Is Your Fertility Doctor Taking Kickbacks?
By Cassie Murdoch,
Slate
| 07. 13. 2012
People take out loans to buy a car or a house or to send a child (or themselves) to college. And these days, more and more people are also taking out loans to create babies. It makes sense: A single cycle of IVF can run about $12,000, which, for most people, is A LOT of money. Responding to the growing IVF market, companies that give loans to fund fertility treatments are sprouting up across the country.
The
Today Show’s Dr. Nancy Snyderman recently
filed a report about the dozens of these fertility finance companies that are changing the way couples think about their options for having children. In theory, they’re just like any other loan company—except that they’re dealing with a population of borrowers who are often far more emotionally vulnerable than your average home buyer, and many of these lenders seem totally comfortable taking advantage of that fact. There are some that charge exorbitant interest rates, and others that are engaging in something far more unethical: Snyderman reports that some lenders are giving fertility doctors kickbacks or a...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 07.11.2024
Louise Perry’s recent article in The Spectator cautions against “The quiet return of eugenics,” a threat she locates in preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders. The technology is billed as a way for parents undergoing IVF to select which embryo to implant based on information about each embryo’s genetic risk factors and traits. These reports, she says, give parents “a very full picture of the adult that embryo could become”––from their child’s risk of developing different diseases to their “likely...
GATTACA was released in 1997, but — remarkably — is even more relevant now than it was then, as the technologies whose social implications it explores have developed considerably.
On Thursday, June 13, the California Film Institute presented GATTACA to a sold-out house at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center as part of their Science on Screen series. CGS Associate Director Katie Hasson offered framing for the film and participated in a Q+A discussion.
The film’s plot explicitly involves...
By Ellie Kincaid, Retraction Watch | 06.18.2024
Nature has retracted a 2002 paper from the lab of Catherine Verfaillie purporting to show a type of adult stem cell could, under certain circumstances, “contribute to most, if not all, somatic cell types.”
The retracted article, “Pluripotency of...