Cancer patients should get free fertility service, say experts

Cancer patients should be offered free fertility treatment on the NHS to enable them to store frozen sperm or eggs and have children one day in the future, leading medical institutions say today.

About 11,000 people under 40 are diagnosed with cancer every year. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy will make some infertile. But the technology exists to freeze men’s sperm and pioneering work is being done in freezing and later thawing and implanting parts of women’s ovaries and eggs. Where the woman has a partner, it is possible to carry out test-tube fertility procedures and create embryos which can be frozen pending a time after treatment when she wants to become a mother.

 

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