Sos Infertilità Onlus began its life in april 2006, thank to 5 women with a strong personal and social experience of infertility and its communication.
Their friendship was born around infertility and ART, thank to a dedicated website where they were helping each other with many other women and some man through “among patients informations” about treatmetns, infertility clinics in Italy and abroad and through mutual emotional support.
Their dream was to find a way to transform all this in a territory service, to bring all of this out of the net, to help infertile people to meet in the real life and help each other, to help them through a dedicated free phone number, in order to reach also those people who, due to their social and professional situation, do not usually surf the net.
This dream has become reality with Sos Infertilità Onlus, who was born even to help italian infertile patients to “survive Law n°40”, italian law on ART, the worst in the world, approuved by Italian Parliament in March 2004.
Just to give you an idea of the kind of struggle we have to fight:
-It is forbidden any kind of donation, sperm, egg, embryo.
-It is forbidden embryo freezing, except in very peculiar situations.
-It is forbidden the insemination of more than 3 eggs (with the waste of many eggs or their, ofter unuseful, freezing).
-It is compulsory the transfer of all the embryos (even 3 in a young woman, with high risk of triplet).
-It is forbidden any kind of embryos selection.
-It is forbidden PGD.
The consequence of it, is an amazing number of italian couples obliged to go abroad for their treatments, a decreasing of pregnancy rate in Italy and an increasing of twin and triplet pregnancies: the opposite direction of that taken by other european countries.
I think we do urgently need international, european, help in this situation.
Our association, through national free phone number (in cooperation with Milan Provincial Government) gives useful information about infertility clinics in Italy and abroad, provides psychological support, medical consultation: we provide patient-to-patient consultation and specialistic consultation, with two gynechologists and one andrologist answering the phone.
The number, calling from Italy, is 800.097.999, every tuesday and thursday from 2.00 p.m to 4.00 pm: if you need english speaking consultant, ask for Rossella.
Our territory services: mutual support groups, leaded by our Psychologist, informal meetings with infertility specialists ( gynechologists, andrologists, biologists) from Italy and abroad who explain in understandble words various topics of infertility problems to patients and answer their questions, conventions with politicians, other patients associations, journalists in order to try to change something in italian legal situation about ART that I’ve above explained.
We also do our best to contribute to the diffusion of information and culture about infertility problems, helping publishing of books and articles.
Rossella Bartolucci
Association Leader