Illegal clinics are luring high school and college-age girls in China with the promise of large payments for their eggs. The procedure can damage the girls’ health and future child-bearing, and the clinics are offering no legal or medical help if complications ensue. For clinics operating on the black market, there is little incentive to […]
Recently in my state of California, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that, beginning in 2016, will alter birth certificates in a dramatic way. Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) authored Assembly Bill 1951, which amends the California Vital Records Birth Certificate law in order to “modernize” California birth certificates by allowing each parent to self-identify as mother, father, […]
New Year’s Resolutions tend towards the personal: lose weight, take up a hobby, spend more time with the family, get up earlier, read great books, etc. But this new year I beg people to take some time to learn more about bioethics. The stakes are high. Our definitions of life, death, and human dignity are […]
I think future generations will look back on our insane notion of “reproductive rights,” and they will be horrified. Back in the 70s reproductive rights meant terminating a life you already started. Today it also means creating life however you see fit and tossing out whatever doesn’t suit your desires. So not only have we […]
Last week the New America Foundation hosted a conference on “The Future of Reproduction” in Washington, D.C. Despite a few exceptions, the event was pretty much one large cheerleading session in praise of reproductive technology. A few highlights: Dan Kois, co-Host of “Mom and Dad Are Fighting,” Slate’s parenting podcast, offered praise of preimplantation genetic […]
In our long stride toward the inevitable designer babies, the first manipulation has been the noble goal of creating babies free of the mitochondrial diseases carried by their mothers. This series will examine the issue rather thoroughly in four basic segments: 1. The basic cell biology involved. 2. The problem of defective mitochondria. 3. The […]
Creating children with sperm donation has gone on for a long time. In fact, the first documented case of a woman becoming pregnant by donor insemination was in 1884. A Quaker woman and her merchant husband, not able to conceive, approached Dr. William Pancoast of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. When Dr. Pancoast presented this […]
Last night before heading off to bed I happened to check my email, only to read this unbelievable headline – “Obama Administration Allows Fertility Clinics To Sell US Citizenship.” Boy, did that catch my eye! I’ve just finished reading the Policy Alert issued by the Department of Homeland Security. You can read it here but […]
It’s July 2008 and I’m strapped to a surgical table as a fertility doctor siphons three dozen eggs out of my ovaries through a long needle. Blood is coming from between my legs, as the needle repeatedly perforates my vaginal walls en route to my ovaries in search of viable eggs. In the next room, […]
What a mess. What a God-awful mess the new reproductive technologies in general—and commercial surrogacy, in particular—are making of family life. What a legal, emotional, and moral mess. Case in point: A commercial surrogacy contract was litigated in Tennessee all the way to the state’s Supreme Court—which was forced to sort out the chaos that […]
Last week doctors in Sweden announced the birth of a baby after a uterus transplant. The baby is so far healthy being born at only 31 weeks gestation. I am very happy that mother and baby are healthy enough to leave the hospital and I wish them continued health. I also wish that this procedure […]
Many people are not aware that there are already about two dozen kids in the United States that have been genetically modified. A recent headline exclaims that “The World’s First Genetically Modified Babies Will Graduate High School This Year.” This is true.Nearly 2 decades ago, Dr. Jacques Cohen of the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and […]
Last month the UK’s Department of Health quietly redefined the term “genetic modification” to open the door to allow certain kinds of modification of human embryos – thus potentially making it the first country in the world to allow genetic engineering. Scottish journalist Lori Anderson recently raised the alarm over the change in a column […]
The recent report by transhumanist Zoltan Istvan that scientists are well on their way to successfully creating artificial wombs has caused a stir in a number of circles. Ectogenesis, the scientific name for the process, was once merely a product of fiction. For most of us, however, the reality of artificial wombs is something we […]
Pattharamon Janbua is a surrogate mother who carried twins for an Australian couple. Upon learning that one of the twins had Down syndrome, the couple pressed Janbua to get an abortion. She refused and the couple chose to abandon that child and take only the healthy baby. This is a chilling story, but one with a happy ending […]
After two weeks of media reports on baby Gammy, is difficult to discern which version of the story is the one we should believe. Is it true that the Australian couple, who used the services of a Thai “surrogate mom”, upon learning that one of the two children that the “surrogate mom” was expecting suffered […]
“A small error in the beginning leads to a multitude of errors in the end” – Aristotle, De Coelo The small error in this case is the assumption made long ago by the members of the United States Supreme Court that they had the power to play God. First, the court ignored the science on […]
IVF Worldwide is an expansive online community that prides itself on being “the largest and most comprehensive in-vitro fertilization (IVF)-focused website for doctors, embryologists, nurses, and social workers.” While it’s meant to serve as a resource for those within the industry—because make no mistake about it, that’s what it is, an industry—couples considering using IVF […]
If you are like me (you probably aren’t) and have your google alerts set for “egg donation,” “sperm donation,” and “surrogacy,” you will have seen that it was a bad press week for the field of reproductive medicine. Here are several stories that caught my eye. Risks to Mother and Child The Daily Mail reports […]
In today’s society everything seems turned around. Black is white. White is black. You would think nothing would surprise me anymore, but it does, especially in the realm of reproductive medicine. The United Kingdom’s authority on reproductive medicine, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has called the creation of embryos with three genetic parents […]
I’m writing from Delhi, India, where I’ve spent the last week meeting with various experts and officials that work on the issue of surrogacy here. In short, it’s a booming enterprise, by some reports estimated to be worth $3 billion U.S. dollars. Medical tourism has been popular in India for over a decade now, but […]
On April 1 the Louisiana House passed H.B. 187, a gestational surrogacy bill that would provide a legal framework for women to enter into a contract in order to carry, deliver, and surrender a child at birth to an infertile couple. The bill has now passed the Senate and is headed to Governor Bobby Jindal’s […]
Both the 1932 novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and the 1997 science fiction movie “Gattaca” are classified as dystopias because they depict societies riddled with misery, tragedy, and a dehumanizing culture. Both attribute this decline in civilization to manipulations of human genetics and perversions of human reproduction. In Brave New World the traditional […]
Recently, Christopher White wrote a commentary on the ethical problems associated with “surrogate parenthood for money.” He argued that paying for surrogate parenting is actually a form of human trafficking. His position is an interesting one, particularly because he presents his perspective in the context of many surrogate mothers who have later regretted their decision to carry […]
