A FERTILITY centre in occupied Famagusta has found itself at the centre of a scandal after Britain’s Mail on Sunday revealed that the clinic provided “family balancing” treatments forbidden in the EU.
The scandal broke after it emerged that prominent UK gynaecologist Charles Kingsland regularly referred patients wishing to pre-determine the sex of their yet-to-be-conceived children to the Famagusta clinic. “Family balancing” treatments, which allow parents to select the sex of their unborn child, are illegal in the UK, the rest of the EU and Turkey.
Kingsland, who is the clinical director of Britain’s largest NHS fertility unit, will undoubtedly face questioning in the UK over his role in referring patients to the clinic after it was alleged he may have benefited financially from the fertility package costing patients up to £14,000 each. The Mail on Sunday claimed that at least one couple was being referred to the clinic per week, and that Kingsland’s office regularly arranged the visits that included a stay at luxury hotels in Famagusta and Kyrenia.
An attempt yesterday by the Cyprus Mail to interview the Cyprus IVF Clinic’s director Halil Ibrahim Tekin was unsuccessful with staff saying he was “out of the country”.
Another doctor working at the modern-looking clinic located within the private Yasam Hospital, Onder Coban, did not deny that family balancing treatments were conducted at the clinic, but insisted that north Cyprus was “not in the EU” and that EU law did not apply there. Also at the clinic, which claims to carry out 1,700 treatments per year, was a woman claiming to be Dr Tekin’s sister, who also insisted that activities at the clinic were “legal according to the laws of the TRNC”.
Family balancing treatment involves the removal of eggs from the female patient’s ovaries, which are then fertilised outside the body. Two growing embryos of the chosen sex are then transplanted back into the womb.
The process has been illegal in the UK since being outlawed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act in 2008. The law was devised on the grounds that allowing parents to choose the sex of their children could have dire demographic consequences, particularly in countries such as India and China, where the demand for male offspring is so high that infanticide against female children is not uncommon.
Further applications of the technology could ultimately enable parents to create “designer children”, where physical and mental characteristics are selected before birth.
Kingsland’s covert practices were revealed when a Mail on Sunday reporter went undercover as a patient seeking to choose the sex of her yet-to-be-conceived child.
During her investigations, the reporter was told not to tell her GP about the treatment she would receive in north Cyprus, but encouraged to sign up to the programme run by the UK Cypriot Fertility Association (UKCFA). Kingsland is a shareholder in the UKCFA.
Although the UKCFA does not apparently make money directly out of services offered in Famagusta, it does charge for the advisory and preparatory services.
According to the Mail on Sunday, couples who apply are given screening and tests along with injections to the female partner to stimulate egg production. A secretary was also at hand at the UKCFA to arrange flights, accommodation and transfers to the clinic.
This is not the first time clinics in the north have been cited in the press for this type of procedure. In October a report in the French newspaper, Le Parisien, said a French couple would come to Cyprus this year to have the controversial procedure done.
