Tag Archives: Topic: Bioethics

LifeSiteNews: The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has launched a survey asking health professionals and the public to weigh in on several ethically controversial strategies to increase organ donations.

LifeSiteNews: A controversial IVF method resulting in 3-parent babies has recently been debated in the UK, but according to reports brought to light by Dr. Joseph Mercola of the health website Mercola.com, the technique has already been used in the US as far back as 1997.

Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy: A recent New York Times article laments the spread of illegal organ markets in Europe, in which mostly poor people try to sell kidneys and other organs to people who need transplants . . .

Dov Greenbaum and Mark B. Gerstein at the Wall Street Journal (via Google): Thanks to a greater popular appreciation of the genetics behind athleticism coupled with advances in genetic manipulation, we may soon see athletes-by-design, either from conception or a childhood tailored to sports for which the budding athlete is already genetically optimized.

Blog of the Legal Times: This morning marked a reunion of sorts for the parties involved in a controversial dispute over whether isolated human genes are patentable. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled last year that they are, but was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to take another look in light of new, possibly related precedent.

FoxNews: Researchers at Stanford University have sequenced the entire genomes of 91 human sperm from a single man – providing insight into the genetic variation that naturally occurs in a single individual.

LifeNews: A new report released today by the Charlotte Lozier Institute takes a comprehensive look at the stem cell research debate and comes to the conclusion that proponents of embryonic stem cell research have lost.

AZFamily.com: A new, more affordable, convenient and effective option for women turning to in vitro fertilization to get pregnant is finally available thanks to the advancement of egg donors and the technology to freeze donated embryos.

Rebecca Tayler at LIfeNews: Hanlon’s undated piece discusses a technique IVF doctors have used to “rejuvenate” an infertile woman’s eggs by injecting the cytoplasm of another woman’s healthy egg. Factors inside the cytoplasm help the infertile woman’s egg in fertilization. When doctors injected the cytoplasm of the healthy egg, it contained mitochondria from the donor egg. Those mitochondria have DNA from the woman who donated that egg. So the after that hybrid egg is fertilized, the resulting embryo has the DNA from 1 man, and 2 women.

LifeNews: On Friday’s NBC Today, chief medical editor Nancy Snyderman explained to viewers that it’s just good science to abort an unborn child that may have a genetic disorder, explaining that testing for such conditions, “gives parents a chance to decide whether they’re going to continue that pregnancy or not. This is the science of today.”

AP: An influential British bioethics group says that couples who face the risk of having a baby with certain genetic diseases should be allowed to use eggs from two women to produce the embryo.

Telegraph: Scientists could soon be able to routinely screen unborn babies for thousands of genetic conditions, raising concerns the breakthrough could lead to more abortions.

Christian Institute: The fertility and embryology regulator has announced a consultation on a controversial technique which could lead to children with three genetic parents.

Science Daily: In a groundbreaking study,Yale School of Medicine researchers and colleagues at the University of Oxford have identified the chromosomal make-up of a human egg. This discovery may soon allow them to avoid using abnormal — or aneuploid — eggs during infertility treatments, and instead to pick eggs that are healthy enough for a successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle.

SCOTUS Blog: Case Information Page and Document Links _____________ SCOTUS Ruling here: Astrue v. Capato, No. 11-159 Eighteen months after her husband, Robert Capato, died of cancer, respondent Karen Capato gave birth to twins conceived through in vitro fertilization using …

LifeNews: What do you do when you have created 18 extra IVF embryos and you don’t want to destroy them or give them away to just anyone? You put them on Craigslist of course!

NY Times: The scale of the problem is only now becoming apparent with the advent of online communities like Ms. Kramer’s. “There needs to be oversight, and some regulation of the industry,” she said.It is not known how many children are born each year using sperm donors, because mothers of donor offspring are not required to report their births. By some estimates, there are more than a million children in this country conceived with donated sperm or eggs.

