BW #55: IVF
In vitro fertilization is in the news, thanks to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling. This week, we look at some data about IVF in the United States.
Last week, the Supreme Court of Alabama (in the United States) ruled that embryos created as part of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a widely used fertility treatment, have the legal status of children. The plaintiffs were three couples who had undergone fertility treatment at an Alabama clinic. A patient at an adjoining hospital entered the clinic without permission, picked up several cryogenically frozen embryos, discovered the hard way that such packaging is extremely cold, and dropped them on the floor, destroying them.
Alabama law considers embryos and fetuses to have the status of children. The question here was whether embryos created outside of the womb, as part of IVF treatment, would also have that status. The court ruled that they were, and allowed the couples to sue for damages based on Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. (You can read the ruling here: /content/files/newsgraphics/documenttools/4b56014daa6dda84/a039b1d9-full.pdf)
Needless to say, this ruling has gotten a lot of attention, given how widespread IVF is. If embryos have the legal status of children, that opens up a lot of challenging questions regarding IVF. For example, the procedure often requires the fertilization of numerous embryos, only the most viable of which are implanted. What will happen to the others? Will clinics then be considered murderers if they dispose of the embryos?
Not surprisingly, the fertility clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham stopped its use of IVF, at least temporarily, in order to assess its legal liability (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/us/university-alabama-birmingham-ivf-embryo-ruling.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Y00.5VWn.RgRUNGWe-sMh&smid=url-share).
In a complete coincidence, I've been listening to The Retrievals, a chilling podcast series about the fertility clinic at Yale University, where a nurse stopped giving women pain-killing drugs while retrieving their eggs (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html).
I've certainly heard about IVF, and already knew that it was in widespread use. But the news, as well as the podcast series, led me to learn more about the procedure. (Fun fact: The Israeli government funds IVF for couples until/unless they already have two children.)
From what I've learned, it would seem that IVF can be divided into three main parts:
- Retrieval: Eggs are retrieved from a woman. (This is the step that was described in the podcast I referred to above.)
- Fertilization: The eggs are fertilized in the laboratory, becoming an embryo. The term "in vitro" means, "in glass," and it refers to the procedure taking place in a laboratory, or outside of a living body.
- Transfer: One or more embryos are placed into the woman's uterus.
You can learn much more about the procedure at this site from the Cleveland Clinic: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22457-ivf
Data and six questions
In searching for IVF data to analyze, I found a number of interesting-looking sites and data sets. However, many were behind firewalls and/or broken. In the end, I found data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describing IVF in the US in the year 2021:
That page has a limited data dictionary. The construction of the data isn't always obvious. Some of the columns duplicate data to get around dtype issues.
This week, we'll look at this data, which asked the same questions of a large number of IVF clinics across the US. (I'm not sure if these are all of the IVF clinics, or just a sample.)
IVF is such a huge, complex, and sensitive subject that I'm sure I've missed some of the more important and useful questions that we might want to ask. (If you have some to suggest, please leave a comment below!) That said, there's always something new to learn, both about the subject at hand and about Pandas.
Note that while the above URL is where you have to get the data, it took me a while to figure out how to get it. Here's what I did:
- Click on the "export" button at the top of the page
- Select "CSV file" for export format (which should be selected anyway, as the default)
- Click on the "download" button
Here are my six tasks and questions for this week. Learning goals include: Using PyArrow, selecting rows and columns, grouping, stacking, and pivot tables:
- Download the CSV data. Read it into a data frame using both the PyArrow engine and for all of the backend dtypes (i.e., instead of NumPy).
- How many IVF clinics were surveyed for this data? How many questions were asked of each clinic?
