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Good grief: A sperm bank is bragging that it set the record of having children born with 40 year-old sperm. From the press release, headlined “World Record Shattered:” Late in August, twin girls were born to a couple who used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to achieve pregnancy. On the surface, this may look like just another of the increasingly common success stories for the IVF industry. But this story has its own unique twist that makes it different from every other IVF pregnancy—the sperm used to fertilize the egg was frozen over 40 years ago, shattering the existing record of...

Caruso began to question the IVF process after being confronted by his parish priest. CHICAGO, August 3, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - One former in-vitro fertilization (IVF) expert’s difficult moral journey towards becoming the first of his kind to embrace a new vision of fertility treatment, one in line with his religious faith, began with the intervention of a Catholic priest. Reproductive endocrinologist Anthony Caruso told the Chicago Tribune July 30 that he began to seriously question the IVF business, in which children are picked and chosen according to physical features and frequently aborted in “selective reductions” of multiple pregnancies, after an...

August 2, 2012 (Mercatornet.com) - A TV show called The New Normal will have its premiere on NBC in the US soon. It’s about a gay couple and the single mother they engage to have their baby. “She’s just like an easy-bake oven except with no legal rights to the cupcake,” the surrogate-mother broker tells Bryan and David. This is a hard-nosed description of the woman’s role in gay marriage and child-rearing, but it sums it up accurately. In heterosexual relationships, the birth rate rises when couples are married. One would expect similar dynamics to apply to same-sex couples. For...

NEW JERSEY July 26, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A controversial IVF method resulting in 3-parent babies has recently been debated in the UK, but according to reports brought to light by Dr. Joseph Mercola of the health website Mercola.com, the technique has already been used in the US as far back as 1997. The birth of these genetically-modified children was indicated in a 2001 report issued by the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of Saint Barnabas (IRMS), New Jersey, so the children are now over 10 years old. The IVF process involves transferring the ooplasm of a healthy donor egg...

A California woman is suing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for "unconstitutional" sperm donor policies. The woman is in a same-sex relationship and wants to conceive a child with her female partner. The woman has a male friend who she wants to use as a sperm donor.

ISTANBUL, Turkey, July 4, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – While some doctors are celebrating an estimated 5 million living people created through Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART includes IVF and ICSI) since the world’s first ‘test tube baby’, Louise Brown, was born 34 years ago, one prominent critic has slammed the technology for what he says is an unethical treatment of human life and a chimerical solution to women suffering from infertility. “If 5 million babies have been born as a result of in vitro fertilization, then at least six times that many human lives have been aborted in the earliest and most...

A British ethics committee has recommended going forward with creating human embryos with 3 genetic parents. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an independent body that considers issues in biotechnology and medicine, has found the genetic engineering technique is ethical and should move forward even though the technique is currently against the law in the United Kingdom.Why would doctors want to engineer an embryo with the genetic material from 3 people? Because, it will “prevent” the inheritance of mitochondrial disease. Not all of our DNA that we inherit is in the nuclei of the egg and sperm that join at fertilization....

Across all age groups there was no overall increased risk of breast cancer associated with IVF. However researchers at the University of Western Australia found women who had IVF treatment at a younger age had a higher risk of developing the disease over the following 15 years. Oestrogen, a hormone which is known to fuel certain forms of breast cancer, may be up to 13 times higher during an IVF cycle than normal. Concerns have been raised about the use of strong hormones to stimulate the ovaries to produce more eggs during fertility treatment as hyperstimulation can be fatal.

What do you do when you have created 18 extra IVF embryos and you don't want to destroy them or give them away to just anyone?  You put them on Craigslist of course!  From WhoTV.com: After struggling for years to have children the McCrea family had their prayers answered, and then some, thanks to In Vitro Fertilization. Now the family is sharing their extra blessings.... Deb had nearly signed on the dotted line to donate those leftover 18 embryos to a fertility clinic, but something just didn’t seem right. “When my daughter was born, I went months and months just...

Above a cheap mobile phone shop in a chaotic street in north Delhi, there is a grimy apartment whose peeling walls are decorated with photographs of adoring mothers nursing their babies. The woman cooing at her child in the biggest portrait is beautiful, white and affluent-looking — in stark contrast to the flat’s five residents, four of whom are pregnant, while the other is being pumped full of hormones in the hope she will soon conceive. They are all uneducated, bare-footed, dirt-poor Indian women from outlying villages — and given the emotional turmoil that awaits them, one would have thought...