Doctors Lounge: Screening embryos produced by in vitro fertilization using array comparative genomic hybridization plus morphology improves pregnancy rates over screening by morphology alone in single embryo transfers, according to a study published online May 2 in Molecular Cytogenetics.

Nature.com: In vitro fertilization (IVF) does not cause birth defects in children conceived with the technology. Instead, the higher rate of congenital disease in children born after IVF, compared to natural conception, is probably explained by factors underlying the parents’ infertility. Those conclusions come from a study of more than 300,000 births, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

LifeSiteNews: His oldest son Tagg now has six children, three of whom have the same surrogate mother. Tagg and his wife Jen are the biological parents.

Ken Connor at Townhall: This week, another of the President’s infamous “compromises” is in the spotlight, namely his executive order expanding federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Stymied by existing law limiting the government’s involvement in this ethically troubling area of “scientific” work, the President crafted a workaround based on rhetorical hair-splitting, issued his order, and the dollars began flowing. The Alliance Defense Fund filed suit to enjoin the funding and in 2010 a federal judge issued a temporary injunction blocking the executive order. [also available at Renew America]

Perez’s age has not been disclosed, but a local news report stated that she received fertility treatment in order to become pregnant.
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/226419/nonomom-mexican-woman-pregnant-with-9-babies/#MZHshYc3OtdBie5l.99

Journal Gazette: Emily and Brian Herx – the Hoagland couple launched into a national religious debate this week – said Friday they just wanted to expand their family when she underwent in vitro fertilization and ultimately lost her Catholic teaching job.

Wesley J. Smith at First Things: IVF has always been a form of human experimentation–which costs the subject’s (the baby) parents a lot of money–since we jumped head first into the technology without fully knowing the potential consequences. And now, decades later, we are finding that people born from IVF have greater health risks.

One News Now: “This case is challenging President Obama’s executive order to really ignore the federal law that protects American tax dollars from being used to destroy human embryos and goes ahead and has funded millions and millions of dollars’ worth of destructive research,” Bowman shares.

National Catholic Register: Will this discovery provide an unlimited egg supply and an anti-aging elixir, or the ingredient for more embryo destruction?

Available for media interviews following oral arguments in Sherley v. Sebelius, a lawsuit challenging an Obama administration policy that authorized the National Institutes of Health to fund additional research projects that destroy human embryos even though a federal law known as the Dickey/Wicker Amendment specifically prohibits such funding.

Kelly McParland at the National Post: A U.S. fertility clinic that placed an advertisement for sex-selection services in a British Columbia newspaper is doing nothing that should be criticized by anyone supporting Canada’s free-for-all baby market. Since there is no law on abortion in this country, anything goes.

LifeSiteNews (includes video): Bioedge published a good article this week discussing the claim by some bioethicists that parents be required to use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to eradicate unwanted heritable conditions.

Rebecca Taylor at LifeNews: In fact, a recent study done by researchers at Johns Hopkins showed that genetic testing for disease is really not that predictive. They looked at occurrence of disease in identical twins and found that genetics were not a good predictor of who will suffer from what disease.

Philadelphia Inquirer: For the first time, a Pennsylvania appeals court has confronted the complex question of who gets custody of embryos, ruling this week in favor of a Chester County woman who hopes to give birth using frozen embryos that her estranged husband wants destroyed . . . The three-judge Superior Court panel affirmed and quoted the trial court’s reasoning: “Because Wife cannot achieve genetic parenthood otherwise, we conclude that Wife’s interest in biological procreation through the use of these pre-embryos outweighs Husband’s professed interest against procreation.” | Opinion: Reber v. Reiss | Hat tip: How Appealing

AP: Many countries have strict rules on who is allowed to get fertility treatments. And recent court rulings suggest nothing’s likely to change anytime soon.

The Atlantic: For $8,000 it was easy for the author to justify selling her eggs the first time. The second time, too. Only then did they share the bad news.

How Appealing reports and links to the ruling.

LifeNews: That is what the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding in Astrue v. Capato.

enewspf.com: The U.S. Supreme Court today set aside a ruling that allowed a company to patent two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer and limit access to potentially life-saving genetic tests for at-risk women.

