You may have heard about the "exclusive" story in The Sun newspaper yesterday, claiming that a couple had abandoned their IVF twins in hospital after their birth because they were the wrong sex.
According to the report, the couple had left their twin girls in hospital because they'd wanted boys, and had immediately asked when they could start trying IVF again in order to have a child of the right sex. Their ages added to the scandal, as the husband was in his early seventies and his wife in her late fifties. Not only that, they'd also travelled to India for their treatment, and were of Indian descent. Since the twins had been born, the paper claimed the parents hadn't been to see them at all.
As is often the case with this kind of story, there does seem to be another side to it. The local trust involved has denied the reports, claiming that in fact the babies have been moved from the hospital where they were born to another closer to the parent's home so that they could see them more easily. Another member of the family has suggested that language problems may have led to some kind of misunderstanding.
Whatever the truth, it is stories like this that muddy the waters of opinion about fertility treatment, and add to the general assumption that IVF is too often abused. The reality is that this kind of IVF scandal story makes the front page precisely because it occurs so infrequently, and that the details seem to suggest that this one may not have occurred at all.
There's an update on the story in The Times at www.timesonline.co.uk
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