Conference: European couples face a fertility time bomb. As many as one in three are unlikely to be able to conceive without assisted reproductive technology in 10 years, an international expert warned last week in Copenhagen.
At present the ratio is about one in seven, said Prof Bill Ledger of Sheffield University. He spoke of a coming crisis created by a combination of women delaying childbirth, an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, rising childhood obesity and a decline in male fertility. One way governments could encourage earlier motherhood was to promote career breaks, he urged.
Another study presented to the 21st annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) indicated that male infertility has for the first time surpassed female infertility.
Dr Edgar Mocanu, who runs the Rotunda Hospital's Human Assisted Reproduction Unit Ireland (HARI), said Ledger's findings represented "a serious health issue" likely to threaten Ireland's economy and workforce.
The Government should follow up its "excellent" smoking ban initiative with fertility education on "the unfortunate reality" that the best time to conceive was before age 35 and provide supports, including good child-minding. In an ageing society where working women were becoming more competitive, it should be better known that the fertility success rate at 43 was less than 0.5 per cent, he said.
Nearly two million in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) babies have been born since the treatment was pioneered 27 years ago. ESHRE, which has forsworn cloning humans as "irresponsible and unethical", represents more than 5,000 international experts.
With the recent referendum failure to overturn Italy's strict law on choices facing infertile couples high on its awareness, one theme of the conference was an increasing scientific effort to avoid ethical conflicts by exploring alternative treatments.
US research has found that embryos incapable of becoming normal foetuses can "self-correct" in the lab to become a "more ethically or politically acceptable" source of stem cells and Belgian scientists said they had cloned the first human embryos from otherwise unviable immature eggs grown in the lab.
The Italian law, passed last year, forbids the fertilisation of more than three oocytes (mature eggs) at the same time. It says all embryos obtained must be transferred to the woman irrespective of their quality, and forbids embryo freezing.
The referendum defeat was seen as a victory for the Vatican, which urged voter abstention. ESHRE's chairman, Prof Arne Sunde, said Catholic Church intervention under the new Pope would not stop with Italy. "The issue is the moral status of the early embryo," he said.
Italian experts said that since the new law there had been fewer successful pregnancies resulting from infertility treatments and more multiple births by some women. And two studies, from Belgium and Denmark, provided further evidence that single embryo transfer produces healthier babies than those born after multiple implantation - without affecting overall IVF success rates.
A Belgian professor of bioethics defended "reproductive tourism" as a "safety valve" as thousands of couples travel for treatment to countries more legally liberal than their own. In this field Prof Guido Pennings opposed European "harmonisation".
Reproductive tourism is already having an Irish impact. A new British law, requiring that donors be willing to be identified by any offspring, has meant the ending of some donor treatments in the UK, including Belfast.
Couples are now travelling for treatment to the Republic, where Danish donor sperm is not subject to this requirement.