Business Week: Medical advances have made it increasingly common for older Americans such as Dick Cheney to receive heart transplants, extending their lives. The shift may make it more difficult for younger patients as aging Baby Boomers compete for available organs, top cardiologists say.

ADF Attorney Steve Aden at the Christian Post: As ADF has pointed out in its litigation against the Obama administration’s illegal funding of embryonic stem cell research, other types of research that do not involve pre-born babies have brought about successful results without such ethical horrors. But those successes are largely ignored in the face of gruesome leftists who want to use American taxpayer dollars to find yet another reason to keep abortion alive and well…even if the victims of abortion are not.

AP: Should babies conceived through artificial insemination after a father’s death get his Social Security survivor benefits?

One News Now: After an investigation by Life Dynamics revealed the practice, Investigate Magazine, a New Zealand-based current affairs publication from a conservative Christian standpoint, went on to determine that a Maryland brokerage firm has been arranging the sale of parts of American aborted babies . . .

LifeNews: The Obama administration is getting grief from a pro-life group for approving an experiment using the remains of the bodies of unborn children victimized in abortion for research continues in U.S. laboratories.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith at Washington Times: Late last month, two bioethicists – Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva – published an outrageous “paper” in the Journal of Medical Ethics justifying the deliberate, premeditated murder of newborn babies during the first days and weeks after birth.

The Atlantic: From drugs to help you avoid eating meat to genetically engineered cat-like eyes to reduce the need for lighting, a wild interview about changes humans could make to themselves to battle climate change.

Paul Ford at Slate: Why Have Children?, by Christine Overall, a philosophy professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, is about puzzles like these-not the specifics of reproductive technology, twins, or IVF, but about the moral questions that arise when one decides to have children, or more children.

Life News: President Barack Obama is seeking to end federal funding for a pro-life program installed during the administration of President George W. Bush that helped save unborn babies potentially slated for destruction in fertility clinics.

Catholic Culture: Proper treatment on infertility, the Pope said, should be “most respectful of the human condition of the people involved.” He decried the current approach, dominated by “scientism and the logic of profit,” and said that the heavy promotion of in vitro fertilization is restricting research on more promising techniques.

AP: For 60 years, doctors have believed women were born with all the eggs they’ll ever have. Now Harvard scientists are challenging that dogma . . .

New York Times: Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital say they have extracted stem cells from human ovaries and made them generate egg cells. The advance, if confirmed, might provide a new source of eggs for treating infertility, though scientists say it is far too early to tell if the work holds such promise.

Elizabeth Marquardt at The Atlantic: Today we are witnessing an equal opportunity run on deliberately conceiving motherless children. Men, alone or in pairs, can buy eggs and rent wombs, too

American Thinker: More taxpayer funds continue to be spent on sterilizations in North Carolina than in any other state in the union. As of 2006, the most recent year for which information is available, $11,464,000 (see table 3.8) was spent on taxpayer-funded sterilizations in North Carolina. In fact, more than one in ten of all taxpayer-funded sterilizations occurred in the Tar Heel State.

LifeNews.com: The 3-genetic parent embryo is back in the news. This time it is Australia that wants to attempt to genetically engineer a human embryo to have 3 genetic parents.

Christopher Kaczor at Public Discourse: From its ancient Stoic origins to its modern Kantian formulations, human dignity is an important concept for sound ethical thinking. Doing so requires that we distinguish dignity as attributed, dignity as intrinsic worth, and dignity as flourishing.

LifeNews.com: Turning a blind eye toward both good science and good ethics, the embryonic stem cell and cloning company, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), has published a very preliminary online report regarding their first two patients injected with embryonic stem cell derivatives.

Christian Concern: The Department of Health has announced plans to consult the public on whether a controversial IVF technique should be used to prevent some hereditary diseases from being transferred from women to their children. | Christian Concern: Government plans for three-parent babies

LifeNews.com: NIH Director Francis Collins has approved four more human embryonic stem cell lines as eligible for federal taxpayer funding. The latest approval brings the total to 146.

