Government Shutters Agency That Oversees Canada’s Fertility and Assisted Reproduction Industry
By Tom Blackwell,
National Post
| 03. 30. 2012
It has triggered a boom in risky multiple births, created a generation of children with anonymous sperm-donor parents and spawned an underground trade in semen, eggs and surrogates.
Canada’s thriving fertility industry, however, will soon be left with virtually no official oversight, after the federal government decided this week to close down the oft-criticized regulatory agency for the field.
The government indicated in Thursday’s budget there is no point keeping Assisted Human Reproduction Canada (AHRC) open after a 2010 Supreme Court of Canada decision struck down much of the law it was supposed to enforce. The agency is slated to be shuttered by next March, its remaining functions taken over by Health Canada.
And though the court said large parts of the federal legislation fell under provincial jurisdiction, the provinces have shown little inclination to step into the breach.
Meanwhile, the issues that a Royal Commission argued almost 20 years ago urgently required regulation continue to percolate: the commercial trade in sperm, eggs and surrogates; the multiple births generated by in-vitro fertilization; the effect on children of having unidentified donor...
Related Articles
By Priyanka Runwal, Chemical and Engineering News | 08.05.2024
Saritee Sanodiya, 26, has spent countless days wondering if she’ll ever live a “normal” life. Growing up, Sanodiya often missed school, frequenting the hospital for sudden, life-threatening drops in her hemoglobin levels and excruciating pain in her joints. High fever...
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
By Alcott Wei, South China Morning Post | 07.13.2024
China has banned all clinical research involving germline genome editing under a newly released ethics guideline.
Germline gene engineering relates to altering the DNA in sperm, eggs or early embryos to introduce changes that can be inherited.
“Any clinical research...
By Staff, Japan Times | 07.10.2024
Photo by Roméo A. on Unsplash
How did Japanese society, which was supposed to have transformed into a democracy after World War II, justify discrimination against people with disabilities and openly endorse eugenics?
This is a key question people may...