By Kostas Onisenko
A spokesperson for the Russian Orthodox Church has called for in vitro fertilization (IVF) to be excluded from Moscow’s compulsory medical insurance system, saying that it was too early to re-evaluate the church’s position on the issue. “I hope the State will eventually remove IVF from funding through compulsory medical insurance and IVF will cease to be the means used instead of fertility treatment,” said the head of the Patriarchal Commission on family matters, Priest Fedor Lukyanov, in a televised interview.
Explaining his point of view, the priest said that only 7% of IVF attempts were successful while “93% of embryos die.” He also said that, when the procedure was successful, some of the fertilized eggs were frozen and that “today there are 20 such ‘frozen children’ in the world and their fate is unknown.” He added that it took a long time to judge the effectiveness of the treatment, claiming that many of the children born have serious health problems, a fact about which, he said, their parents often do not talk.
He also referred to abortions, saying that for a long time the Church has been asking to be removed from the same state insurance program. He combined abortions with IVF, saying: “We see that there is a completely clear effort to maintain this horrifying number of abortions in our country. Why? Because abortion is the cause of infertility and the infertile person is a client of in vitro fertilization.”