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(LifeSiteNews) — Last month, a photo of a “maternity” shoot went viral. It depicted two gay men holding hands, beaming at into each other’s eyes, with a pregnant young woman in a red dress in the background. The caption: “We did a ‘maternity’ shoot and it came out great!” The woman was a surrogate; she’d been paid to carry a child created with sperm and an egg donor for the two men. The online reaction — which soon escalated into the millions — was immediate. “This is some Handmaid stuff right here,” wrote conservative commentator Bethany Mandel. She’s not wrong....

Assistant Dean for New Student Transitions at CUNY Geneseo Heather Wilhelhm-Routenberg and her wife, Robbie, who also works at the university as a chief diversity officer, are suing CNY Fertility Albany in Latham on 11 counts including breach of contract, medical malpractice and battery. They are seeking unspecified damages. CNY Fertility has refused to comment on the case. The couple told the New York Post that they decided Heather would carry their child through in vitro fertilization (IVF) after Robbie had suffered a miscarriage during their first attempt to have a daughter. They had opted to implant each other's embryos,...

“…but Hannah had no children.” - 1 Samuel 1:2 Is IVF, AID, or AIH (forms of Artificial Insemination) ethical from a Christian position? There are two views by which I would like to investigate this. First by way of Joseph Fletcher who opposes the Bible, and second by way of the Biblical picture. ...Fletcher believes that AI is an answer for a problematic dilemma which carries couple to a wonderful end. (He is a avid adherent to Consequentialism – that the means does not matter so long as the ends are acceptable.) Though AI and IVF may involve masturbation, this...

Golly gosh, you learn something new every day about the IVF industry. And you thought it was just about gurgling, picture-perfect infants. IVF porn is one of those sordid things that everyone knows about but no one has the stomach to talk about. Last year’s “Private Life”, a highly-praised Netflix film about a middle-aged couple going through IVF, is typical. Equipped with a cup, the exasperated husband enters a cubicle where a wall-mounted screen is playing hard-core porn. It’s part of the fertility furniture. Back in 2010, a British health think tank, 2020Health published a brief report, Who Said Pornography...

I'm hearing stories of weird things happening in IVF clinics starting in March of this year. They can't figure out the cause.Steve KirschDec 17 394310 I just got off the phone with a woman who works at a large IVF clinic. She has to remain nameless to avoid being fired for speaking out. Nobody is supposed to know about the serious problems happening in the IVF clinics.Let me tell you what is really going on and the scientific study that explains it.Rest assured that the so-called “fact checkers” will call the IVF clinics who will deny there are any problems...

I’m unapologetically Protestant but, as I’ve said for a while now, our Catholic friends have long led the way on many bioethical issues like abortion and assisted reproductive technologies. For example, back in 2008, the Vatican released a document called “Dignitatis personae,” which said that “The desire for a child, while good, cannot justify the ‘production’ of offspring, just as the desire to not have a child cannot justify the abandonment or destruction of a child once he or she has been conceived.” Now, I recognize that Christians disagree about whether it’s intrinsically wrong to conceive children outside of the...

1. A common method of sperm retrieval (masturbation with the assistance of pornography) involves a violation of the sixth commandment (Matthew 5:28; Colossians 3:5; Exodus 20:14). 2. Many ethical and practical issues are the same here as with surrogate parenting. A review of surrogate parenting material would be appropriate. 3. Sperm banks raise valid social and legal concerns re: paternal rights, the rights of children to know their parents, transmission of diseases, and a checkered past of mismanagement resulting in mistaken insemination of sperm. I reject the argument that sperm banks presume for humans the authority of God. The role...

When Benedicte Blanchet, a 40-year-old who lives in a Paris suburb, decided that she wanted to have a child on her own and not wait to meet the right man, nothing prepared her for the costly obstacle course that was to follow. Under existing laws in France, which are among the strictest in western Europe, only heterosexual couples who are married or have been living together for at least two years and have difficulties conceiving a child, are given access to medically assisted reproduction, such as sperm donation or in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. “It’s really hard. Since the French...

Human beings bear the image and likeness of God. They are to be reverenced as sacred. Never are they to be used as a means to an end, not even to satisfy the deepest wishes of an infertile couple. Husbands and wives "make love," they do not "make babies." They give expression to their love for one another, and a child may or may not be engendered by that act of love. The marital act is not a manufacturing process, and children are not products. Like the Son of God himself, we are the kind of beings who are "begotten,...

Theodora Aidoo is a young woman who is passionate about women-related issues. Her Love: To bring to fore the activities of women making a global impact. This stems from her journalism background from the Nigerian Institute of Journalism and Ghana Institute of Journalism. Reports say that was the first time in the country’s history that a 68-year-old primigravida (pregnant for the first time) has given birth to twins following an In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). The Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Idi-Araba, took to Twitter to announce the news. Speaking to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday, Wasiu Adeyemo, Chairman,...

