Tassie penguins affected by worms
Tasmania is famous for its wildlife; wombats; Tassie devils and even little penguins.
But in Burnie, on the state's north coast one wildlife carer has noticed a concerning issue with these beloved birds.
An increasing number are affected by worms and it's impacting their health and giving insights into their changing environment.
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Tassie penguins affected by worms
Tasmania is famous for its wildlife; wombats; Tassie devils and even little penguins. But in Burnie, on the state's north coast one wildlife carer has noticed a concerning issue with these beloved birds. An increasing number are affected by worms and it's impacting their health and giving insights into their changing environment.
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'People, not products': There are ethical questions concerning IVF that go deeper than the recent scandals - ABC Religion & Ethics
After two incidents involving women who were implanted with the wrong embryos — including one case where a woman gave birth to the child of a complete stranger — the Australian IVF industry is facing a long-overdue reckoning. On Friday, 13 June 2025, federal and state health ministers announced an immediate inquiry into the sector and its regulation, stating that it was unacceptable for the sector's peak body to also function as a regulator. Currently, IVF providers in Australia are accredited by a national body, the Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee, which is a professional group of the Board of the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand. Federal health minister Mark Butler said the national review was focused on 'independence and transparency around the accreditation of providers'. The history of negligence in the IVF sector, however, predates these latest breaches, and we do well to reflect on how an instrumental approach to conception, to children, to patients and families is baked into the way in which the IVF industry operates. Originally, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was intended as a treatment for a narrow subset of women experiencing medical infertility. Today, IVF is provided by large corporations who are profit driven and increasingly target people experiencing 'social infertility' or older women looking to wind back the fertility clock. The language of 'customers' has replaced the language of 'patients' and IVF 'treatments' have become 'products'. IVF providers offer a range of increasingly sophisticated options and tests which ostensibly help women take control of their reproductive health, but which can cause confusion and anxiety for patients and families. On top of this, providers stand accused of systematically neglecting their obligations to women using their services. While Australia should, as a matter of priority, establish an independent national regulator to preside over IVF providers, we should recognise that there is a problem with the industrialisation of fertility as such, something that even the best regulator will not be able to fully address. A brief history of IVF in Australia Australia was a world leader in developing IVF technology, and Australian scientists who developed IVF technology also helped create our IVF industry. Monash IVF, the company at the centre of the most recent scandals, was set up by IVF pioneer Carl Wood who in 1973 oversaw the world's first IVF pregnancy. Australian Doctors Gab Kovacs and Alan Trounson were part of the team that oversaw Australia's first IVF birth in 1980, which was only the third IVF birth in the world. Trounson went on to serve as Scientific Director at Monash IVF and Kovacs served as Medical Director. In this way, the science and the business of IVF have been intertwined from the start. Initially, IVF was relatively rare, had low success rates, and were narrowly focussed on women and men experiencing medical infertility. It has now become a huge, sprawling industry with annual revenue in excess of more than $800 million a year — including hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicare subsidies. IVF provision has expanded to include single parents, same-sex couples and, increasingly, older women who are struggling to conceive. Somewhere in the vicinity of one in eighteen babies are born by IVF in Australia each year. We can expect this number to grow. Overall IVF success rates in terms of live birth rate per embryo transfer cycle increased from 27.3 per cent in 2018 to 29.9 per cent in 2022, though these success rates vary based on the age and medical profile of patients. Importantly, however, IVF success rates decrease significantly once women reach the age of 35. The Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand has gone as far as to describe IVF as a solution to declining fertility, suggesting that it should be part of a plan to increase fertility rates nationally given that people are increasingly choosing to delay having kids. A recent report published by the Fertility Society, co-authored by former federal Health Minister Greg Hunt, notes that Australians are increasingly seeking to conceive at a later age, and this means that there is an 'increased role for IVF in particular, and [assisted reproductive technology] more generally, in supporting individual conception and national birth rates'. Concerns over negligence in the IVF industry The IVF industry has been plagued by claims of negligence since its inception. Initially, in Australia it was not mandatory to keep donor records for IVF, and sperm and egg donors could opt to have their identifying information withheld from any subsequent children. (In some cases, clinics destroyed their medical records.) Donor sperm could be used for as many women as needed, creating situations in which today there are some sperm donors who are believed to have fathered several hundred children. Donors were subject to basic health checks, but screening was limited, putting women at risk of contracting disease. Four women, for example, died after receiving fertility treatment at Westmead Hospital in Sydney in the 1980s using donor semen from HIV positive donors. This is just one of the harrowing revelations recounted in journalist Sarah Dingle's 2021 book, Brave New Humans: The Dirty Reality of Donor Conception . Legal reforms have addressed some of these problems. It has now become mandatory, for example, to ensure that children conceived by IVF can access a de-identified medical history of their donor parents, and, in