Free Republic

I’m sure you’ve seen them in the media: attractive, well-off, smiling parents holding adorable infants created by third-party reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Of course, the narrative goes, this development is a win-win for all. Who could object to children being created for those who through either infertility or biological sex are unable to reproduce? But this picture hides the highly profitable fertility industry’s dirty secrets. It ignores what is required to create these children: exploitation, health endangerment, and the commodification of human life. An honest look at the facts and circumstances surrounding third-party reproduction and ART should...

The book that was never supposed to be published, all library copies tracked down, retracted, the author forced to issue a heavily censored edition, that's all we have now, you can't see the original…Tragedy & Hope, by Bill Clinton's favorite Georgetown Prof., engineer turned historian Carrol Quigly…He talked about the fact that, early in the 20th century, (during the transition from Financial Capitalism, bankers screaming at kings & dictators, to Monopoly Capitalism, Henry Ford cutting out bankers by giving his workers raises they could use to buy Model T`s)…Early in the 20th century, expert managers became so powerful, that private...

ROME — It won't be long before two women can have a baby of their own, with no biological contribution from a man at all. So says Carter Snead, director of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. Snead, who once served as general counsel to the President's Council of Bioethics under George W. Bush, said that at the current rate of developments in reproductive technology, sperm and eggs may soon be created from human skin cells. But it doesn’t have to be this way, says Snead, who together with the Center is trying to re-inject...

Genetic research is advancing to the day when gay couples could fulfill their dreams of having children related to them both. I’ve helped many same-sex couples over the years have children of their own through assisted reproductive procedures. Egg donation and surrogacy allow two gay men to have children genetically related to one partner and the egg donor, but not to both. It’s the same dynamic for lesbians and sperm donors. I’ve been asked many times by countless same-sex couples over the years: “can we make a baby that’s a combination of both of us?”

The cost of a product that half the world’s population needs multiple times a day, every month for approximately 30 years, is simply too much.When I got my first period, I was in the most embarrassing place my then-11-year-old self could have imagined: my grandparents’ house. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just put on extra pairs of underwear and threw them away one-by-one, scrunched at the bottom of the bathroom trash bin, as I bled through them. Finally, with nary a pair of panties in sight, I was forced to tell my mother. I have never been...

Parent and child rights, abortion, and baby-selling are among issues coloring the debate among Maryland legislators over a gestational surrogacy bill passed by the Senate March 20 and awaiting action by the House Rules Committee. The Maryland Catholic Conference supports the Maryland Collaborative Reproduction Act (S.B. 208) as amended, in order to protect the parties involved – intended parents, surrogate mothers and the children surrogacy arrangements produce. As the public policy arm of the state’s Catholic bishops, the MCC does not support surrogacy, and in past years has simply opposed similar legislation. “We would prefer a ban,” said Andrea Garvey,...

Following the devaluation of babies in the developed world in the 1970s and 80s, babies became scarce and, consequently, desirable once again. Now, any means used to make babies is seen as good, as long as pregnancy occurs at a convenient time.Some cannot conceive naturally. The prevailing view is that those who cannot do so should have free access to such reproductive technologies as in vitro fertilization (IVF) or the purchase of gametes, i.e., sperm and eggs. Yet, many do not know what occurs in IVF labs and others do not care, as long as offspring result. The zeitgeist...

Just to recall a basic fact: Intercourse/PIV is always rape, plain and simple. This is a developed recap from what I’ve been saying in various comments here and there in the last two years or so. as a radfem I’ve always said PIV is rape and I remember being disappointed to discover that so few radical feminists stated it clearly. How can you possibly see it otherwise? Intercourse is the very means through which men oppress us, from which we are not allowed to escape, yet some instances of or PIV and intercourse may be chosen and free? That makes...

No excerpt from IHE allowed, story here. To summarize, an engineering education magazine publishes a letter by a professor critical of homosexuality, and many are appalled.

Between the ages of 36 and 38, I spent nearly $50,000 to freeze 70 eggs in the hope that they would help me have a family in my mid-40s, when my natural fertility is gone. For this baby insurance, I obliterated my savings and used up the money my parents had set aside for a wedding. It was the best investment I ever made. In RAH's 1963 Novel "Podkayne of Mars", the common ability of a woman to "Freeze" embryos in order to delay childbirth is the starting plot generator.

LONDON: A woman desperate for another child forced her 14-year-old daughter to get pregnant using syringes of donor sperm, a British judge said. In a ruling reported for the first time on Monday, high court judge Peter Jackson said the mother had behaved in "a wicked and selfish way" that almost defied belief. The judge said the woman, an American divorcee living in Britain with three adopted children, hatched the plan after she was prevented from adopting a fourth. The scheme involved getting her oldest daughter to inseminate herself with syringes of sperm purchased over the internet from a Denmark-based...

MEN have long wondered what exactly it is that women want. Some pore over men’s magazines, with their promises of “washboard abs”, for guidance. The more scientifically minded look for experimental data. The latest evidence comes from a group of researchers led by Brian Mautz, then of Australian National University. They gathered 105 heterosexual Australian women and showed them a series of digitally generated pictures of men in which three bodily characteristics were varied—height, shoulder-to-waist ratio and flaccid penis size. The women were asked to rate the men as sexual partners.In an article just published in the Proceedings of the...

Query: HuffPost journalist is doing a story about the concept of sex with aliens. Would like to speak with people who’ve had sex with aliens, UFO experts, biological experts who can discuss the potential problems of mating with a foreign species, psychological experts who have studied the phenomenon.

After almost 40 years of legalized abortions throughout the United States — and longer in states that okayed abortions pre-Roe — the U.S. population has been decimated to the point that the nation is seeing the lowest population growth since the 1930s.Abortion has destroyed not only one generation of Americans but a second as well — people who should be boosting the fertility rate in their childbearing years now who were victims of abortions in the 1970s and 1980s. In total, more than 55 million Americans are been victimized by abortions and millions more were never born because their parents...

Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female—specifically, her eggs and womb. The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women’s reproductive rights rests not only on a woman’s ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes 40 long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women will always face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies....

CNS News broke the story late last month: At a recent press conference held to discuss the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., “Obamacare”), a reporter asked former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a critical question: “One of the services that health care plans have to offer free of charge [under the HHS mandate] are sterilizations… do you agree with the federal government mandating—” At this point, Congresswoman Pelosi cut the reporter off and responded, “You know what, I told you before, let’s go to church and talk about our religion. Right here we’re talking about public policy as it...

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...

For nearly seven years, Dale Liuzza raised his son as the caregiving parent in a gay relationship. The boy was conceived through a surrogate, a donor egg and a mixture of sperm from both his dads. "We didn't know or care about the biology," said Liuzza, 31, and a behavioral therapist who works with autistic children in New Orleans. "I pretty much raised him. As far as I was concerned, I carried him." But when the men's relationship fell apart, his partner determined he was the biological father and took the boy out of state to Texas and eventually to...

Human egg cells which have been grown in a lab could be fertilised in a landmark experiment that would completely rewrite the rules of reproduction. Scientists want to secure permission to fertilise the eggs, which have been produced from stem cells, to see whether reproduction this way is possible. Scientists are seeking permission to fertilise lab-grown human eggs Researchers are working towards generating an infinite supply of human eggs which could allow older and infertile women to become mothers, the Independent newspaper reports.Furthermore, some scientists have gone as far as to say the tests could uncover an ‘elixir of youth’...

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....