Psychological risks of assisted reproductive technologies and especially the attitude of parents towards children born with ART (literature review)

Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) allows people with reproductive health problems to become pregnant, bear, and have a baby. Conception, pregnancy and birth of a child are accompanied by special psychological conditions and risks, and further interaction of parents and a child forms the vector of his/her mental development. The evidence determining the relevance of the topic is both an observed prevalence of reproductive health disorders and an increase in the use of assisted reproductive technologies, as well as real psychological risks for parents using ART, in particular, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and for their children. Objective: based on the materials of domestic and foreign literature, to study psychological characteristics of the use of assisted reproductive technologies in families with infertility and to systematize data on the presence or absence of associations between their use and the attitude of parents towards their children conceived, born and given birth through these technologies. Material and Methods: articles published from 1990 to 2019 in Russian and English are considered. The search has been carried out from February to April 2020, using the online databases Google Scholar, eLibrary and ScienceDirect, the preference is given to full-text articles of recent years, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Search queries include key phrases: “psychological aspects of ART/IVF”, “parent-child relationships”, “marital relations” and others, as well as their analogues in English. In previous studies of psychological well-being of parents using assisted reproductive technologies, the psychological risks of ART have been rarely considered for the formation of parent-child relationships, including the specifics of parent-child relationships; as well as psychological traits and dynamics of the attitude of parents towards their children, depending on the age of the child given birth using IVF. Study of this problem in the future will require additional data regarding equally the maternal and child-father relationships, as well as their dynamics and internal characteristics of various areas of emotional and personal communication between parents and children of different age in families using assisted reproductive technologies.