Voluntary isn't working
By Marcy Darnovsky,
Modern Healthcare
| 04. 13. 2009
Recent events show need for regulation of assisted reproduction
Each year, assisted reproduction quietly helps thousands of people in their quest for children biologically related to them. But the fertility field has been far from quiet of late. In recent weeks, two scandals burst into the headlines
The first stories about the Southern California octuplets, in late January, focused on the novelty and details of their birth. But shock and then outrage quickly followed as news of the mother's circumstances and the fertility doctor's recklessness emerged. Entertainment news has yet to tire of the story; a more sober conversation about the need for additional policy and oversight is also simmering.
A few weeks later, the Wall Street Journal reported that another Los Angeles-area fertility clinic had begun advertising the "pending availability" of embryo screening to select for hair color, eye color and even skin tone. As that story bubbled into network and cable news, it elicited a reaction similar to the one surrounding the octuplets: What's going on here? How can irresponsible fertility doctors get away with this sort of thing?
These questions are not being asked only by...
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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...
Photo by TeggorMindFish via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Prophets of techno-paradise tend to bloom and then fade but not necessarily disappear. Malcolm and Simone Collins, a husband and wife team, have been on quite a roll for a couple of years. However, their time in the spotlight may at last be coming to a close, after a report revealed their parenting style.
The Collins family have already featured on this...
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...