reproductive tech

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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. . . for a human future

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We held our Thirteenth Annual Paul Ramsey Award Dinner on April 16 in Diablo, California. It was a wonderful gathering where we were able to honor the legacy of Paul Ramsey by presenting Dr. Brent Waters with the Paul Ramsey Award for Excellence in Bioethics and by highlighting the work of our Paul Ramsey Institute. […]

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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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Human Gene Editing and Eugenics

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A recent essay by Brendan Foht in the Washington Post reveals the backwards logic of scientists who advocate for human gene editing and those who also support the idea that embryos that have been genetically modified must be destroyed. The advent of CRISPR technology allows for the possibility of us forever altering the human genome […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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1. Nepal Bans Commercial Surrogacy The Supreme Court of Nepal has banned commercial surrogacy in the country—delivering a win for women and children alike. Some commentators are twisting the news saying it would negatively effect gay couples in Israel who previously relied on Nepal’s surrogacy business. As we have long held, no one—gay, straight, married, […]

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This Week in Bioethics

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Mitochondrial Disease Research Makes Progress Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported on the fact that two new experiments—one using cell reprogramming and the other using cloning—have led to progress against mitochondrial disease. While we encourage ethically informed research that could reduce or eliminate the disease, we oppose any type of experimentation that will […]

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First Full Trailer: Maggie’s Story

Our new documentary short explores one woman’s journey through egg donation . . . and its consequences… For more see http://www.cbc-network.org/maggie/

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What’s Wrong with Third Party Assisted Reproduction?

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Here is a new resource we’ve developed in order to highlight and provide references to medical and scientific literature on issues that arise in third-party reproduction. The information is divided into three sections that address: Health and psychological risks to women serving as egg vendors or surrogates Health and psychological risks to the children born […]

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Modern Families and the Messes We Make

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Assistive reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization not only involve serious medical risks, they also disrupt family life and commodify human beings. It almost always starts with an emotional story: an infertile couple trying desperately to conceive; a woman diagnosed with cancer, worried that she may lose her fertility when she undergoes chemotherapy or […]

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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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The “Chaos” Sired by Sperm Donation

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A biological father named William Marotta is resisting being held responsible for his child conceived privately — by answering a Craig’s List ad, as opposed to using a medical clinic — by artificial insemination. From the Topeka Capital Journal story: Representatives for Marotta and the Kansas Department for Children and Families recently filed motions in […]

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Biological Colonialism = Outsourcing Ethics

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My pal William Hurlbut — formerly a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics — coined the term “outsourcing ethics.” Here’s what he means: When countries, companies, researchers, or individuals want to do something ethically questionable — but not near where they live — they go to developing nations or places mired in poverty where […]

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Having Children: What’s Love Got To Do With It?

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Eugenics is evil in that it presumes that some human beings are better than others, and moreover, that we have a duty to control procreation to improve the human herd. In the USA, the first iteration of this great wrong — a political progressive project, by the way — led to hundreds of thousands of […]

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It Depends On What Your Definition Of Safe Is

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The world’s first baby has been born from “natural” IVF, and the story is making the news a lot these days. Not news to us at the CBC, is the fact that IVF carries risks and those risks can be significant both to the mother undergoing IVF and to the child born via IVF technologies. […]

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Fertility Consultant Thumbs Nose at Law

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It seems that fertility brokers — and clinics and the reproductive lawyers — are getting more aggressive these days. My hunch is that marriage debates are emboldening them to seek more liberal IVF laws in order to assist singles and same-sex couples in family building. Canada, which has laws I quite like (Canada prohibits the […]

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Egg Selling Bad for Women

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AB 926 in California would permit Big Biotech to buy eggs from poor women to conduct human cloning and other experiments — potentially increasing the frequency of a practice commonly used in IVF that generally targets beautiful and brilliant college women. (New York already permits egg buying by biotech, resulting in the manufacture of the […]

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Alana S. Newman: Shark Tank Girl

When I first met Alana, I was at Columbia University Law School screening my documentary film, Eggsploitation. I had done an earlier screening during the day at Fordham University Law School and noted at both of these screenings “they” were following me. They being the women who typically attend my screenings to give me pushback […]

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Freezers Are For Food

In the world of commercialized conception, it seems we’ve decided the freezer is a great place to keep eggs, sperm, and “spare” embryos until we need them. We think they do pretty well in the freezer, but the verdict is still out on what happens over the long haul when you freeze and store human […]

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