Virginia Clinic Sparks Controversy by Offering Free IVF and Eggs at London Seminar

Wash. Post: London seminar offering free IVF from Virginia clinic sparks controversy, by Rob Stein:

A Virginia infertility clinic sparked an international ethical controversy Wednesday by sponsoring a seminar in London that gave away an attempt to get pregnant using an American woman's eggs.

More than 100 people attended the 90-minute session at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel, which was organized by the Fairfax City-based Genetics & IVF Institute, one of the United States' largest infertility clinics. As organizers had promised, one of the attendees learned at the end of the seminar that she had won a free cycle of in vitro fertilization using the eggs of a woman from the Washington area, worth about $23,000.

The seminar, designed to entice infertile British women to seek donor eggs in the United States, drew intense criticism from infertility experts, bioethicists and others in Britain and the United States, who likened the event to a crass, commercial come-on similar to a lottery, with the prize being a human body part. . . .