ABSTRACT
Previously intractable causes of both female and male infertility can now be circumvented. The escalation of technologies to assist conception in the past decade has been accompanied by an expansion of what the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 refers to as ‘treatment services’ to couples, very largely in the private sector of medicine. One commentator has portrayed the developments in this field of medicine as ‘reproduction without sex but with the doctor’ (Brody 1987). Another cautioned, ‘The issues are so new that there isn’t an agreed ethical tradition and so there’s a danger that whatever practices doctors drift into become the norm.’1 But the doctor who practises in this area of medicine is not the doctor of old.