O’HARA, Pa. – Tagg Romney, the eldest son of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, announced via Twitter that he and his wife Jen have new twin boys, delivered by a surrogate today. “Happy 2 announce birth of twin boys David Mitt and William Ryder. Big thanks to our surrogate. Life is a miracle,” Tagg tweeting, linking to a photo of himself and one of his new sons. This the second time that Tagg, 42, and his wife, Jen,39, have used a surrogate. The same surrogate was used for the twins carried their youngest son Jonathan, who was born in August of...

Indiana teacher who says she was fired from a Roman Catholic school for using in vitro fertilization to try to get pregnant is suing in a case that could set up a legal showdown over reproductive and religious rights.

FORT WAYNE, Ind. -- A Fort Wayne teacher who claims she was fired from a Roman Catholic school for using in vitro fertilization to try to get pregnant is suing in a case that could set up a legal showdown over reproductive and religious rights. Emily Herx's lawsuit accuses the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend and St. Vincent de Paul School in Fort Wayne of discrimination for her firing last June. Herx, 31, of Hoagland, Ind., said that the church pastor told her she was a "grave, immoral sinner" and that a scandal would erupt if anyone learned she had...

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 19, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In the wake of a new study that indicates that unborn girls are being targeted for abortion by certain immigrant groups in Canada, evidence has surfaced that sex selective in vitro fertilization (IVF) is being regularly advertised in Canadian news papers. A fertility clinic in Washington state has been targeting Indo-Canadians in British Columbia with an ad encouraging them to “create the family you want: Boy or Girl.” The ad features a picture of an ethnic boy and girl attired in traditional Indian garb.  A website address in the ad directs parents...

March 14, 2012 (AmericanThinker.com) - My soul carries a new scar. The pain is fresh and keen, and I know that while time might see the pain fade, I will never fully recover from what I’ve seen, and done. For I have failed, intentionally and knowingly, in the first duty of a parent: protecting the lives of two of my children. My wife and I wanted children; alas, we needed IVF treatment to realize this dream. Several cycles and multiple embryo implantations later, we welcomed our blessing from G-d, who is the light of our lives. Recently, we tried for...

My wife didn't look, but I had to. I had to know what would happen to my children. I had to know how they would die. "It never rains, but it pours," said the fertility doctor -- of the three embryos that were implanted, all three took. We were faced with the news of triplets. I was shocked, knowing the burden that would entail, but since G-d gave us three, I was prepared to do whatever I needed to do to help, manage, and provide. Snip... Each retreated, pushing away, as the needle entered the amniotic sac. They did not...

PAV Assembly in a conference center next to St. Peter's Basilica VATICAN CITY, February 27, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A gathering of the Vatican’s own academy for promoting respect for life was met with palpable discontent from its own members and other registrants after presenters on the topic of infertility alluded to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other artificial reproduction technologies as “natural” and legitimate for treating patients, despite their conflict with Catholic moral teaching. In addition, one prominent Catholic doctor who noted the link between the birth control pill and breast cancer was told by the moderator that his claim was...

An embryologist removes frozen embryos from a storage tank at the Smotrich IVF Clinic in La Jolla, Calif., in this 2007 photo. (CNS photo/Sandy Huffaker) In 1978, when doctors introduced Louise Brown, the first “test tube” or in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby, to the world, the international media hailed the event as something just short of the definitive answer to infertility. In Time magazine, Dr. Robert Edwards—one of the brains behind Baby Louise’s birth and the acknowledged godfather of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry it spawned—boasted: “This is the first time we’ve solved all the problems at once....

A Long Island man was stunned to find out that his 4-year-old twins weren’t an accidental pregnancy at all — his desperate girlfriend secretly stashed away his sperm and used it for an in-vitro procedure, he charges in a lawsuit. Elmont resident Joseph Pressil, 36, wasn’t planning on having children with Anetria Burnett, with whom he was in a relationship for six months in 2007, he said. So she took matters into her own hands, he told The Post, in order to remain in his Texas house and make a legal bid for half of his possessions. -snip- The real...

In the Carpenter home, every meal begins with a prayer. Robin and his wife, Emily, are devout Christians. But they part ways with many other Christians over a measure that would expand the legal definition of human life. Their son, Luke, now 4 years old, was born through in vitro fertilization. The anti-abortion amendment being voted on this week in the state could restrict in vitro procedures, and the Carpenters are worried that if they wait too long to add to their family, they may end up breaking the law. "I don't really want or need anybody else getting involved...