VOICES FROM THE FIELD- Fertility Clinic Counselling Perspective

of us who counsel infertile individuals. In large measure, this is due to the reassurance that preliminary controlled studies and particularly the longitudinal work that is emerging on psychosocial adjustment of singleton and twin children born from these technologies are not demonstrating significant differences between them and children conceived by more conventional means. Each author red-flags the issue of higher-order multiple births as a central worry, but this concern is likewise reflected in the science and practice of infertility, where much energy is now invested in attempting to limit the occurrence of triplets and more. Those of us who counsel the infertile can relax – sort of. What is also evident from these reviews1-3 is that key questions regarding some of the most basic aspects of the technologies have yet to be answered. Chief among these is the result of gamete donation (egg and sperm) and embryo donation on the psychosocial well-being of children who will eventually become adults with families of their own. We do not know in an empirical sense whether it is best to disclose and how much to disclose to children born from donor gametes and embryos. We do not know how children born from donor embryos will view the likelihood they were frozen as embryos, stored an