IVF

Baby Markets: Financial Market Expert Weighs In

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I recently interviewed David Bahnsen, a highly regarded, California-based investment manager and expert in financial markets about his views on markets and children. Jennifer Lahl: I live in the back yard of the Silicon Valley, where, stealing from my colleague Dr. Bill Hurlbut at Stanford, we like to say, “We have a front seat on the […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. Priorities at the VA The department of veterans affairs this week released the preliminary results of a new study on suicide among veterans. “In 2014, the latest year available, more than 7,400 veterans took their own lives, accounting for 18 percent of all suicides in America. Veterans make up less than 9 percent of […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1.  Can You Imagine That Anonymous Sperm and Egg “Donation” are a Problem? CBS’s Sunday Morning program this week ran an item on “The Flourishing Business of Building Family Trees,” highlighting widespread interest in genealogy and the businesses that are helping people in their searches. The report is bookended by the moving story of 55 […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. Surrogacy Bill Becomes Law in Louisiana Louisiana Governor Edwards has signed into law a bill that makes surrogacy contracts enforceable in his state. Former Louisiana Governor Jindal vetoed similar legislation in 2013 and 2014, and we were hopeful that the new governor and his staff would also be attentive to the strong arguments against […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. Surrogate Custody Battle Moves Forward Melissa Cook, whose story we broke, is moving forward with her custody battle for the triplets she carried as a gestational surrogate for a single man. Melissa’s case brought international attention after the intended father demanded she abort one of the babies because he was worried about the realities […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. Euthanasia Expansion If you need any evidence that the arguments in support of euthanasia or assisted-suicide are specious, read this story. A young woman in the Netherlands chose euthanasia by lethal injection. What was her terminal illness? She didn’t have one. Did she have less than six months to live? There is no evidence […]

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Wounded Vets Don’t Need Taxpayer Funded IVF

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I’ll be in DC next week for a bunch of meetings, mostly speaking with people about a bill that provides $3.4 billion in additional care for vets. I am involved because the bill currently includes an amendment to provide IVF benefits to wounded vets. These sorts of policy battles always start out with a rough […]

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The Cold Chain of Precious Cargo

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Wired has just published a close look at the global cold chain of eggs, sperm, and embryos headed to the latest destination where paid surrogacy is legal: “Inside the Hidden Global Supply Chain for Frozen Sperm, Eggs, and Embryos.” Typically, a cold chain is the transportation of things that have a limited shelf-life. Think food […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. Physician Assisted Suicide Pills Made Cheaper Who doesn’t love a sale?! A new cocktail of drugs has been devised to make physician assisted suicide even cheaper in Washington State. Whereas the previous prescription would cost somewhere between $2,000-$5,000, the new mix is now priced at $500—a real steal! It’s no wonder why governments around […]

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Everybody Loves a Sale

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In our documentary film Breeders?, one of the fertility doctors commenting on the high likelihood of twins in surrogate pregnancies joked that everybody loves a sale—her way of downplaying the fact that many intended parents seeking one child via surrogacy end up with two (or more). Now, in the United Kingdom, a fertility clinic is […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. IVF Conceived Children Face Poor Health Outcomes A new study in the journal of Human Reproduction warns that IVF conceived children may suffer poor health outcomes such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. According to Dr. Pascal Gagneux, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California San Diego, “We’re engaging in an evolutionary […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. New Records Set For Reproductive Technology in the United States According to a new report, the U.S. reproductive technology industry is slated to reach over $4 billion by 2020. The largest sector of the market, $1.2 billion, comes from fertility drug revenue. As we’ve long said, infertility has become a booming business in the […]

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IVF: Clarifications and Caveats

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Earlier this month I wrote about a recent study in the Journal of the American Medicine Association that found that “nearly two-thirds of women undergoing I.V.F. will have a child by the sixth attempt.” In commenting on the story I noted that the New York Times reported on the study with a rather deceiving headline: […]

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IVF Pays Off…For Whom?

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A new study published in the Journal of the American Medicine Association at the end of 2015 suggested that “nearly two-thirds of women undergoing I.V.F. will have a child by the sixth attempt.” The headline in the New York Times declared “With In Vitro Fertilization, Persistence Pays Off.” But as Pamela Tsigdinos suggests, the payoff […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. Assisted Suicide Law Now in Effect in Quebec Quebec’s assisted suicide law went into effect yesterday. According to the Minister of Justice, the law is aimed at “allowing people at the end of their lives to receive care that respects their dignity and their autonomy.” It’s both strange and tragic how suicide—normally condemned and […]

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Adventures in Fertility?

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Jason Gay, a sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal, had an essay in the weekend edition of the paper on a different sort of game for him: fertility medicine. In a casual and, at times, humorous essay, “Adventures in Fertility,” Mr. Gay discusses the woes of waiting until one’s mid-thirties to begin trying to […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. Australian High Court Rules BRCA1 Gene Cannot Be Patented The Australian High Court has issued a final ruling that the BRCA gene cannot be patented. Mutations of the BRCA1 gene often lead to higher risks of breast cancer and other cancers. This ruling overturns two lower level court rulings but follows similar rulings in […]

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The Parent Trap – Brave New World Style

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Growing up, I can’t even count the number of times I watched the Disney movie The Parent Trap (the original, with Hayley Mills). It’s a cute story about identical twins separated at birth because of their parents’ divorce. In dividing assets in the breakup, each parent took one of the girls. It’s only when the […]

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