Smiling babies. Confusing statistics. Talk of miracles. There is too little oversight of how fertility clinics market themselves online, a new report charges, possibly misleading women about their chances of getting pregnant.
In the 30-plus page paper — among the first to examine how fertility clinics market themselves on the web — Jim Hawkins, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston, looked at all 372 fertility clinics in the United States, that are registered with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology and that have websites. SART, an affiliate of the non-profit American Society for Reproductive Medicine, represents more than 85 percent of the fertility clinics in the U.S.
According to the report, nearly 80 percent of the clinics’ websites had photos of babies on their homepage. Thirty percent used the word “dream” and nearly 9 percent used the word “miracle,” which, Hawkins argues, may push patients to disregard the high costs of fertility treatment (the average cost of a single cycle of in vitro fertilization is $12,400) and create false hope.
“I don’t think this creates some sort of deception,” Hawkins told HuffPost — at least not a deception that would be illegal under current laws, he said, but showing photos of babies and using such words may suggest to some patients that success is a likely outcome. Read full article.
