The World Isn’t Ready for What Comes After I.V.F.
By Ari Schulman,
The New York Times
| 09. 09. 2024
There was immediate backlash when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law. But it was a backlash as much from the right as from the left: The state’s overwhelmingly Republican government took just weeks to pass a law to shield fertility clinics from liability when embryos are damaged or destroyed.
It seemed the fight over I.V.F., as a cultural question, was over before it began. In May, 82 percent of Americans polled by Gallup said they believed I.V.F. is morally acceptable. In response to public pressure, Donald Trump recently promised to defend I.V.F. with federal protections and even a theoretical mandate that health insurance pay for it.
This wasn’t inevitable. A generation ago, bioethicists fought over whether assisted reproductive technology would be normalized or made taboo. Now there’s strong public consensus that it should be not only tolerated but also celebrated.
But this may be a lull. With major technological advances in childbearing on the horizon, what was once hypothetical is becoming plausible, setting the...
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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...