"In 2002, a white woman known only as Mrs. A gave birth to black twins after staff at the Medical Reproduction Unit at the Leeds Teaching Hospital's NHS Trust mistakenly fertilised her egg with the sperm of a black man, known as Mr. B. In an unprecedented case, Mr. and Mrs. A and Mr. and Mrs. B went to court to establish the legal parentage of "their" children and to settle on who should bring them up.

In accordance with the [U.K.] Human Fertilisation And Embryology Act 1990, the law that governs IVF procedure, Mrs. A, the "birth mother", was declared the legal mother. But the legal father was ruled to be Mr. B, the biological father. Where the children are now is not known as a court injunction still remains in place to ensure that no details that might lead to their identification are ever made public.

... Parsons said: 'It is easy to see that a mistake has been made when a white couple have a black baby. How many mistakes have been made with less obvious consequences? That must worry a lot of IVF couples.'"

(Source:  By Aideen McLaughlin, "Crazy mixed-up kids," and "IVF mix-ups are 'more common than thought,'" The Sunday Herald [Glasgow, Scotland], 17 April 2005; http://www.sundayherald.com/49142 and http://www.sundayherald.com/49088 .)

"The [U.K.] Government has announced that women will now be offered one free cycle of fertility treatment on the NHS.  ...But will this make women more likely to rush into IVF without regard for the impact on their health and lives?

Only now can I see how, in those four years, I was little short of a woman possessed. I made bizarre, potentially dangerous decisions, and I denied obstacles and signs that now seem all too obvious - not least that my marriage was tissue-paper thin. It was simply too difficult for me to hold on to rational deductive processes while in the grip of the most powerful emotions. A staggering 15 per cent of couples are now seeking medical help for fertility problems, and infertility treatment is stressful. They arrive at the clinics already seriously wounded: periods have come and gone and no baby has materialised.

This is not a good state of mind in which to make decisions either about the emotional cost of treatment or the possible medical risks. Even when presented with something concrete - the treatment's links to ovarian and breast cancer, and concern for ART children's health in later life - I realise that I couldn't hear. As I saw it, life would be over anyway without children, so the risk of dying as a result of treatment didn't scare me. I swung between a childlike dependency on the medical system and a steely determination to "succeed" at any price."

(Source:  Nicola Glucksmann , "Would you risk it all for a baby?" The Independent [U.K.], 12 April 2005; http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=628542 .)

Single mothers visit the psychiatrist's office much more often than do married peers.  And these frequent visits reflect deep mental distress not typically found among married mothers.  Single mothers' unusually heavy reliance upon psychiatric care comes in for intense scrutiny in a study recently published in Social Science & Medicine by a team of researchers from McMaster University and the University of Toronto.  The findings of this study offer little reassurance to those who suppose life is easy for single mothers.

Scrutinizing a provincial data set collected in Ontario in 1990 and a national data set collected in 1994-1995, the Canadian scholars calculate that "single mothers are between two and three times more likely to have sought help for mental health concerns in the previous 12 months than married mothers."  Comparing single mothers to married peers, the researchers calculate an Odds Ratio for mental health care utilization of 2.76 for the national survey and of 3.27 for the Ontario survey.  

This pattern of psychiatric dependence, the authors of the new study further conclude, reflects deep psychological distress.  "Single mothers," the Canadian researchers write, "have higher rates of affective anxiety [and] substance abuse disorders, and are more likely to be comorbid [that is, to be subject to multiple mental-health problems] than married mothers."   Specifically, the researchers find that only 6.4 percent of married mothers in the national survey and only 5.1 percent of those in the Ontario survey suffered from affective disorders, compared to 14.8 percent of the single mothers in the national survey and 19.1 percent of those in the Ontario survey.  

Though the national survey offers direct comparative data only for affective disorders, the Ontario survey provides evidence that various other types of mental illness are two to three times more prevalent among single mothers than among married peers.  Compared to married peers, single mothers are more than twice as likely to suffer from anxiety disorders (31.2 percent vs. 14.3 percent), almost four times as likely to suffer from substance-abuse disorder (4.7 percent vs. 1.3 percent), and more than twice as likely to suffer from multiple mental-health disorders (39.0 percent vs. 17.5 percent).  

The authors of the study thus conclude that single mothers are not visiting psychiatrists for trivial or inappropriate reasons.  "The higher rate of use of mental health services by single mothers," the researchers write, "appears appropriate given their higher rate of psychiatric illness."  

The Canadian scholars suggest that their findings carry particular weight because of the "steady increase" in the number of Canadian families headed by single mothers, an increase that "parallels a similar trend observed in the United States, where the number of single parent families has more than doubled from 12% in 1970 to 27% in 1998."

No wonder psychiatry is a growth industry on both sides of the border.

(Source: John Cairney et al., "Single mothers and the use of professionals for mental health care reasons," Social Science & Medicine 59 [2004]: 2535-2546.)