some states, identifying information about their donor parents once they turn 18. Nevertheless, problems remain. In recent years, the IVF industry has been extensively criticised for failing to give clients an adequate picture of IVF success rates and the withholding of donor information from clients. IVF success rates plummet once a woman hits 40, and yet in 2022 one in four women receiving IVF in Australia were over the age of 40. In a 2024 Four Corners report on IVF, several parents and prospective parents were interviewed about their experiences with the major Australian IVF providers. One participant, Amelia Hawkshaw, said that 17 of her embryos had been destroyed in a lab at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney after they were infected with bacteria. In a separate case, Queensland woman Anastasia Gunn alleged that an IVF clinic had created embryos from her eggs with the wrong donor sperm. She went on to have two boys who have serious health problems, including mobility disorders and autism. The IVF provider, Queensland Fertility Group, however, has refused to acknowledge or accept responsibility for the error. In the wake of the most recent Monash IVF scandal, some experts have claimed that IVF mistakes are 'rare'. In reality it is difficult to tell, because in some cases — such as implantation of the wrong embryos — the mistake may go undetected. We should also factor in the history of negligence in the IVF industry relating to patient safety and respect for embryos, children and women. The instrumentalisation of human life IVF has long been criticised for instrumentalising human lives — whether it is the embryo which becomes a child or the adult patient who seeks treatment. In medicine, the patient's welfare should always come first. This should be a bedrock of clinical practice, but in IVF a transactional mentality has replaced a focus on patient welfare. But there is an even harder question to consider — namely, whether and in what cases IVF should be offered at all. Older women well into their 40s are increasingly trying IVF even though the prospect of IVF success is very small, not because of any medical reason necessarily but just because of natural processes of aging. Given this, in what sense is IVF a 'treatment'? In what circumstances would providing IVF amount to taking advantage of a desperate patient? The replacement of the language of 'patient' with the language of 'customer' in the IVF industry is an implicit acceptance that what the industry is providing today are not medical treatments for infertility as much as a series of technological fixes that speak to social and life circumstances that otherwise preclude conception. The transactional logic at the heart of the IVF industry also stems from the way in which IVF babies are brought into existence — namely, in laboratories rather than in the context of a sexual act. These embryos are the object of a scientific process carried out by an IVF company. If we were ever to speak in a literal way of 'making babies', this would be it. This sense of being 'made' is increased the more 'design' and precision testing are involved in the production of IVF babies. The trouble is that the way in which we bring human life into existence shapes our own conception of human dignity. Exerting this level of power of another human being – determining not just the conditions of their existence but literally making them in a laboratory — can lead someone to think that the resultant individuals are your products . German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas famously argued in The Future of Human Nature that the way in which we treat embryonic human life in IVF — particularly when we 'objectify it' and 'design it" — affects how we view human dignity in general. To put it frankly, it leads us to view human nature as something made rather than given , and other human beings as our possession rather than autonomous and befitting of rights. This seems to be something of the mindset of the IVF industry. It plays out in how embryos are treated — they are also either 'used' or 'discarded' if unneeded or unwanted — and how customers are treated — in too many cases with callous neglect. Contrast such language with the way women such as Amelia Hawkshaw see their situation. Concerning the loss of her embryos, she remarked: 'Those 17 embryos were all like potential children we could have had', she said in an interview. 'My children are people, not products', says Lexie Gunn, the partner of Anastasia Gunn. 'We're not talking about a pair of sneakers. I didn't go home and open up the box and they were the wrong brand of sneakers. These are my children.' A path forward? 'What's the threshold for you to think something's not quite right?' This was a question posed by Katherine Dawson, an Australian woman in her 30s who was conceived using donated sperm and who believes that she may have up to 700 siblings. There is a growing consensus that the fertility industry in Australia needs stricter and more impartial regulation. Indeed, the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand, in the report I've already mentioned, has called for uniform laws to be adopted by the commonwealth and states on assisted reproduction as well as the establishment of an independent regulator. One can only hope that this would be an outcome of the current 'rapid review' of the nation's fertility sector. But we should be aware that there are endemic problems to the IVF industry that cannot be solved by an independent regulator. It is baked into the industry that those seeking IVF are treated as customers rather than patients and that embryos are treated as products . The science and the economics of IVF are intertwined and both are underpinned by a kind of utilitarian logic which objectifies embryos and children and in different ways can take advantage of vulnerable women seeking to conceive. These challenges are problems related to IVF as such and the for profit-model on which IVF is provided, rather than being a problem of neglect on the part of individual providers or an effect of a lack of robust and uniform legal standards or ethical guidelines. The ethics of IVF is not settled. Rather, the recent Monash IVF scandals show that the period of ethical querying has only just begun, because the central question of instrumentalisation was never honestly faced. We must now face what we have previously denied. Xavier Symons is Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at the Australian Catholic University.