News from The Associated Press: A new study of fertility treatment found that women who get three or more embryos have no better odds of having a baby than those who get just two embryos.

News from The Associated Press: The ministry stopped accepting applications for stem cell procedures until July and is implementing a yearlong campaign to halt unauthorized stem cell therapy trials.

BBC : For the first time, scientists have produced monkeys composed of cells taken from separate embryos.

Reuters: Many U.S. fertility clinics don’t tell egg donors that embryos made from their eggs may end up being used in stem cell research, according to a new government survey.

Scientists have made a major breakthrough that could soon see human sperm grown in the laboratory.

There are only four things Alana Stewart knows about her father: he has blonde hair, blue eyes, a college degree, and his assigned number at the sperm bank where he sold half of Alana’s genetic code is 81.

Wesley J. SmithSecondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog: Pro choice and pro life women have come together in coalition to protect women from being exploited for their eggs by Big Biotech. Reason? Women would take all the risks and the companies could make all the money but for the small payments to women to undergo the unnecessary extration procedure.

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy: Brooklyn resident Levy Itzhak Rosenbaum recently became the first person convicted of brokering the sale of kidneys in the United States [HT: George Mason law student Michael Mortorano]. The real tragedy here is not what Rosenbaum did, but the fact that organ sales are illegal to begin with. Legalizing them would save thousands of lives every year by increasing the supply of kidneys available to those suffering from organ failure.

ADF Attorney Daniel Blomberg at LifeNews.com: Imagine that medicine allowed doctors to easily and safely remove babies from the womb long before birth and put them in some sort of artificial womb to complete their development. Now ask yourself if this technology would completely remove the market for killing the unborn. Answer? No. Why?

LiveScience: A team of South Korean scientists led by the Hwang Woo-suk – who made headlines in 2005 for falsely claiming to have extracted stem cells from cloned human embryos – has just announced that they have successfully cloned coyotes for the first time. Here are some answers to a few questions you may have about reproductive cloning.

William Carroll at Public Discourse: Modern science does not require us to abandon notions of nature and human nature upon which so much of traditional ethics depends.

SMH.com.au: Serious and fatal diseases such as pancreatic cancer, Parkinson’s disease and diabetes may eventually be treated using stem cells from breast milk following a remarkable discovery at the University of Western Australia.

The European Union’s top court ruled Tuesday that scientists cannot patent stem cell techniques that use human embryos for research purposes, a ruling some scientists said threatens important research since no one could profit from it.

Nancy Valko at Mercatornet.com: Linking the “right to die” with organ donation has opened a terrible Pandora’s Box.

Scientists reported Wednesday that for the first time they used cloning techniques to coax human eggs to generate embryonic stem cells containing the genes of specific patients.

Wesley J. Smith at Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog: Penn bioethicist Art Caplan and I have had some vocal disagreements over the years, but we tend to think very similarly about organ transplant issues. Now Art and four other bioethicists have an opinion column in The Lancet calling for a boycott of Chinese scientists over its barbaric human organ market. From “Time For a Boycott of Chinese Science and Medicine Pertaining to Organ Transplantation” . . .

LifeNews.com: The story is about the rising number of what are euphemistically called “twin reductions”: Women who are carrying twins decide to kill one of their unborn children while allowing its sibling to live. This demonic procedure was the unintended but not unforeseeable consequence of reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization.

BBC News (includes video): Doctors at Moorfields Eye hospital in London have been given the go-ahead to carry out Europe’s first clinical trial using human embryonic stem cell.

LifeNews.com: The Scientist has a great article called “Skipping Pluripotency.” What is pluripotency? Pluripotent is a term used to describe a cell that is undifferentiated. A pluripotent cell can become most or all of the cell types in the body.

NY Daily News: The world’s largest sperm bank is telling redheads to keep their semen. Demand for ginger-haired donors is so low that Cryos International says they needn’t bother donating.