Clinic Raffles Could Make You a Winner, and Maybe a Mother
By Douglas Quenqua,
New York Times
| 10. 20. 2012
“That’s right, one lucky woman will win the ultimate chance at starting or building her family,” said a contest announcement issued in April by Long Island I.V.F., a clinic in Melville that offers in vitro fertilization to women who are having difficulty conceiving.
Ramsi and Brian Stoker, who spent over $25,000 in four years on failed I.V.F. treatments, recently won a free round in a raffle.
Contestants were asked to submit “the most emotional or entertaining essays and homemade amateur videos” explaining why they wanted a free round of I.V.F. “Make us laugh with you or cry with you,” the announcement said. “Tell your story straight from the heart.”
The winner, Jessica Upham of West Babylon, N.Y., submitted a video that showed her repeatedly injecting her abdomen with hormones and later weeping on her bed as a clinician delivered bad news. When she found out that she won the contest — a doctor holding balloons knocked on her door the day after Labor Day — she “just lost it,” she said in an interview.
“I feel inadequate that I can’t...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...