something I should hide. But everyone has always been very comfortable talking about it and that made a big difference in me growing up and being comfortable and stable."

Being home-schooled until she was 12 and consequently side-stepping any potentially damaging playground jibes, reinforced JoEllen's self-assurance, enabling her to take the next step of her labyrinthine voyage of personal discovery in her stride.

When she was 12, her mother showed her an article about a website, donorsiblingregistry.com (DSR), that was created to help donor siblings and parents find each other.

"I had no intention of doing anything concrete about finding my donor father until I turned 18," says JoEllen, "but I signed up anyway, entered my donor number, and just waited. I dreamed that he'd make contact, but I never expected it to happen." For two years, progress stalled. But then Danielle Pagano, 14, visited the DSR website after learning from her married heterosexual parents that she, too, was a donor child.

Seething with resentment that her parents had kept the facts of her conception from her, and armed with her donor profile number , which was 150, Danielle entered her details on to the site and instantly discovered that she had at least one half-sister, JoEllen Marsh.

Following a flurry of awkward emails and phone calls, the girls first met in New York when JoEllen was 16 and Danielle 15. "That first meeting was surreal," recalls JoEllen. "We spent the first 15 minutes just saying how weird the whole thing was but somehow we could feel a connection."

Around the same time, the girls were contacted by a New York Times journalist writing an article about donor siblings, and the subsequent story of their collective quest to find their donor father made front-page news.

On the other side of America in California, in a Venice Beach cafe, 52-year-old retired sperm donor Jeffrey Harrison was enjoying a morning coffee when the New York Times story caught his eye. "What jumped off the page," he says, "was Danielle's anger and the fact that she was pissed off that her parents had lied to her. I had been lied to as a kid by my parents, and that tore me up."

Jeffrey recognised himself as the donor in the story because he remembered his donor number from when he signed up with the California Cryobank.

Initially, he assumed it must be from another clinic, but then he read on and saw that it was from the California branch and … the rest is very peculiar family history. "At that very moment I knew I had to let them have closure. Whether they approved or disapproved of me; it was their right."

Soon after, JoEllen, already buoyed by the discovery of a further three half-siblings – Rochelle Longest, Fletcher Norris and Ryann McQuilton – received a call from DSR co-founder Wendy Kramer informing her that donor 150 had decided to come forward.

"I was amazed," says JoEllen. "The fact that he just voluntarily turned up and said, 'Hey, I'm open to contact,' took a lot of courage, and I was just so excited to find out what he looked like and what sort of a man he was. "As a young child, I'd fantasised that he would be some sort of celebrity or a successful businessman or someone glamorous who travelled the world so I couldn't wait to finally find out."

What JoEllen hadn't visualised was a former Playgirl centrefold and erotic dancer with a history of depression and a penchant for wild conspiracy theories, who lived in a battered RV in a California car park with his dogs and a rescue pigeon.

Born in Delaware to upper middle-class parents who divorced when he was six, and clearly unsettled by his father's military-style parenting (morning "inspections" were commonplace for Jeffrey and his sibling "troops"), he suffered from severe depression as a teenager, and from an early age sought solace in the less-threatening companionship of animals.

More comfortable on society's margins, and flitting between part-time jobs as a model, waiter and a masseur after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s, he'd gradually downgraded from apartment to mobile home, and his current status as a tie-dyed, bong-smoking "fringe monkey" whose closest relationships remain canine not human.

"But," says Jeffrey, who could surely have made a comfortable living had he pursued a career as an Iggy Pop look-alike, "I am a big family man. It's just that most of my children have four legs."

Yet when he began to donate sperm at the California Cryobank in the early 1980s – in total he donated over an eight-year period and was paid up to $80 a contribution – he did so with his very own, very particular intentions.

"I donated about 500 times, and they're all tiny little souls," he says from the makeshift, debris-strewn lounge in his bohemian beachside mobile home. "When I did the donation I always felt there was a miracle attached to it – this divine miracle – and that somehow I was karmically being asked to be a soul caller. There's not one I did where I did not go completely deep."