Minister for Health Simon Harris said that comments made by a Catholic parish group about IVF are ‘extremely hurtful’. Tullamore’s Catholic Parish Facebook group was used to warn its members that IVF was ‘incompatible’ with what it means to be a Catholic. The post also made comments about the affects of the treatment on the female reproductive system in the process. It read: ‘The process of IVF damages embryonic stem cells and thus life and is therefore completely, clearly and totally incompatible with our Catholic faith. ‘For all believers in God, all life is sacred at all times.’ According to...

With increasing rates of infertility and higher average rates of maternal age, people are turning to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) like in vitro fertilization (IVF) more than ever. More than 8 million babies have been born since the first IVF pregnancy in 1978. Recognizing the emotional agony of dealing with trouble conceiving, it makes sense why IVF is becoming so widely used. IVF provides a glimmer of hope for couples who have faced numerous cycles of negative pregnancy tests. But recently, some light has been shed on less positive aspects of the ART industry, revealing inflated success rates, maternal and...

When couples struggling to conceive approach an infertility clinic for help, they’re not just patients seeing a doctor: they’re also healthcare consumers navigating a billion-dollar industry. All too often, they’re also sucked onto a moving sidewalk designed to effortlessly take them from one intervention to another, without stopping to heal their spirits, discern their options, or possibly close their wallets. That’s what happened to me. I should be clear: I feel that most of the doctors we talked to were sincerely trying to help. This was especially the case with the reproductive endocrinologists who worked with nonprofit hospitals. They are...

A 74-year-old woman now holds the record for “world’s oldest mom” after she reportedly gave birth to twins on Thursday following a round of in vitro fertilization using donor eggs. The woman, identified as Erramatti Mangayamma, and her husband, 80-year-old Rajarao, hail from a small Indian village in the Eastern Godavari district, SWNS reported.

In vitro fertilization is the process of joining a woman’s egg (ovum) and a husband’s sperm in a lab rather than inside a woman’s body... When the egg is fertilized by the sperm, the result is a living embryo, which is then implanted in the woman’s womb so that it can develop like any other baby. Evangelical Christians differ on the moral acceptability of this procedure. My own position is that, in principle, the teachings of Scripture present no moral objection to a married couple using IVF (as long as no human embryos are destroyed in the process), because it...

The world of IVF and assisted reproductive technology has been a massive social experiment, designed under the pretext of giving couples struggling with infertility the ability to have a family. While helping people get pregnant is a worthy and laudable goal, has the experiment gone too far? Most of the attention has only been paid to the parents, while the effect this has on the children conceived through these methods is largely ignored. More and more of them are speaking out — like one man who was conceived through a sperm donor… and learned he has over 30 siblings. Eli...

California couple Anni and Ashot Manukyan say they were delivered into a nightmare when a horrific in vitro fertilization mix-up led to the implantation of their embryo in a complete stranger living in Queens. The Flushing woman later gave birth to their son in New York on March 31 alongside another baby boy from yet another pair of strangers. No one comprehended the monumental mistake until the shocked Queens woman saw the infant boys and realized they didn’t match either her Korean-American background or the two female embryos she created with her husband and consented to having implanted.

The quiet heartbreak and pain of infertility is well known to many evangelicals, whose aspirations to have a child have been frustrated for reasons they cannot understand or control. It is frequently a secret burden that couples carry, which only emerges into the open as they reveal their struggles to family, friends, and doctors. The weight of infertility and the value of children has increasingly prompted infertile couples to pursue procreation by every means possible: artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and even surrogacy have all found their way into evangelical communities. Yet while evangelicals have become increasingly aware of the...

IVF clinics may soon use a controversial screening technique to get rid of embryos which are likely to grow up with low IQs. A company in the US offering tests which can pick out 'mental disabilities' – and, in theory, predict intelligence – has confirmed it is in talks with fertility clinics. The news has stoked fears about a rise in designer babies, which could be created by parents wanting to erase undesirable traits from their children. Experts say it is 'repugnant' to think about terminating embryos because they are expected to have lower than average intelligence.

Michelle Obama says she felt alone after a miscarriage 20 years ago and she and Barack Obama underwent fertility treatments to conceive their two daughters, according to her upcoming memoir. In some of her most extensive public comments on her White House years, the former first lady also lets her fury fly over President Donald Trump's "bigotry and xenophobia" — dangerous, deliberate rhetoric, she wrote, that risked her family's safety. "For this," she writes, "I'd never forgive him." But it's her deeply personal account of her marriage to the future president that shed new light on the Ivy League-educated couple's...