This week's BioNews reports on a recent study of families with children conceived using assisted reproduction techniques. Surprisingly for a story that mentions IVF, it was hardly mentioned in the press.
The authors, who reported their findings at an international conference last week, looked at the psychological health of families with children conceived using either donor insemination or IVF. They found that such families functioned entirely normally - if anything, the parents were more emotionally involved with their children than usual. Perhaps the results were just too reassuring to report.
It is tempting to wonder how different the media coverage might have been, had the study found evidence that families with children born following assisted conception function less well than usual. This, according to the study's lead author Susan Golombok, was what some psychologists had predicted. So her results were surprising, at least to some in the scientific community, though not surprising enough to make last week's newspapers.
Of course, health stories have to compete for space with other news, as well as other health and medical stories. Last week, for example, a major conference on breast cancer was held in Barcelona - closer to home for UK journalists than Buenos Aires, the venue for the assisted reproduction conference. But it seems that in some areas of medicine, studies that may cause concern are reported far more readily than those that offer reassurance. A study that shows there's no evidence that assisted reproduction has any adverse effect on family life is simply not newsworthy, even though it's probably of great interest to many existing or prospective parents. Perhaps we just need to assume that when it comes to studies involving assisted reproduction, no news is usually good news.
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