JoEllen Marsh's first sight of her biological father took 15 minutes to download on the screen of her home computer. "Wendy from the DSR had emailed a photo of Jeffrey, but my dial-up modem was so slow the image appeared pixel by pixel.

"It was a very emotional moment. After all those years imagining what he would look like; first his hair, then his forehead and then those blue, blue eyes gradually revealed themselves. I'd already talked with the other half-siblings about which of our physical similarities might have come from our donor so to be able to confirm, "yes, that's where our eyebrows come from," and, "that's our face shape," was surreal."

A year of phone and email communication followed until, shortly after JoEllen's 18th birthday, under the sensitively watchful eye of director Jerry Rothwell's cameras, she finally came face to face with her biological father for the first time, and despite his eccentricities the connection was immediate.

"I don't really know why, but I think there is something genetic that makes you feel like there is a bond with another person. And I think it was really helpful to meet the donor siblings first because that prepared me for what it would be like to meet Jeffrey. So by that point I kind of knew what to expect because some of the others had already met and talked to him. "It was a big moment and there were a lot of emotions going through my mind that took a while to process, but I never considered a negative outcome. I knew what to expect by the time we met and I'm cool with how Jeffrey is.

"I'm not expecting him to be some sort of father figure for me. I'm already grown up, and that's not what he signed up for. Accepting Jeffrey for who he is and actually getting to meet him was the most important part.

"And I think that he really did think about the children he was creating. Obviously he did it for money, but he did have the thought in his mind that he was making children when he was donating."

When filming ended, JoEllen's donor family had grown to 14 half-siblings. "The whole process has really opened my mind about the concept of family," she says, "and made me realise that you don't have to grow up with someone to consider them in some way part of your family.

"So much of my family is non-biological but it's different with Jeffrey and the other siblings. I feel this very strong connection with them all and yet I haven't known them my entire life. But I do consider Jeffrey and my siblings to be very much part of my crazy 21st-century family.

"As for the future, who knows? I know we'll always be friendly and I'll try to keep in touch. I'll try to visit Jeffrey when I can and if I have kids in the future I'll tell them the whole story, and I hope that I can introduce them to Jeffrey and their aunts and uncles.

"It's really cool that they'll have all that extended family in addition to the family that I grew up with, and although it's been kind of scary to be among the first donor siblings to find each other through the DSR I hope that other donor children will read my story and feel inspired to go out and create their own stories.

"But the most important thing for donors and donor children and the parents of donor children is that they just need to remember that they are the ones who define the relationship, and it can move at whatever pace they are comfortable with. If they only want to share a picture, that's fine. If they want to meet, that's fine too. There are some amazing experiences to be had, so just be a little open about it and see where life takes you."

Donor Unknown: Adventures in the Sperm Trade opens in cinemas on 3 June and will be shown on television on More4 on 28 June The DVD will be released on 4 July, donorunknown.com

Article: 21st May 2010 www.guardian.co.uk

Read more about finding a known sperm donor and gay parenting at www.prideangel.com

A Canadian court in B.C. has struck down part of the province’s adoption act as unconstitutional, following a legal challenge by a woman conceived through artificial insemination who wanted to learn more about her anonymous, biological father.

Olivia Pratten sought to have B.C.’s Adoption Act declared unconstitutional because it allows adopted children to obtain records about their biological parents, an option that is not available to people conceived from donated eggs or sperm.

In a ruling released Thursday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Elaine Adair agreed sections of the act violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Justice Adair said excluding donor offspring from the benefits and protections of the act creates a distinction between donor offspring and adoptees, two groups who she said can experience similar struggles.

“I’m really happy. It’s the end of donor anonymity in B.C. It’s the first time this has happened in North America. It’s a landmark decision and it’s about time,” Ms. Pratten said in a phone interview.

Justice Adair suspended her ruling for 15 months to give the province time to re-craft the legislation.

