K. Kaur

Accreditation, supervision, and regulation of ART clinics in India--a distant dream?

The development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in India began with efforts to create “test tube babies” with in vitro fertilization in the 1980s. But rather than commit public funding to advance such research, the Indian government withheld the use of government funds for research on human embryos, largely as a byproduct of the debate over population control. Without government funding, research on human embryos was outside of government regulation and oversight, and continues to take place in private settings with private investment, beyond governmental rules and public scrutiny. In addition to the absence of government oversight, scrutiny from health insurance companies was also absent, since till last year the only insurers were government owned monolithic companies and they do not cover assisted reproductive technologies. Whatever we might think about health insurers, they perform the valuable func-