The report, published in the BMC Journal of Health, Population & Nutrition, highlights the need for healthcare professionals to undertake a more sensitive approach to the ART procedure, including having detailed discussions with women and their families to tailor the embryo transfer processes to suit individual needs.

Foetal reduction is the process of removing one or more developing embryos to reduce the number of babies during multiple pregnancies, in order to improve full-term outcomes for mother and child following ART treatment.

The research was conducted in Taiwan as part of a three-year project by a multi-disciplinary team of academics and researchers from the University of Bedfordshire, National Taipei University of Nursing &Health Sciences Taiwan and the Taipei City Fertility Centre Taiwan, drawing together the real-life experiences of seven first-time mothers who underwent foetal reduction following ART treatment in a fertility centre in Taiwan.

The researchers found through in-depth interviews that mothers often regretted that they took clinical advice to implant multiple embryos and then had to resort to foetal reduction. All participants said they had experienced a sense of distress during their treatment and expressed strong feelings of guilt, believing that they ended the foetuses’ lives knowingly. A key learning from this study was the need for mothers to be provided with specialist support to help them process and manage the outcome of this treatment.

Dr Shuby Puthussery – Senior Lecturer in Public Health and Director of the Maternal & Child Health Research Centre with the Institute for Health Research (IHR) – co-authored the report. She said: “In a global context where ART is increasingly being used as an acceptable method to enable women with untreatable infertility to conceive healthy babies, the findings have important implications for policy and practice in Taiwan and internationally.”

The report’s authors also concluded that it is necessary for ART providers to consult more in-depth and sensitively with women and their families, along with a precise recognition of risks to tailor the embryo transfer process to suit the needs of every individual woman.

Dr Puthussery added: “While the focus of ART providers is on ensuring the success of the pregnancy itself, the experiences and the overall wellbeing of the mothers need to be given greater consideration with provisions for intense support before and after pregnancy.”

Professor Andrew Church, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, commented on the importance of studies like this: “Research such as this is vitally significant as the findings of this report will make a marked contribution to the development of policy around the world to improve the experiences of expectant mothers who undergo this type of treatment. It is very pleasing to see University of Bedfordshire academics once again at the forefront of such important research.”

The full report can be read via the IHR’s Open Access online research repository.