Ms. Pratten, 29, was conceived through sperm donation and her parents supported her desire to learn more about her biological father. Ms. Pratten’s mother learned her husband was infertile from complications of bladder surgery, and a Vancouver doctor used artificial insemination to impregnate her.

When the mother returned to the doctor asking for information about the donor, the doctor refused to hand it over. He later said it had been destroyed after the requisite six years. Ms. Pratten and her mother filed affidavits saying they didn’t believe him. In Thursday’s ruling, the judge disagreed, saying she believed the records had been destroyed.

The B.C. government had argued that while Ms. Pratten’s desire to learn more about her biological father was understandable, her constitutional rights had not been violated.

The B.C. government also expressed concern about what a ruling in Ms. Pratten’s favour might mean for the privacy rights of donors who thought they would remain anonymous.

Article: 19th May 2011 www.theglobandmail.com

Read more about known sperm and egg donation at www.prideangel.com

IVF clinics in London are "cashing in" by overcharging patients who want to store frozen embryos, according to a top fertility doctor.

Clinics are advised to use one embryo at a time to reduce the health risks connected to multiple births, but couples desperate to conceive often choose to freeze embryos for future use. Lord Robert Winston, the fertility treatment pioneer, said that some clinics were taking advantage of these "one at a time" regulations. He revealed that one clinic charged £915 for embryo freezing plus £325 for storage in liquid nitrogen which "costs a few pence a litre".

Speaking in a debate in Parliament on the future of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Professor Winston said:

"Embryo freezing will be increasingly required if we are to limit the number of pregnancies that result in multiple births by transferring just one embryo each time." The Labour peer added: "One of the key issues which the HFEA has not dealt with is the high cost of IVF treatment. In my view, it is a scandal.

"There are clinics that treat patients for around £3,400 a cycle. It is only when you look at their websites that you see that they are charging up to £1,100 to £3,200 for drugs that should be obtained on contracts at around £500 to £700 per cycle." Lord Winston said IVF was a "highly privileged treatment" because "hard-pressed" NHS trusts cannot afford to offer the three free cycles of IVF recommended.

Many clinics only offer single embryo transfers since the new HFEA issued advice on limiting multiple births three years ago. Figures published last week reveal multiple pregnancies fell to 22 per cent last year from 26.7 per cent in 2008. Lord Winston also said that some clinics are offering treatments which are not backed by scientific evidence. These include immune therapy which costs up to £3,000 and is based on the belief that a woman's immune system may reject a pregnancy and lead to miscarriage.

The Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre in Wimpole Street is one clinic which offers these tests. It is run by Mohammed Taranissi who argues such testing can help women become pregnant. But Professor Winston said: "Where is the evidence that immune therapy actually improves the success rate of pregnancies? I do not know of that evidence and, indeed, the treatment may even be damaging or harmful to the patient's residual immune system."

Read more about IVF, sperm donation and egg donation at www.prideangel.com

Childless couples trying to start a family using in vitro fertilization are putting mothers and babies at risk by implanting multiple embryos, experts say. Limiting the number of embryos used in IVF would reduce the number of newborn deaths, prevent cases of severe eye and brain damage and cut the time babies spend in hospital, the team from the University of Montreal have found.

It comes as the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in the UK announced a drop in the number of multiple births following IVF after a drive to cut twin and triplet births. The health push saw 22 per cent of births in the first six months of 2009 being two or more babies, down from 24 per cent in 2008. The HFEA launched the initiative in January 2009 with the overall aim of cutting the IVF multiple birth rate to 10 per cent in the coming years.

The United States and Canada currently allow multiple embryos to be transferred in each IVF cycle. The Canadian report found that in 2005, 29 percent of IVF pregnancies in Canada were twins and about one percent were triplets. Without fertility treatments, the rate of twins is about one per cent, while triplets occur in just one of every 8,100 births, according to the advocacy organization Multiple Births Canada.

