But recent surveys show that in about two-thirds of the cases, PGD isn’t being used to detect genetic diseases. It’s done, instead, to inspect embryos created in the lab for abnormal chromosome counts in cases in which parents with fertility problems are already undergoing IVF.
Harvard`s Debora Spar has a commentary in a recent New England Journal of Medicine article that calls for an improved debate over egg donation and payment policies. Spar highlights a central inconsistency in American egg donation policy?we allow women to sell eggs for reproductive purposes, but not for research, even though the risks and benefits to donors are the same in both cases. Both donors undergo the same set of medical risks, and both receive roughly the same direct benefits?basically nothing.
The number of twins born from IVF needs to be cut because of risks to mothers and babies, a watchdog has said. Older women or those who have already been through several unsuccessful IVF cycles would be very unlikely to be restricted to one embryo transfer.
And for expressing his approval of a hypothetical prenatal intervention to change a baby’s sexual orientation, he was verbally attacked by gay-rights advocates. Some of them likened him to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele for seeming to advocate the manipulation of nature to “basically wipe out gay people,” said Wayne R. Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, a group that fights efforts to convert gays to heterosexuality.
Guidelines say all eligible women aged 23-39 should get one free cycle of IVF. But some areas have introduced restrictions such as age limits, with some saying a woman over 35 is too old, with others saying that is too young.
IN the old days, nearly two decades ago, when Jeffrey Harrison was selling his sperm to California Cryobank, sperm banks did not tell clients much. The reason for offering clients previously unimaginable degrees of access to information is competition.
If the mechanisms underlying sexual orientation can be discovered and manipulated,Dr. Wolpe continued, then the argument that sexual orientation is based inbiology and is immutable evaporates. “The prospect of parents” eventually being able tochoose not to have children who would become gay is a real concern for thefuture, Dr. Wolpe said.
Yet a San Antonio woman’s idea to bring the two together “creating complete embryos ready to be implanted into the womb” has drawn a raft of criticism, with bioethicists debating whether this is the commodification of children or just another “perhaps more effective” way to help people become parents.
Britain’s most successful test-tube baby clinic has been secretly filmed offering unproven treatment to women, potentially risking their health.
In the US they will implant five embryos, six in India. Back home I had one embryo the first time, two the second, and two the third; and it didn’t work.
