A crackdown on fertility treatment would help cut population size and tackle global warming, an expert claims today.
Governments should only offer free fertility treatment to people who are medically infertile "through no fault of their own," according to bio-ethicist Professor Cristina Richie.
They should not be offered to people making "lifestyle choices," she says.
Professor Richie says fertility treatments are unusual among medical procedures as they produce a carbon footprint – but also leave a "carbon legacy" in the form of additional children.
She says that assisted reproduction has created some five million new lives since the late 1970s.
Writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, she says: "It is therefore the obligation of environmental policymakers, the ethical and medical communities, and even society to carefully weigh the interests of our shared planet with a business that intentionally creates more humans when we must reduce our carbon impact."
Professor Richie, of Boston College, Massachusetts, USA, includes same sex couples, single women and people who have voluntarily undergone sterilisation among those who might seek fertility treatment as a lifestyle choice.
But one of the journal’s associate editors warned the policy could lead to discrimination.
Dr Dominic Wilkinson, a neonatologist at the University of Adelaide, Australia, said: "Climate change is important, but carbon caps should be applied equally and fairly. They should not be used to discriminate against those who are single or gay.”
What would an environmentally sustainable reproductive technology industry look like? Journal of Medical Ethics 25 July 2014; doi:10.1136/medethics-2013-101716 [abstract]
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