Ruth Institute Blog

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…

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…

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…