Hey, I wondered if you could tell me more about the situation in Australia? IIRC, there are no Australian IVF clinics offering PGT-P, and recommendations against it from medical professionals, but no explicit ban on using an overseas company to obtain this data and then implanting the chosen embryo? (Although I believe choosing the sex of the embryo is banned outright.) Have I misunderstood something about that? Would it be possible in practice, or would you expect that no clinic would allow testing or allow the couple to choose their own embryo? Would it be illegal to obtain genetic data given that it would give information about the embryo’s sex (even if that was not used to make the decision)? How do the advances with PGT-A play into this?
No worries if you don’t know the answers to these yet! It will be several years before my partner and I are looking to have a child, and the technology and regulation could well change dramatically before then—I’m just considering the possibility of egg/sperm freezing, and whether it would be necessary to plan to go overseas for the process.
Sorry for so many questions, and thanks for the great post!
Taiwan could possibly be an option. They have quite inexpensive egg retrieval (something like $3-4k all in). But you’d have to look into data sharing and/or shipping eggs abroad.
It may be technically possible to do PGT-P in Australia right now, but it’s very hard and I know several people whose data is basically being held hostage by the PGT company.
MAYBE you could do it if you could convince them to share the raw PGTA data with you and transfer an embryo of your choosing, but unless you have written pre-approval I wouldn’t go that route. Australia can ban you from sending your own embryos abroad.
I would recommend Australian patients fly abroad if they want to do PGT-P.
I’d love to get this changed. If you’ve got any contacts in Australia I or someone else in the industry could talk to I’d be happy to chat with them. Even if they’re not going to allow IQ, it’s pretty stupid to ban embryo selection against Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia when there’s no effective treatment for either.
Hey, I wondered if you could tell me more about the situation in Australia? IIRC, there are no Australian IVF clinics offering PGT-P, and recommendations against it from medical professionals, but no explicit ban on using an overseas company to obtain this data and then implanting the chosen embryo? (Although I believe choosing the sex of the embryo is banned outright.) Have I misunderstood something about that? Would it be possible in practice, or would you expect that no clinic would allow testing or allow the couple to choose their own embryo? Would it be illegal to obtain genetic data given that it would give information about the embryo’s sex (even if that was not used to make the decision)? How do the advances with PGT-A play into this?
No worries if you don’t know the answers to these yet! It will be several years before my partner and I are looking to have a child, and the technology and regulation could well change dramatically before then—I’m just considering the possibility of egg/sperm freezing, and whether it would be necessary to plan to go overseas for the process.
Sorry for so many questions, and thanks for the great post!
Taiwan could possibly be an option. They have quite inexpensive egg retrieval (something like $3-4k all in). But you’d have to look into data sharing and/or shipping eggs abroad.
It may be technically possible to do PGT-P in Australia right now, but it’s very hard and I know several people whose data is basically being held hostage by the PGT company.
MAYBE you could do it if you could convince them to share the raw PGTA data with you and transfer an embryo of your choosing, but unless you have written pre-approval I wouldn’t go that route. Australia can ban you from sending your own embryos abroad.
I would recommend Australian patients fly abroad if they want to do PGT-P.
I’d love to get this changed. If you’ve got any contacts in Australia I or someone else in the industry could talk to I’d be happy to chat with them. Even if they’re not going to allow IQ, it’s pretty stupid to ban embryo selection against Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia when there’s no effective treatment for either.