Fertility loans clash with faith advice on procreation

 Two interesting articles on the issue of infertility and the finance industry show the need for oversight.

The first one is from the WSJ.    It talks about the loan industry that has been built up around financing the expensive treatments that couples or singles will undertake the get pregnant. Are doctors doing their patients a service to introduce them to finance companies that will loan them money for fertility treatments or do they see this as a way to boost their own  "production." Is this bad? After all they are businessmen/women. Why would they not want their practice to thrive?

"At a time when many traditional lenders are struggling, companies that join forces with doctors to make loans for in vitro fertilization, egg harvesting and other fertility treatments say their business is thriving.

Some doctors won't offer the loans. Others worry that doctors who invest their own money in fertility-finance companies will push the loans on patients."

Some doctors set up kiosks in their offices where patients could apply for the bank's loans.

Would the dr. have such an interest in these loans that they adjust their medical practices?

Also contentious are refund programs that offer money back if in vitro fertilization fails and patients don't take a baby home. One of IntegraMed programs refunds 70% of the $24,000 sticker price for a package of six IVF treatments if they all fail. If the first treatment works, the borrower still owes the entire $24,000, resulting in a larger profit for clinics.

The Catholic Church continues to take the opposite  view of IVF and fertility treatments that interfere with the husband/wife conjugal arrangement.

"The pope pressed the church ban against artificial procreation, saying infertile couples should refrain from any method to try to conceive other than sex between husband and wife.

"The human and Christian dignity of procreation, in fact, doesn’t consist in a 'product,' but in its link to the conjugal act, an expression of the love of the spouses of their union, not only biological but also spiritual," Benedict said.

Sperm or egg donation and methods such as in vitro fertilization are banned by the church for its faithful.

The emphasis on science "and the logic of profit seem today to dominate the field of infertility and human procreation," the pope said."

There is such a lack of regulation around this industry that any offshoot industry  like fertility loans have the potential for abuse of couples who are so eager for offspring that they will let their emotions override their principles and usual  precautions.  Then there are the intended consequences of IVF such as spelled out in the book Inconceivable when a  a dr.  mistakenly  implanted another woman's embryo during a treatment.