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IVF clinics may soon use a controversial screening technique to get rid of embryos which are likely to grow up with low IQs. A company in the US offering tests which can pick out 'mental disabilities' – and, in theory, predict intelligence – has confirmed it is in talks with fertility clinics. The news has stoked fears about a rise in designer babies, which could be created by parents wanting to erase undesirable traits from their children. Experts say it is 'repugnant' to think about terminating embryos because they are expected to have lower than average intelligence.

Michelle Obama says she felt alone after a miscarriage 20 years ago and she and Barack Obama underwent fertility treatments to conceive their two daughters, according to her upcoming memoir. In some of her most extensive public comments on her White House years, the former first lady also lets her fury fly over President Donald Trump's "bigotry and xenophobia" — dangerous, deliberate rhetoric, she wrote, that risked her family's safety. "For this," she writes, "I'd never forgive him." But it's her deeply personal account of her marriage to the future president that shed new light on the Ivy League-educated couple's...

Most people still remember the story of Nadya Suleman, dubbed “Octomom,” a single woman who used in vitro fertilization to become pregnant with eight babies simultaneously. Suleman had asked her fertility specialist, Dr. Michael Kamrava, to implant at least a dozen embryos into her uterus, leading to the birth of the famous octuplets in 2009. Dr. Kamrava’s medical license was later revoked by the California Medical Board. In commenting on the case, Judith Alvarado, Deputy Attorney General in California, concluded that Dr. Kamrava had acted “like a cowboy” in ignoring fertility industry guidelines.When it comes to the “wild west”...

When Catholic couples experience trouble getting pregnant, they often seek medical help and begin to research what options are available to them. A number of moral considerations and questions generally emerge during this process: Why are techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) considered immoral? What approaches will the Church allow us to try? What does our infertility mean, spiritually and personally, in the face of our fervent but frustrated desire for a baby?When a couple, after having non-contraceptive sexual intercourse for a year or more, begins to investigate whether there are issues related to infertility, some medical professionals simply...

(CNN)An Ohio fertility clinic says more than 4,000 eggs and embryos were affected by a freezer malfunction, double the number previously thought -- and that it's unlikely any of them are viable. The University Hospitals Fertility Clinic also said about 950 families were affected by the storage tank failure earlier this month. At the time, the facility in Cleveland said it believed about 700 families were affected. In a letter sent to the families, dated Monday and obtained by CNN on Tuesday, University Hospitals said it was sharing the updated information with a "heavy heart." "The technical manner in which...

Paris now has a vigorous new pro-life advocate for its archbishop! Archbishop Aupetit, 66, was something of a “late vocation” (if you only count the priesthood as a vocation): He was ordained at age 44, after a previous vocation as a medical doctor. He practiced medicine from 1979 to 1990 and taught bioethics until 2006. His book, L’Embryon, Quells Enjeux? (The Embryo: What Are the Stakes? Paris: Éditions Salvator, 2008) is a vigorous defense of the unborn child. Archbishop Aupetit is very much a Renaissance man: As he notes in his book, “We have tried to visit the different domains...

An East Tennessee couple has welcomed a baby girl who grew from the longest-frozen embryo to ever result in a birth. Benjamin and Tina Gibson’s daughter, Emma Wren, weighed 6 pounds, 8 ounces when she came into the world on November 25. Prior to being transferred into Tina’s uterus at the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville earlier this year, the embryo Emma grew from had been cryopreserved for more than 24 years, according to a news release. And, according to research staff at the University of Tennessee Preston Medical Library, that makes her the all-time record holder for the...

Some of the strangest news I’ve ever seen came across my screen this week. A company in Australia is turning frozen embryo children into jewelry for their parents to wear. Previously Baby Bee Hummingbirds had been making jewelry out of mothers’ breastmilk and placentas. Now, the company has turned its attention to frozen human embryos— embryos that couples choose not to implant in the mother’s uterus and no longer want to store or “donate.” To put it plainly, they’re making trinkets out of discarded children. Founder Amy McGlade says, “I don’t believe there is any other business in the world...

The dwindling respect for human life reached a new low this week with the announcement that a jewelry company is now fashioning pendants out of the ashes of “leftover” embryos from in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics.Newsbusters broke this appalling story about an Australian company named Baby Bee Hummingbirds that produces keepsakes for new mothers that contain breastmilk, placentas, teeth, cord stumps, hair, and the ashes of loved ones. The company has now added a new category to the list – “embryo ash.”“It’s special because the embryos often signifying the end of a journey, and we are providing a beautiful...

A company in Australia is facing scrutiny from conservatives after a Wednesday article revealed that they were turning unused embryos from in-vitro fertilization into “sacred art.” The Australian parenting blog Kidspot highlighted Baby Bee Hummingbirds, an enterprise started by Amy McGlade in 2014. McGlade’s company reportedly has made “over 4000 pieces of jewelry using breastmilk, placenta, hair, ashes, or cord stumps – including 50 made with embryos.”

Parents who no longer wish to store their youngest children in freezers may now destroy them and have them made into jewelry thanks to Baby Bee Hummingbirds, an Australian keepsake company that recently began advertising its “Embryo Ashes” product. In an April 30 post on social media, the company declared, “We are absolute experts & true original leaders in Embryo Ashes • DNA Jewelry.” The company also creates jewelry keepsakes from breastmilk, hair from a baby’s first hair cut, first tooth, umbilical cord stump, and placenta. “I don’t believe there is any other business in the world that creates jewellery...

Fast forward to my 38th birthday. I was still single, and the world of dating had changed significantly in the last eight years. Tinder and Bumble, the dominant dating apps, offered countless options for single men and women, but made the experience of dating entirely impersonal. Dating amounted to small talk with a stranger, who you had briefly interfaced with online because you each thought the other attractive. The small talk was a prelude to hooking up, and there were no expectations even of a text the next day. It was brutal. And after trying my hand at it, I...

A woman who had In Vitro Fertilization done and conceived four babies had a “selective reduction” where one baby was aborted. A pro-choice therapist asked her some questions: “Did you feel like you got enough emotional support during the pregnancy reduction?” “No, not really. Mostly because the people we talked to mainly were doctors and medical people and they were all coming from the point of view that it was dangerous medically to carry that many babies….but because that was the only side I was getting, I wished later that I’d known I had more of a choice to keep...

The December 28 New York Times reported another “oops!” in vitro fertilization (IVF) moment. A technician in Utrecht may have mixed up sperm used to fertilize eggs, leading to the members of 26 couples perhaps not being the parents of the babies they contracted to produce.I admit that last sentence is a bit awkward: it would be nicer to say “leading to 26 couples being unsure if they are the parents of the babies they conceived.” Indulge me temporarily—I have my reasons for how I formulated that thought.In the procedure used by the technician, one sperm is injected from a...

Five years ago, Erin and Marianne Krupa chose to start a family. They moved to Montclair, N.J., from a more conservative environment in North Carolina, and decided that Erin would carry their first child. Erin Krupa remembered her fertility doctor looking her in the eye and promising to help her become pregnant. But there were complications. At an appointment with her doctor in 2013, Ms. Krupa, then 33, learned that she had benign cysts on her uterus and Stage 3 endometriosis, in which the tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus grows outside. That meant she was infertile....

On a busy night last week at the Target on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, Ari Nagel, 40, emerged from the men’s bathroom looking a little flushed and quite pleased with himself. “It’s better when it’s fresh,” he told them. “It” is Nagel’s semen, and it’s in demand. The 6-foot-2 CUNY Kingsborough math professor has served as a sperm donor for dozens of locals, siring 22 kids over the past 12 years with 18 women of various backgrounds.

I confidently predict that people will still be having sex in 20 to 40 years’ time, but they will be using sex to conceive their babies much less often. Two biomedical advances are going to change how humans reproduce: whole genome sequencing and stem cell technology.

The use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) is so common nowadays that it’s easy to forget how quickly social attitudes have changed. The Atlantic recently published a feature about the early days of artificial reproductive technology under the headline “The First Artificial Insemination Was an Ethical Nightmare: The 19th-century procedure involved lies, a secrecy pledge, and sperm from a surprise donor”.The implication is that that contemporary ART is far more ethical than it was in the bad old days.Let’s look first at the origins of ART. The first pregnancy after artificial insemination apparently took place in England in 1790. The...

TAMPA, Florida, January 21, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Is the procreative impossibility of homosexual activity the same as heterosexuals being biologically infertile? Stetson University law professor Joseph Morrissey is suing for a tax deduction of $36,538 for in vitro fertilization treatments and the cost of a surrogate to carry twin boys for himself and his male partner. In denying Morrissey's claim, the IRS explained that for tax deductions, the medical services must be provided to the taxpayer, his spouse, or his dependent. Therefore, a surrogate does not qualify, and neither does IVF for someone other than the filer, his spouse, or...

A California surrogate mother filed a lawsuit Monday to protect one of her unborn triplets from being aborted by the biological father. The New York Post reports that the babies’ biological father is demanding that one of the triplets be aborted because he only wants two of the children. The unnamed Georgia man threatened to not pay surrogate Melissa Cook if she refused to abort one of the babies.Despite the pressure, Cook refused to abort the third triplet. She was 17-weeks pregnant in November when her story first gained national media attention."They are human beings. I bonded with these kids....