IVF bill may be fine-tuned to fertilise up to three eggs

The government will be considering increasing the number of oocytes that can be fertilised in a bid to increase the efficiency of the in vitro fertilisation process that it is proposing in its bill.

The minister for justice, the family and public dialogue Chris Said said that one of the points raised in the ongoing public consultation on the Embryo Protection Bill could be increasing the limit of two female ova that can be fertilised to three, if doctors think this would increase the chances of pregnancy.

Malta's proposed law today was described as "one of the most restrictive" in the world by Eleonora Porcu, a professor in reproductive medicine at the University of Bologna who has practised the science of oocyte vitrification as an alternative to the freezing of embryos.

Malta's draft law will ban embryo freezing and instead opts for the vitrification of oocytes, limiting their fertilisation to just two ova, while the rest of the ova are frozen for later fertilisation.

Justice minister Chris Said said that while the law will be fine-tuned, "the principle of protecting life from the very start will not be changed."

Porcu claimed her successful pregnancy rates for the oocyte vitrification process she champions were 33% on 800 transfers of fresh ova, where the ova are fertilised with sperm upon harvesting.

The success rate of pregnancies on frozen ova were much lower, at 26% on just 200 transfers.

MaltaToday asked how many of these successful transfers actually resulted in births, to which Porcu said that up to 20% of pregnancies would have succumbed to a spontaneous miscarriage.

Asked whether this data was encouraging at all, health minister Joe Cassar said it was difficult to appraise such data. "It is hard to calculate what the success rate of oocyte vitrification will be for infertile couples to be able to assess whether they should go for the procedure or not. What we think is that this law offers a ray of hope to such couples, by offering a procedure that is sustainable."

By sustainable, the emphasis here are the limits that government is imposing in a bid to outlaw the freezing of embryos, which so far is not even practised in private operations like the St James Group's, which for 22 years has provided IVF to infertile couples.

But the St James procedure raised questions over how many embryos were being implanted inside women without being able to freeze additional embryos that get created in the IVF process of fertilising a multiple number of female ova.

Prof. Porcu told MaltaToday that on average some five to eight ova can be harvested from an infertile woman who undergoes medical stimulation. A morphological assessment of these ova is carried out upon harvesting to see which are the two 'best looking' oocytes to fertilised, before the rest are frozen. Not all eggs may be of good quality to even merit being frozen, she said.

"Oocyte vitrification safeguards the ethical concerns of couples who are truly concerned about embryo freezing and what happens to additional embryos created in the process of IVF, and not just because of religious concerns."