When twenty-year-old Maria Slone first saw the ad in her college newspaper, she remembers thinking, “Damn, that’s a lot of money!” She called up immediately, envisioning an egg-plucking process that would be as quick and effortless as sperm donation. Disappointingly, the receptionist at Woman to Woman Fertility Clinic didn’t give her the time of day, mostly because that was last spring and Maria wasn’t twenty-one yet, but also because she seemed a tad too money-hungry for the well-to-do clinic.
Steinbock, Bonnie. "Payment for Egg Donation and Surrogacy." Bioethics in a Changing World. By Jennifer A. Parks and Victoria S. Wike. 1st ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2010. 400-09. Print.
One of the most natural and necessary actions in life is that of reproduction. For many families it is not just a natural process, but also a deep desire to have children and raise a family. For those that experience problems with reproduction, because of the development of new medical technologies, there are options like adoption and reproductive assistance. Due to the desire of many to have biological children, these families turn to the option of Assistive Reproductive Technology (ART), including In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), Intrauterine Insemination (IUI), and Third Part Assisted ART (sperm donation, egg donation, or surrogacy) (Assisted). After much consideration and research, it is clear that stances on In Vitro Fertilization are
The addition of a child into a family’s home is a happy occasion. Unfortunately, some families are unable to have a child due to unforeseen problems, and they must pursue other means than natural pregnancy. Some couples adopt and other couples follow a different path; they utilize in vitro fertilization or surrogate motherhood. The process is complicated, unreliable, but ultimately can give the parents the gift of a child they otherwise could not have had. At the same time, as the process becomes more and more advanced and scientists are able to predict the outcome of the technique, the choice of what child is born is placed in the hands of the parents. Instead of waiting to see if the child had the mother’s eyes, the father’s hair or Grandma’s heart problem, the parents and doctors can select the best eggs and the best sperm to create the perfect child. Many see the rise of in vitro fertilization as the second coming of the Eugenics movement of the 19th and early 20th century. A process that is able to bring joy to so many parents is also seen as deciding who is able to reproduce and what child is worthy of birthing.
When people begin to think of IVF, they conjure images of a mad scientist performing outrageous experiments upon his test-subjects. They also begin to think of Hollywood movies of cloned people creating societies that completely lack human emotion and compassion (“IVF.net”). Unfortunately, these images and fictitious movies have tarnished this medical practice severely. If someone were to step back and leave their cultural norms and preconceived perceptions aside – they would understand that IVF is merely medical procedure utilized to help a couple conceive a child.
Moreover, people opposed clinics destroying frozen embryos because it is the owner’s property. It is the owner’s (in this case donator) decision to determine what will happen to the embryos. There are people who have emotions towards their embryos. Especially for the donator that undergoes a lot of process creating those embryos. Based on an interview, a donator said that a lot of people put emotions and effort to produce the embryos. Embryos matter because they are special for the people who donated it and it is just a personal feeling. Because of this, they don’t accept their embryos disposed.
In addition to artificial insemination, the process of in-vitro fertilization has raised some major controversies that are centered on whether it is morally acceptable to meddle in the reproduction process. As part of the process of medically assisted procreation, in-vitro fertilization and its associated therapeutic approaches are used to enable infertile and untreatable couples to have children. The most common form of in-vitro fertilization is intracytoplasmic sperm injection, which enables clinicians to palliate most of masculine pathologies in order to deal with male infertility. While in-vitro fertilization has helped in dealing with male and female infertility, there are several potential risks associated with it including embryonic decrease, multiple pregnancies, cloning, risk of transmission of infectious disease, choice of donors, and donor motivation (Germond, n.d.). These issues emerge from the fact that the process involves the practice of surrogacy, a third party through genetic material donation, cryopreservation of and experiments on pre-embryos, and genetic manipulation.
In the World, there are a lot of couples who are unfortunate and are unable to be able to give birth to children, making them infertile. There are a lot of different methods of contraceptives that infertile parents can use to have a baby, but the one I will be talking about today is IVF: In-vitro fertilization. There are hundreds of thousands of test tube babies living in the world right now, and is a very known method of having babies. According to the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), in the year 2002, about 2%, which is 1.2 million of the 62 million American Women, had a doctor’s appointment related to infertility, and most of those appointments were for IVF. (Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/babies-today/) The IVF treatment was invented in order to grant infertile couples the happiness of having a child, however, it is when fertilization occurs outside the body. On Average, 1 in 8 American couples experience infertility, and 1.1 million of these peo...
Only twenty years ago, embryo freezing (cryopreservation) was considered a technique that raised “disturbing,” “extremely difficult,” “incredibly complex,” and even “nightmarish” ethical issues. Currently, however, at least 41 of the 169 infertility clinics in the United States have begun to implement in vitro fertilization protocols (IVF) (Freemann et al., 1986). The number of frozen embryos in this country nearly tripled, from 289 to 824, between 1985 and 1986 (Van Steirteghem and Van Den Abbel, 1988). An estimated ten infants in the U.S. and sixty in the world were born as of 1988 after having been frozen as embryos. The government and professional advisory groups have endorsed embryo cryopreservation in several countries, but despite these developments, human embryo freezing is still not universally accepted. The fact that freezing lengthens, perhaps indefinitely, the period of embryonic existence outside and independent of the human body allows new options for manipulation of the embryo and for its ultimate fate. As a consequence, the emerging technology raises a number of issues that challenge deeply embedded ethical principles.
In this case, scientists approached donors and informed them that their eggs and sperm would be used to develop embryos for stem-cell research.