By Rachel Pepa [Please note the other resources at the bottom of the article when you click "Keep reading."]
A review of Precious Babies: Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting after Infertility By Kate Brian
As an informal guide to having children after fertility problems, Precious Babies has much to recommend it. There is, however, an omission which, as a donor conceived (DC) person, I found particularly troublesome – the book is entirely devoid of DC voices. Read more…
by Wesley J. Smith
Click here to watch the related music video.
Pro choice and pro life women have come together in coalition to protect women from being exploited for their eggs by Big Biotech. Reason? Women would take all the risks and the companies could make all the money but for the small payments to women to undergo the unnecessary extration procedure. Read more…
Wonderful! The world is coming to its senses!
FROM THE IONA INSTITUTE BLOG:
In the last year to 18 months the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR, pictured) had handed down several excellent decisions. The most famous is the Lautsi judgement in which it ruled that Italy could place crucifixes on the walls of state classrooms.
In another, it ruled that a prohibition on same-sex marriage did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights, and this week it ruled that a ban on the use of donor sperm or eggs does not violate the Convention. Read more…
By David Picella
For couples that are experiencing infertility, the desire to have a child can be overwhelming. Every month that passes is another missed opportunity. Depression, grief, sadness, and despair eventually set in and at some point most couples become desperate enough to gamble with tens of thousands of dollars on expensive procedures like InVitro Fertilization (IVF) without fully understanding what they are getting themselves into. For the vast majority of couples who try IVF, false hopes turn false, and things that sound too good to be true prove to be so. Read more…
by Margaret Somerville
A Canadian radio station created world-wide controversy recently when it ran a “win a baby” competition.
An Ottawa music station, Hot 89.9, recently launched a “Win a Baby” contest. The prize offered was up to three rounds of fertility treatment worth C$35,000. It’s reported that the station received around 400 applications “from a diverse range of people, including same-sex couples, single women and cancer patients.” Read more…
Tonight Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse will interview Katie Elrod. Elrod has been a humanities teacher and administrator in independent schools for over 15 years, and has taught in the Perspectives program at Boston College. She received her BA and MA in philosophy from Boston College, where she was a Lonergan Fellow. Read more…
by Richard Egan
Human cloning researchers pay women to risk death so they can pursue their doomed experiments.
In an article published in Nature on 6 October 2011, Scott Noggle and his colleagues at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory report on their experiments in which they have derived stem cells from human embryos created by adding the nucleus of a somatic cell to a human egg. Read more…
September 26th, 2011
Betsy
by Karen Clark
Not much unlike Alana’s expereince in the Shark Tank, Jennifer Lahl’s experience was not much different. These people should be ashamed by their uncivil behavior. Thankfully, Diane Allen, of the Infertility Network, was a voice of reason and respect. Read more…
(March 1, 2011) Maggie Gallagher appears on Dennis O’Donovan’s “Religion, Politics, and the Culture” to discuss President Obama’s refusal to uphold DoMA and the ramifications of this approach to legal and policy matters. Listen here.
(March 2, 2011) Dr J appears on Dennis O’Donovan’s “Religion, Politics, and the Culture” to discuss the links between redefining marriage and redefining parenthood and her recent trip to testify before the Rhode Island legislature. Listen here.
By W. BRADFORD WILCOX
In “The Switch,” coming later this summer, Jennifer Aniston plays an attractive 40-year-old professional who has given up on finding Mr. Right for marriage and decides instead to move straight on to motherhood with a donor father. The movie offers a largely celebratory treatment of donor insemination, as do two other movies out this year, “The Back-up Plan” and next month’s “The Kids Are All Right.” Indeed, one of the bottom-line conclusions these movies are pushing is that the children turn out “all right” with donor dads. Read more…
February 19th, 2010
Betsy
Great article by a Ruth Institute Academic Advisory Board Member.
By Jennifer Lahl, CBC National Director
Newsweek recently reported a story about a 51-year-old man, who between 1980 and 1994 donated his sperm twice a week in order to make cash for medical school and to nurture his altruistic desires to help infertile women. Kirk Maxey states, “I loved having kids, and to have these women doomed to wandering around with no family didn’t seem right, and it’s easy to come up with a semen donation.”
Don’t get me started. Read more…
What percentage of Artificial Reproductive Technology patients are married couples, and what percentage are unmarried women?
A. The vast majority of ART patients, about 75%, are married couples.
B. It is split about evenly between married and unmarried women.
C. It is evenly split three ways: about a third married women, about a third partnered lesbians and about a third single women.
D. None of the above.
Click here to take the quiz.
Michael Cook BioEdge
While the mistakes of British fertility clinics are going to be placed on a public register, in the US lawsuits are needed to bring them to light. Two scandals have been in the news in the last couple of weeks.
In New Orleans, Ochsner Hospital has shut the doors of its IVF clinic because the embryos of as many as 100 patients had been mislabelled or destroyed despite safeguards that should have included bar-coding, color-coding and labeling. Outside experts have been brought in to audit all of the clinic’s work, all the way back to 2003. No embryos had been implanted in the wrong woman, says the hospital. Read more…
by Michael Cook
From now on serious mistakes in UK IVF clinics can be scrutinised by the public. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority says that it will post inspection reports on its website in an effort to make fertility treatment more transparent. The reports will include the name of the clinic involved, brief details of the incident, and the seriousness of the consequences. It will not be possible to identify the patient. Read more…
September 30th, 2009
Betsy
by Margaret Somerville
If society pays the costs for creating test-tube babies, we also have to accept the ethical responsibility.
The Ontario Expert Panel on Infertility and Adoption recently released its report, titled “Raising Expectations,” which describes the current state of Ontario’s adoption and assisted reproduction systems and makes detailed recommendations. Read more…
Thirty-two invitro fertilized children gather at the Swedish Medical Center in 2003 in Denver. The Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Center gathered the children from each of its 16 years of work in the field. Guests included Payton Kline, 4 1/2 months, the 5,000th invitro fertilized baby born at the center. – Kevin Moloney/Getty Images 
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