Aggregated News

(WOMENSENEWS)-- On Sept. 5, 2012, a 53-year-old grandmother from Chicago, Cindy Reutzel, birthed her daughter's baby, and said she would do it again. That same month reality television star Kim Kardashian announced that she was freezing her eggs for hopeful future use through a new technique unsupported by long-term women's and fetal health safety studies.

A few days later, news circulated around the globe that the first mother-to-daughter womb transplants had been carried out in a hospital in Sweden. Some headlines touted the "miracle" that a woman might now have the ability to birth her own child from inside the same womb she herself was carried. The success of the procedure, doctors said, will not truly be "celebrated" unless the daughters actually birth babies from frozen embryo transplants at some point in the future.

ABC News called the womb transplant the "latest fertility feat" and raised questions about the ethics driving an industry that has grown into an ever-expanding multi-billion-dollar global business. Dr. James Goldfarb, director of University Hospital's Fertility Center in Cleveland and past president of the Society for...