A rather strange French pair has been dominating the European press over the past week. Their names are Jeanine and Robert Salomone and they have two new babies. But they are not a couple: they are brother and sister.
It's not just Jeanine and Robert Salomone's peculiar set up that has excited press attention, but a whole host of other factors. First, the pair led their American clinic to believe that they were married. Second, Jeanine is 62 and had IVF treatment using an egg donor - a woman who also carried the other baby to term. And then it transpired that the reason for all this effort was to secure an inheritance that might otherwise fall into the hands of the state.
For opponents of IVF, the case has all the right ingredients to prove just how horrible the whole thing is. But even for those without strong objections to the technique, the Salomone case has provoked a kind of sigh of inevitability. An article in the Sunday Times warned: 'The oddest couple ever to have IVF reveal the flaws in modern fertility treatment.' In the Daily Mail, a commentary asked 'How many other abuses are being perpetrated in a ghastly game of genetic roulette?' It also suggested that IVF, once used for deserving infertile couples, is now being 'exploited for money without a shred of concern for the innocent life created'.
But as bizarre as this case seems to be, it should not be regarded as indicative of what is going in the world of IVF. Most people seeking IVF have a perfectly ordinary request: to be helped to have a much-wanted child. The more we get distracted by cases such as the Salomones, the more we risk neglecting the needs of everyone else undergoing treatment. Worse, the call for tighter controls which this case has prompted could lead to a situation where unfair and discriminatory rules are imposed upon all IVF patients in an attempt to screen out a vanishingly small number of 'undesirables'.