Friday , October 4, 2002

A story published today by the Kansas City Star reports that single women and same-sex couples seeking to get pregnant with a little help from modern science now have fewer options in the Kansas City area.

Citing conflicts with its religious views, Shawnee Mission Medical Center recently stopped offering assisted reproduction services to single females.

The hospital joins the growing ranks of private fertility clinics in Kansas and Missouri that for varying ethical and legal reasons have excluded single women from their practice.

"I find it frustrating for women that they don't have choices," said Valerie Montgomery Rice, a physician who is head of the fertility clinic at KU Med. "I respect everyone's policies, but I have some issues with that."

About 15 percent of U.S. women of childbearing age have received infertility services, according to a 1999 national report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Similar statistics were unavailable for Kansas and Missouri.

Of the four Kansas City area fertility clinics, KU Med's Women's Reproductive Center now is the only one that offers single women insemination with donor sperm and assisted reproductive technology services, such as in vitro fertilization.

Midwest Women's Health Care at Research Medical Center also offers in vitro fertilization to single women, but only to those with established fertility problems. Others are referred to private practice doctors.

No clinic in Kansas other than KU Med serves single women.

The policy change took effect in mid-August and covers artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and any associated drug therapies offered through the clinic.

The new policy affected less than 3 percent of the clinic's patients, hospital officials said. A hospital spokeswoman could not give an exact number of patients. But Rice said KU Med's program a few weeks ago got 52 calls from single women in a couple of days, the vast majority from former Shawnee Mission patients.

Shawnee Mission's clinic is the second Kansas clinic in as many years to opt out of treating single women.

The Center for Reproductive Medicine in Wichita stopped providing similar services to single women in December 2000. Officials there would only say that the physician in charge of the program decided to alter the policy.

Religious and societal views on the family unit further complicate the debate. Many religions generally accept assisted reproduction for a husband and wife, believing that the stability of marriage is in the best interest of the child. Therefore, such services are not condoned for singles.

Conversely, society's views on the family unit have grown more liberal, said Wayne Vaught, assistant professor of philosophy and medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Divorce, separation, single parenthood and same-sex couples have been redefining the notion of a family, he said.

"To suggest that a person who is not married does not have the resources to care for a child is not a sustainable argument anymore," Vaught said.