Are Infertility Treatments ‘Essential’? How to Ethically Determine What Kind of Care Must Go On Amid Covid-19

May 1, 2020

(STAT News) – In early April, the New York Department of Health issued guidance expanding the definition of essential care to explicitly include fertility services and infertility treatments. These expensive, resource-intensive medical therapies, which include egg harvesting and in vitro fertilization, maximize a patient’s chances of conceiving a biological child. They are also major sources of revenue for specialists, clinics, and hospital systems. It is not entirely clear, however, that they should be considered essential in this dangerous moment for the American health care system.