Fertility Week begins today (1-7 September). Designed to coincide with the first week of spring (think fertility, babies and so on), this year’s campaign focuses on the impact that being overweight or obese can have on a person’s ability to conceive and have a healthy pregnancy and baby.

This lecture series commemorates the significant contribution Emeritus Professor Louis Waller has made to the field of assisted reproductive treatment in Victoria. Guest speakers raise and discuss controversial issues and challenge our thinking on assisted reproductive treatment and other relevant fields.

Leading researchers and reproductive specialists discussed current research into whether we can create human sperm and eggs from stem cells and what this could mean for assisted reproductive laboratories and clinical practice in the future at the 2015 Twilight Seminar: Hope, hype or reality: can we make eggs or sperm from stem cells?

In the past twenty years egg freezing has been offered as an option to preserve fertility for women who are diagnosed with cancer and are about to undergo chemotherapy that might affect their fertility. This is called ‘onco fertility preservation’ (OFP). Advances in egg freezing techniques in the last ten years have improved the chance of having a baby from frozen eggs. As a result, more and more women around the world now turn to egg freezing for non-medical reasons to guard against age-related fertility decline. This is called elective fertility preservation (EFP).

Egg freezing for social reasons means that women have more reproductive options than ever before, according to arguments presented at the 2014 Louis Waller lecture held by the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority (VARTA) in Melbourne last night.

Recently, ABC Radio National ran a lovely story on donor linking(link is external). It examined the relationship formed between Adrian, a sperm donor, and his family with two of his biological daughters, conceived via donor treatment, and their mother Dianne.

Last week, VARTA’s CEO Louise Johnson and Senior Research Officer Dr Karin Hammarberg spoke to Penny Johnston at ABC Babytalk on the subject of what to do with unused embryos. The program was informative and sensitive to the complexity of this issue and is really worth a listen.

We are making changes to protect the health and safety of our staff, our clients and the wider community. VARTA is aiming to continue its normal service provision, however there may be delays or changes to our activities.

I found out by accident when I was around 11 years old (I was born in May 1982). From memory I was watching Home & Away and IVF was mentioned in the story line. Mum told me that was how I was conceived and left it there

Attorney General George Brandis has announced a Commonwealth parliamentary inquiry into surrogacy, to be conducted by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs. Announcing the inquiry, the Attorney General’s media release stated that “surrogacy raises a broad range of legal and social issues, and raises questions relating to the rights, responsibilities, values and protections of Australian citizens”.