Ethics Committee Opinions of ASRM & SART: The Mysterious Disappearance of an Important Ethics Committee Opinion
A missing ethics opinion, a conflicted publication, and big questions for ASRM.
The CHR here comments on periodic mailings ASRM members receive from the society announcing the pending publications of Opinions by Ethics or Clinical Practice Committees of the ASRM and its daughter organization, SART, and requesting final comments from the membership before publication. The impetus for this CHR Opinion came from two related recent events: (i) The disappearance without explanation of an Opinion of the Ethics Committees that strongly opposed the clinical utilization of PGT-P (preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic conditions); and (ii) publication—possibly by invitation—of a strongly supportive Opinion article for the utilization of PGT-P in Fertility and Sterility (F&S)—the flagship journal of ASRM—by three obviously economically conflicted individuals, one of which having been a longstanding and very influential proponent of PGT-A (preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy). These two obviously contrasting events, of course, speak for themselves. They also urgently ask for an explanation from the ASRM and F&S.
Members of the ASRM, under the signature of their respective Ethics or Practice Committees, periodically receive from the society drafts of combined Opinions of ASRM and SART (why these two societies of ASRM have separate committees is unclear). The apparent purpose is solicitation of comments on the proposed Opinions from the membership before formal publication (in F&S).
The subjects of such Opinion documents can at times be rather banal, like the most recently circulated document on “Compassionate (embryos) transfer,” a process where patients – most often for religious purposes -request, at non-fertile times in their menstrual cycle, clinically useless transfers for non-reproductive purposes. But fortunately, more often than not, these Opinions address really important ethical and/or clinical issues, where comments from membership would seem of significant importance.
But as has been our impression (and we have to point out that we have not conducted a formal study), the mailed drafts only rarely change in a significant fashion before formal publication. But in some rare cases, something funny can apparently happen—a proposed draft can disappear!
Such a disappearance act was, indeed, what happened several months ago, when the membership received a usual prepublication request for comments on a suggested policy recommendations from the combined Ethics Committees of ASRM and SART under the heading, “Use of preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P),” which is a very obviously really important potential document in these days—when lay media—as elsewhere discussed in this issue of the CHRVOICE—have suddenly discovered the subject of polygenic disease risk screening and several laboratories are already commercially offering such screening for human embryos. As we have noted before in these pages on repeated occasions, several genetic societies have, indeed, issued opinions on the commercial utilization of PGT-P, universally condemning it a premature and, at times, even unethical 1-3
A professional opinion from the leading fertility society in the U.S, ASRM (and, on a side note, in Europe from ESHRE), would, indeed, seem especially urgent not only because infertility practice controls the IVF process, but also because PGT-P is not only (falsely) advertised as a tool to prevent polygenic diseases, but also as an enhancing tool to, for example, produce offspring with blue eyes, higher intelligence, etc. In other words, PGT-P is presented as the eugenics tool of our times and is already finding a significant following among investors in Silicon Valley and, as at least one public opinion poll has suggested, in the general public.4
It is important to note that the preliminary ASRM/SART document on the subject reached all the correct conclusions and—without disclosing any secrets—condemned the use of PGT-P for trait selection, described PGT-P as a nascent and unproven technology, not recommended for clinical use which, therefore, should not be offered as a clinical service as of this point, and stressed that research on PGT-P should only be conducted under IRB supervision and clinical use should occur only after safety, efficacy, ethical and societal concerns have been addressed.
This vanished document, indeed, reached practically the identical conclusions several professional genetics societies had reached already quite some time earlier. It is not only high time for ASRM/SART to publicly explain what happened to the proposed Ethics Committee draft, but the infertility field is in urgent need of a document that defines the field’s position on the clinical and commercial use of PGT-P.
We are fairly certain that the Committee’s document was not pulled because one or more ASRM members opposed some wording in the draft. The lobbying had to come from much more powerful sources in industry (i.e., genetic testing labs, investor-controlled IVF clinic networks, etc.), now the major contributors to the ASRM budget after big pharma in the fertility field has shrunk to very small and mostly uninvolved pharma.
Also telling is in this context—rather paradoxically—a very recent, apparently invited pure Opinion article by three individuals—in ASRM’s main flagship journal, F&S, the senior author among them likely the most prominent and most consequential proponent of PGT-A since its inception. All three identified themselves in their conflict statement as employees and stockholders in a new start-up company, which specializes in polygenic predictions, and which describes itself on its website as “a team of scientists building the highest quality genetic tests for families.”
And we are quoting here from the introductory paragraph of their article: “Over the past few decades, insights from genetics have given IVF couples new options for deciding which embryo to transfer. The purpose of this brief essay is to defend PGT-P—the newest form of genetic testing of embryos—as a clinically useful and morally defensible option for women who use IVF.”
In other words, ASRM shut down its own Ethics Committees’ negative opinions about PGT-P, but offered its flagship medical journal, F&S, up for obviously economically conflicted authors voicing their biased opinions, favoring the clinical utilization of PGT-P. And not to be forgotten, the senior author—based on a good number of publications in the fertility literature—is, likely, the single most responsible individual for the widespread current U.S. use of PGT-A in IVF.
References
Behavior Genetics Association. BGA Statement on Polygenic Embryo Selection. June 2025. https://www.bga.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=971921&module_id=734874
International Society of Psychiatric Genetics (ISPG). Advisory on the use of polygenic risk scores to screen embryos for adult mental health conditions. May 2021; https://ispg.net/ethics-statement/
Forzano et al., on behalf of the Executive Committee of the European Society of Human Genetics & The Public and Professional Policy Committee of the European Society for Human Genetics. European Journal of Human Genetics. 2022;30:493-495
Furrer et al., JAMA Network Open 2024;7(5):e:2410832
Anomaly et al., Fertil Steril 2025; September 10, 2025. https://www.fertstert.org/news-do/polygenic-revolution-and-future-embryo-testing; DOI: 10.1016/e375f228-4e6a-4fc1-b742-ab70649d3ac1 Ahead of print.