“This is a real change in the landscape. . . This is the first down payment on what is going to be a much longer list . . . that will empower the scientific community to explore the potential of embryonic stem cell research.”

More like a down payment on a long list that includes guilt, regret and God’s wrath, Dr. Collins.

Researchers used eggs from young donors to repair damaged eggs of older women in order to increase their chances of fertilisation. They have not yet used the eggs to produce babies, but they have injected them with sperm to produce an early stage embryo in the laboratory. While the move breathes new life into “old eggs” and could also remove genetic illnesses, it is likely to provoke an ethical storm as critics believe it could lead to hybrid or genetically modified children.

“If we could transfer these constructed new embryos, I believe the success rate would be high,” Atsushi Tanaka, the lead author told the New Scientist.

IVF often fails in older women because there are abnormalities in the outside of their eggs, known as cytoplasm, which surrounds the nucleus.

The team at St Mother Hospital in Kitakyushu, Japan, believe one way around the problem would be too implant the healthy nucleus – which contains most of the information to produce a baby – into the cytoplasm of a donor, usually a younger mother. The team successfully did this in 31 eggs and of these seven formed “early stage embryos” when injected with sperm in a test tube.

While IVF creates thousands of new families a year, an increasing number of the newborns are twins, and they carry special risks often overlooked in the desire to produce babies. While most twins go home without serious complications, government statistics show that 60 percent of them are born prematurely. That increases their chances of death in the first few days of life, as well as other problems including mental retardation, eye and ear impairments and learning disabilities. And women carrying twins are at greater risk of pregnancy complications.

Yet curiously, The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations in their 1996 report on procreative issues find it difficult to say either Yea or Nay:

The Commission is troubled about the potential for abuse opened up by this technology. We understand why some Christians urge us simply to reject the entire practice. But we are reluctant to locate the problems that arise simply in the medical technique itself and to suggest that Christians could never faithfully use it.

Our discussion of the previous cases outlined the scriptural basis for taking into account the divinely established one-flesh union of marriage. We agree with the synodical representatives who argued that faithful use of in vitrotechnology will involve sperm and eggs only from within the marriage. This conclusion is consistent with the advice we offered in the cases involving surrogacy and artificial insemination by donor.

Why is it so difficult to see and believe that the divinely instituted means for the procreation of children is through the proper use of our created bodies, that is, the one-flesh union of male and female? It seems that the CTCR’s argument is similar to those who want to offer grape juice and rice cakes for the Sacrament, and then justify such because the Words of Institution were added.

Source: Christians and Procreative Choices: How Do God’s Chosen Choose? September, 1996, p. 37 (accessed October 11, 2009)

A pregnant mother will have to give birth to another couple’s baby after a blunder by an IVF clinic.

Carolyn Savage had the wrong embryos implanted into her and will have to give the boy up to his biological parents as soon as he is born.

Yesterday Mrs Savage, 40, who was expecting her fourth child with husband Sean, said: ‘The hardest part is going to be the delivery. I remember communicating with the [unnamed] mother of this child as to what I was envisioning and hoping for.

‘I said, “We want a moment to say hello, and goodbye”.

You can read the rest of the article here.

IVF twins are far more likely to need hospital treatment than naturally-conceived twins, according to a study based on Australian births. It was already known that IVF twins have poorer health outcomes, with lower birthweights, prematurity or birth defects. But this was thought to be due to being a twin rather than to IVF. The research, which was published in the journal Human Reproduction, knocks this theory on the head. Normally conceived twins are healthier and IVF twins spend about an extra 4 days in hospital after birth, have an almost 4-fold increased risk of admission to neo-natal intensive care, and an increased risk of hospital admission in the first three years. As the authors point out, IVF is not only riskier but more expensive.

When I decided to sell my eggs, I never thought I’d get cancer. I don’t remember if the clinic told me that the fertility drugs could increase my risk of cancer. They certainly didn’t tell me that the relationship between cancer and fertility treatments for egg donors had never been researched. Now I know more than I ever wanted to know about breast cancer. I know that breast cancers are hormone sensitive and can be affected by hormone treatments. During my cancer treatment, two doctors mentioned that anecdotally they see more cancer in women who have had fertility treatments. I’ll never know for sure if the egg donation caused my breast cancer, but now I know that it is likely to be a contributing factor. I think often about how much I love my husband, and it breaks my heart that my desperation for a couple thousand bucks has caused him such pain. A bad decision made seven years ago may cost me my life.

You can read her entire story at the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network.

The fertility industry’s professional societies offer a potential avenue for self-regulation of the field, but their existing recommendations are too often ignored. Other countries regulate assisted reproduction to protect the well-being of all participants, including the children whom it helps create and the families and society into which they are born. Drawing lessons from their successes could help temper the commercial pressures in the U.S. assisted reproduction sector, without in any way diminishing reproductive rights.

Perhaps we need a new pair of lenses to see what other countries are doing on the other side of the Great Pond.

HT: Center for Genetics and Society.