The study said that if IVF were limited to one embryo for each attempt to become pregnant, there would be just three pairs of twins for every 100 deliveries, and no triplets. This drop in multiple births would greatly reduce the rate of premature births and the complications that often result.

During IVF, eggs are fertilized by sperm outside the body and then transferred to the womb. Implanting more than one embryo is thought to increase a woman's chances of pregnancy, but it also increases the odds of a multiple birth. All IVF clinics must now have a strategy for reducing their number of multiple births. And researchers at the University of Montreal said Canada and the U.S. should consider following Britain's lead.

Twins and triplets, whether conceived through IVF or naturally, have a higher risk of health problems than single babies. Half of all twins are born prematurely and have a low birth weight of under 5.5lbs. And triplets have a 90 per cent chance of being born prematurely and of low birth weight, and the risk of premature babies dying in the first week is around five times higher for twins and nine times higher for triplets than single babies. Twins are also four times more likely to have cerebral palsy than single babies, while triplets have a risk that is 18 times higher.

Women who are carrying twins or triplets have higher chances of miscarriage, anaemia, haemorrhage, early labour and needing a Caesarean section. And up to a quarter of multiple pregnancies will lead to high blood pressure in pregnancy.

Around 80 per cent of IVF treatment is carried out in the private sector and the HFEA has been urging private clinics to drive down their rates. Women under 35 have a higher chance of success through IVF and therefore a higher chance of multiple pregnancy if two or more embryos are transferred.

The data from the HFEA showed that pregnancy and live birth rates from IVF have broadly been maintained despite the target to reduce multiple births. Professor Lisa Jardine, chair of the HFEA, said: 'It's excellent news that the number of multiple births is coming down whilst overall success rates for patients are still being maintained.

'This shows that the policy is proving successful.' Susan Seenan, from Infertility Network UK, said the NHS must fund three full cycles of IVF, as laid down in 2004 guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. 'With full funding on the NHS - if patients could access three cycles - a lot more women would be willing and able to go for single embryo transfer. 'This would lead to better outcomes for patients and cut the number of multiple births. Some women who are only getting one cycle feel they are limiting their chances of success. "Without full funding, patients are always going to struggle with single embryo transfer. Implementing the Nice guidelines would have a big impact.

'We are big supporters of single embryo transfer but it needs to come with full funding.' But the author of the Canadian study considers the British approach to be the way forward for the U.S. and Canada. Keith Barrington said in the Journal of Pediatrics: 'If you by chance have a premature baby and are unlucky enough to have that child suffer with complications, that's one thing. 'But to actually have a procedure that increases the chance of that happening is something that should be changed.'

The United States and Canada currently allow multiple embryos to be transferred in each IVF cycle. The Canadian report found that in 2005, 29 percent of IVF pregnancies in Canada were twins and about one percent were triplets. Without fertility treatments, the rate of twins is about one per cent, while triplets occur in just one of every 8,100 births, according to the advocacy organization Multiple Births Canada.

The study said that if IVF were limited to one embryo for each attempt to become pregnant, there would be just three pairs of twins for every 100 deliveries, and no triplets. This drop in multiple births would greatly reduce the rate of premature births and the complications that often result.

Article: 13th May 2010 www.dailymail.co.uk

Read more about IVF, sperm donation and egg donation at www.prideangel.com

Pride Angel is delighted to announce that our leading fertility and parenting lawyer Natalie Gamble has now moved premises.

Their new home is nestled within beautiful offices overlooking the New Forest with fabulous countryside around them, but close to the mainline station at Salisbury. Previously known as Gamble&Ghevaert, they have now changed their name to Natalie Gamble Associates and are now a team of five looking for a further lawyer.

Natalie Gamble will continue to be at the forefront of pioneering fertility work with families who need help unraveling the law in the UK within a global context. They are immensely proud of their track record which now stands at over 10 years of grappling with the law and making changes to help families get the right structures in place to secure their family as a unit.

Visit Natalie Gamble Associates website, now at www.nataliegambleassociates.com or contact them for further information.

Read more about fertility law at www.prideangel.com