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Money-Back Guarantees for IVF: An Ethical Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Thomas H. Murray
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Extract

When infertility clinics offer money-back guarantees, they prefer to give them more delicate names such as “shared risk,” “warranty,” or “outcome” programs. We should not allow such daintiness to distract us from the bottom line of these programs which are all about the bottom line.

John Robertson and Theodore Schneyer defend such programs as special forms of insurance, what they call “risk-of-failure insurance.” They argue, in “Professional Self-Regulation and Shared-Risk Programs for In Vitro Fertilization,” that the criticisms of in vitro fertilization (IVF) shared-risk programs by the American Medical Association (AMA) and others are off the mark. It would be sufficient, Robertson and Schneyer contend, to develop guidelines for informed consent or protocols that discourage risky clinical procedures. They acknowledge that shared risk plans “present problems if not offered with full disclosure and attention to patient interests,” but they insist that “there is no reason why they cannot be implemented in an ethically sound way.”

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , Winter 1997 , pp. 292 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1997

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References

Robertson, J.A. Schneyer, T.J., “Professional Self-Regulation and Shared-Risk Programs for In Vitro Fertilization,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 25 (1997): At 285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Id. at MS 286.Google Scholar
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See id. at 287 (citing Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, American Medical Association, Code of Medical Ethics (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1997): At 94–95).Google Scholar
See Robertson, Schneyer, , supra note 1, at 286.Google Scholar
Radin, M.J., “Market-Inalienability,” Harvard Law Review, 100 (1987): At 1885–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
See Walzer, M., Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Walzer, Michael suggests this distributive principle: “No social good x should be distributed to men and women who possess some other good y merely because they possess y and without regard to the meaning of x.” Id. at 20 (original emphasis).Google Scholar
See Murray, T.H., The Worth of a Child (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar