Free Republic

A first-time mom who carried twin babies to term before being forced to give them up has settled with the fertility clinic which 'unimaginably' implanted her with embryos from two other women. The Korean-American woman from New York City only discovered the appalling mix-up in the delivery room when the twin girls she had been told to expect turned out to be two Caucasian boys. She and her husband, named in court papers as AP and YZ, had struggled for years to conceive before spending $100,000 at the Cha Fertility Clinic in Southern California. But just six weeks after becoming...

The likely overturning of Roe v. Wade has panicked many reproductive technology advocates, specifically the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. When abortion policy is decided by individual states, personhood laws such as Louisiana’s Human Life Protection Act and Texas’s Heartbeat Act could immediately criminalize many aspects of Big Fertility’s business model. That’s because destroying human life is part and parcel of in vitro fertilization (IVF). The violation of lab-created children’s right to life begins in the petri dish. First, IVF often involves the preimplantation screening of 6 or 7 day old blastocysts (early embryos), to not only determine the likelihood...

Copenhagen, Denmark: Scientists in the UK have proved that human embryonic stem cells can develop in the laboratory into the early forms of cells that eventually become eggs or sperm. Their work opens up the possibility that eggs and sperm could be grown from stem cells and used for assisted reproduction, therapeutic cloning and the creation of more stem cells for further research and for the improved treatments for patients suffering from a range of diseases. Behrouz Aflatoonian will tell the 21st annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology today (Monday 20 June) that the research...

Human stem cells trigger immune attackJessica Ebert Doubt cast on therapeutic use of embryonic cell lines. Exposure to molecules from animals might have made human stem cells unacceptable.© ANDREW LEONARD / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Most human embryonic stem-cell lines, including those available to federally funded researchers in the United States, may be useless for therapeutic applications. The body's immune defences would probably attack the cells, say US researchers. When embryonic stem cells are added to serum from human blood, antibodies stick to the cells. This suggests the cells are seen as foreign, and that transplanting them into the body would...