News & Commentary

Louisa Ghevaert was pleased to attend Progress Educational Trust’s event “Is Fertility Treatment A Solution To Population Decline?” on 26 March 2025. Fertility is continuing to decline across the globe and birth rates are steadily falling. Fertility rates are now at the lowest in the UK since World War II. As such, this event looked at a range of factors influencing declining global fertility and birth rates and debated whether fertility treatment can bridge the gap and solve population decline.

On 23 March 2025 came news reports that genetic testing firm 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy following financial difficulties and concerns about data privacy. Its recent decision to file for bankruptcy is aimed at procuring a sale. However, it leaves its 15 million users around the world questioning what will happen to their genetic data?

Louisa Ghevaert had the pleasure of celebrating the Ethica Fertility launch event on 20 March 2025 at Barnby Street in London with other dedicated professionals in the fertility and family building space. Ethica Fertility’s mission is to offer an innovative, more personalised approach to fertility care and reproductive health.

Louisa Ghevaert was delighted to attend the Nuffield Council on Bioethics workshop “Epigenetics in human reproduction” in London on 11 March 2025. This event looked at the use and implications of epigenetics in human reproduction. It considered the inter-relationships between the reproductive environment, epigenome, long-term health and assisted reproductive technologies.

On 20 November 2024, Louisa Ghevaert attended a Progress Educational Trust event “10 Years of Womb Transplants: What Have We learned? What Does the Future Hold?”. This fascinating event looked at the important and pioneering uterine transplant work that has been undertaken over the last 10 years, starting with the world’s first successful human womb transplant and live birth in September 2014.

Louisa was pleased to attend Progress Educational Trust’s event “Whole Genome Sequencing at Birth: Implementing The Generation Study” on 23 October 2024. This event provided a progress update on The Generation Study, which is an NHS embedded research study undertaking whole genome sequencing of 100,000 newborn babies at different hospitals across England.

Louisa Ghevaert was interviewed on 8 BBC Radio Stations on 23 October 2024 discussing issues and legalities associated with prenatal DNA testing and other forms of DNA testing. This followed a BBC news story of a woman who received flawed DNA test results identifying the wrong man as her unborn baby's father, resulting in a lengthy legal dispute over custody of her child.