Fertility Study Warns of Risks From Multiple Births
By WSJ,
The Wall Street Journal
| 04. 28. 2014
Like many women going through fertility treatments, Nikki David had one thought when she learned she was pregnant with twins: instant family.
"We were hoping it was twins," said Ms. David, a 33-year-old real-estate agent based in Cherry Hill, N.J., who had twin girls in June after getting pregnant through in vitro fertilization. "We can't necessarily afford to do this again. I would be older the next time around. The whole process of going through IVF again. There were so many reasons why we're like, 'Please let it be twins, please let it be twins.' "
While many women who struggle with infertility say having twins is a blessing, medical experts are increasingly calling for measures to be taken to reduce the country's rate of multiple births.
In an analysis posted online in April in the journal Fertility and Sterility, researchers from the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute, and the Yale Fertility Center called for a number of policy changes to encourage doctors and patients to try to avoid multiple pregnancies. Multiples have a greater risk of preterm...
Related Articles
By Grace Won, KQED [with CGS' Katie Hasson] | 12.02.2025
In the U.S., it’s illegal to edit genes in human embryos with the intention of creating a genetically engineered baby. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Bay Area startups are focused on just that. It wouldn’t be the first...
Several recent Biopolitical Times posts (1, 2, 3, 4) have called attention to the alarmingly rapid commercialization of “designer baby” technologies: polygenic embryo screening (especially its use to purportedly screen for traits like intelligence), in vitro gametogenesis (lab-made eggs and sperm), and heritable genome editing (also termed embryo editing or reproductive gene editing). Those three, together with artificial wombs, have been dubbed the “Gattaca stack” by Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency company...
Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, MacArthur Genius, liberationist, storyteller, writer, and friend of CGS, died on November 14. Alice shone a bright light on pervasive ableism in our society. She articulated how people with disabilities are limited not by an inability to do things but by systemic segregation and discrimination, the de-prioritization of accessibility, and the devaluation of their lives.
We at CGS learned so much from Alice about disability justice, which goes beyond rights...
By Lucy Tu, The Guardian | 11.05.2025
Beth Schafer lay in a hospital bed, bracing for the birth of her son. The first contractions rippled through her body before she felt remotely ready. She knew, with a mother’s pit-of-the-stomach intuition, that her baby was not ready either...