infertility

This Week in Bioethics #113

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***Watch our live discussion of This Week in Bioethics on Facebook or on YouTube*** 1. Nightmare Surrogacy Experience Toni, a surrogate mother from Iowa, says of her experience: “It’s been a nightmare. It has almost destroyed my family.” Toni first reached out to us about this time last year. This week, she and Jennifer recorded […]

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This Week in Bioethics #103

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1. Pregnancy Outcomes for Surrogate Pregnancies are Significantly Different A recent journal article highlights a number of crucial differences between surrogate pregnancies and non-surrogate pregnancies.  2. Storage Issues at Fertility Clinics Two fertility clinics suffered failures in their frozen storage tanks last week. Reports by NBC, the Washington Post, and People magazine.   3. Romanticizing Double […]

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A War on Young Women and Children

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I remember years ago being on The Montel Williams Show when the topic was “extreme baby-making.” I was pitted against women who had gone through many forms of assisted reproductive technologies in order to conceive. And, of course, there was the reproductive endocrinologist who offered her expert voice in favor of “advances in science and […]

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The Other Option: To Remain Childless?

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A common critique of our work in the area of reproductive technology is that we’re unsympathetic to the couples, particularly the women, who desperately want a child to call their own. In both our films and our writing, we aim to highlight the strong, natural desire to procreate, while also recognizing that it must be […]

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A Bad Week of Press for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART)

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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 ChildThe Daily Mail reports on […]

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Jindal Vetoes Unconstitutional Surrogacy Bill

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A few days ago, I warned that Louisiana’s passed surrogacy bill was unconstitutional because it limited the procedure to infertile heterosexual married couples. Governor Bobby Jindal has vetoed. From the Times Picayune story: Surrogacy births — in which a couple’s embryo is implanted in another woman — are not illegal in Louisiana. The contracts between […]

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Fertility Industry Dehumanizes Surrogates

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As a paid consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture, I have become informed about issues to which I might otherwise have paid scant attention. This is particularly true with regard to the increasingly dark side of the fertility industry, about which the CBC has been doing splendidly illuminative work. It has really opened […]

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Who Cares About IVF Dangers?

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The British Medical Journal has published a cautionary article warning of the potential dangers of IVF. From “Are We Overusing IVF?” Extended use of IVF also increases the risk of harm. Multiple pregnancies are associated with maternal and perinatal complications such as gestational diabetes, fetal growth restriction, and pre-eclampsia as well as premature birth. And […]

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The Untold Stories: I Choose Not to Buy a Child

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The desire for a child of one’s own is hardly uncommon and certainly understandable. Yet all too often all we hear are accounts of endless IVF cycles and considerations of surrogacy or conception via anonymous sperm and egg donation. It’s easy to market a story of a couple that’s desperate to conceive and after years […]

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The Fertility Industry Superhighway

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Miriam Zoll, author of the recent book Cracked Open: Liberty, Fertility and the Pursuit of High-Tech Babies, has a terrific piece out in today’s New York Times on “Selling the Fantasy of Fertility” to those struggling with infertility. She’s co-written the piece with Pamela Tsigdinos, and their voices are important as they write from their […]

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Thinking about Selling Your Eggs?

Salon.com runs a lengthy, very frank, first-person account of a young woman considering selling her eggs. From “Selling my Eggs to Make Rent”: Egg donation, as an option, can be seen at once demeaning and empowering: A job that no one else but a woman can have — or rather, a racially pre-selected, usually white, […]

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Protect Your Fertility

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President I recently wrote about women who wait later into life to conceive and find they struggle with what they call “infertility.” In fact, there is no infertility as a result of aging; rather it is the biological reality of menopause. Menopause is a natural and normal event that occurs in […]

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Protect Your Fertility

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President I recently wrote about women who wait later into life to conceive and find they struggle with what they call “infertility.” In fact, there is no infertility as a result of aging; rather it is the biological reality of menopause. Menopause is a natural and normal event that occurs in […]

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Money Changes Everything

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President When the news broke that Mitt and Ann Romney welcomed grandchildren numbers 17 and 18 this past Friday via “gestational surrogacy,” those of us here at CBC central—who oppose commercialized conception—wondered where the bottom is in these murky waters of assisted reproduction. Tagg Romney posted this on his facebook page […]

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Biological Colonialism: Dutch Controversy Over Anything Goes IVF

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC IVF was promised as a generally minor matter that would be available for married couples, otherwise unable, to have biological children. Of course, that relatively conservative agenda held for about two seconds. It is now a huge industry, with unmarried people using it to get […]

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The Higher They are The Harder They Fall

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President Pacific Reproductive Center (PRC) of Southern California (AKA, the reproductive tourist capital of the world) has just announced the opening of an on-site laboratory with breakthrough technology that has the ability to analyze all 46 chromosomes (23 from the mother and 23 from the father) of a human embryo within […]

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Outsourcing Pregnancy: Just Another Job?

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President As millions around the world celebrated the birth of Jesus, Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, issued a press release announcing the birth of their baby boy, born on Christmas Day. Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, a healthy baby, was born through modern, assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Using an anonymous […]

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The Daily Mail Covers Eggsploitation

By Matthew Eppinette, CBC New Media Manager This week, The Daily Mail published an excellent article on egg donation, “The brutal fertility factories trading on British mothers’ dreams.” The article begins with Nastya’s story: she donated eggs six times, from which three children were born. “In dark moments, I feel a sense of loss about […]

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