The Baby Business and Public Policy
By Marcy Darnovsky,
Science Progress
| 05. 05. 2009
Regulation Can Ensure Well-being and Protect Reproductive Rights
The recent media storm over the in vitro fertilization-induced birth of octuplets has receded into the tabloids and entertainment pages. A second fertility industry scandal that emerged several weeks later-the announcement by a Los Angeles fertility clinic that it would soon offer a program to select embryos not just for sex but also for hair, eye and skin color-has also veered out of the headlines. But the outcry surrounding these events has revealed mounting disquiet about the multi-billion dollar baby business.
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.
The importance of addressing these issues is readily evident. The octuplets story left a mark even on the English language. Google now reports one...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Shoumita Dasgupta, STAT | 10.03.2025
President Trump and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have characterized the rise in autism diagnoses in recent years as an epidemic requiring emergency intervention.
This approach is factually wrong: The broadening definition of autism and the improvement in diagnosis...
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...