Posted on 01/06/2007 6:04:54 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
'Embryo Bank' Stirs Ethics Fears
Firm Lets Clients Pick Among Fertilized Eggs
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 6, 2007; A01
A Texas company has started producing batches of ready-made embryos that single women and infertile couples can order after reviewing detailed information about the race, education, appearance, personality and other characteristics of the egg and sperm donors.
The Abraham Center of Life LLC of San Antonio, the first commercial dealer making embryos in advance for unspecified recipients, was created to help make it easier and more affordable for clients to have babies that match their preferences, according to its founder.
"We're just trying to help people have babies," said Jennalee Ryan, who arranged for an egg donor to start medical treatments to produce a second batch of embryos this week. "For me, that's what this is all about: helping make babies."
But the embryo brokerage, which calls itself "the world's first human embryo bank," raises alarm among some fertility experts and bioethicists, who say the service marks another disturbing step toward commercialization of human reproduction and "designer babies."
"We're increasingly treating children like commodities," said Mark A. Rothstein, a bioethicist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "It's like you're ordering a computer from Dell: You give them the specs, and they put it in the mail. I don't think we should consider mail-order computers and other products the same way we consider children."
Prospective parents have long been able to select egg or sperm donors based on ethnicity, education and other traits. Couples can also "adopt" embryos left over at fertility clinics, or have embryos created for them if they need both eggs and sperm. But the new service marks the first time anyone has started turning out embryos as off-the-shelf products.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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You ain't seen anything yet. Just imagine, a few generations down the road when we will not only have read and understood the genome, but will be in a position to re-write it and even to write one de novo. Then one would be dialing up healthy athletic geniuses, and nothing else.
Like the old "Little Tavern " hamburger joints. "Buy 'em by the bag".
Gee, I can make some mad money. Cool. Who knew?
Designer babies. The ultimate in selfishness.
The reason they use the quotes around the word "adopt" is because the actual legal transaction involved, under our legal system's current treatment of an embryo, is a purchase and sale of personal property.
Treatment of human lives as chattel or livestock did not end with the civil war, and was reintroduced to America in 1973.
Doesn't the congresswoman from Huston, that wanted to know if the mars lander could go over and see the lunar lander have a law degree.????
So I guess this process guarantees an IQ of at least 95. LOL
Well, you just can't have *too* many babies, right?
And Sheila Jackson Lee is a potential sperm donor? Who knew?
with a few dummies thrown into the mix- gotta have someone to blame when something goes wrong- lol http://sacredscoop.com
There are three sides to eugenics. Good, bad, and bizarre.
An example of good eugenics has to be put down to just plain luck. It happened in one of the idealistic communes of northern European immigrants in New York State in the 19th Century. Though they believed in strong families, procreation was based solely on the judgment of the leader. A woman was strong and a man was smart, so they were ordered to make a baby, that would then be raised by her and her husband. In three generations, this commune produced some 60 or so national leaders in many fields. But had it continued another generation, it would have genetically collapsed because of inbreeding.
A bad result of Eugenics is already happening with smart people. Tending to marry each other, we have now discovered to our horror that the children of two smart people are often autistic. Far more than for the rest of the population.
A bizarre case of what Eugenics might be came with a poll that went into far more detail about what typical parents might want if their child could be engineered to their specifications. At first, they responded typically with "smart", "pretty", and "athletic". However, with more and more questions, people started to admit that they would really like their children to have more 'feline' and 'canine' qualities. People seem to get along better with their pets than each other, so these people figured that if their children were more like cats or dogs, then everyone would like them.
Eugenics up to now [and for a while in the future] has been/will be conducted with a sledgehammer. Really interesting stuff could become possible in 100-200 years, when we will be rewriting genomes in minute detail.
The article said that the filter for lawyers and PHD's was for sperm, not eggs.
A few more things like this and the "good old USA" will be even more deserving of a nuclear holocaust.
An utterly appalling abomination.
Have you got a reference/link/whatever for that? That's the first time I've seen that assertion. Thanks!
That very odd. Do you have a link for that?
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