IVF bill to allow up to three eggs for fertilisation

The government will be increasing the number of oocytes (female ova) 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 chairman of the Bioethics Consultative Committee, former Nationalist MP Michael Axiak, said that following the public consultation on the Embryo Protection Bill, the governmnet will be increasing the proposed limit of two female ova that can be fertilised, to three.

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 opt for the vitrification, a form of fast freezing, of oocytes, limiting their fertilisation to three ova while the rest of the ova are frozen for later fertilisation.

The jury is still out on the success rates of oocyte vitrification: Porcu, the Italian doctor who champions IVF without freezing embryos, has 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.

She also told MaltaToday that of the successful transfers which actually resulted in births, up to 20% of pregnancies would have succumbed to a spontaneous miscarriage.

By outlawing embryo freezing, the government will also spike the procedure employed by the St James hospital group, the only clinic to provide IVF services for the past 22 years, which procedure raised questions over how many embryos were being implanted inside women. St James adopted a policy not to freeze extra embryos that get created in the IVF process of fertilising a multiple number of female ova.

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.