Free Republic

An East Tennessee couple has welcomed a baby girl who grew from the longest-frozen embryo to ever result in a birth. Benjamin and Tina Gibson’s daughter, Emma Wren, weighed 6 pounds, 8 ounces when she came into the world on November 25. Prior to being transferred into Tina’s uterus at the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville earlier this year, the embryo Emma grew from had been cryopreserved for more than 24 years, according to a news release. And, according to research staff at the University of Tennessee Preston Medical Library, that makes her the all-time record holder for the...

Regarding the Instruction Dignitas PersonaeAim In recent years, biomedical research has made great strides, opening new possibilities for the treatment of disease, but also giving rise to serious questions which had not been directly treated in the Instruction Donum vitae (22 February 1987).  A new Instruction, which is dated 8 September 2008, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, seeks to provide some responses to these new bioethical questions, as these have been the focus of expectations and concerns in large sectors of society.  In this way, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seeks both...

A frozen embryo destroyed in a Chicago fertility clinic was a human being whose parents are entitled to file a wrongful death lawsuit, a Cook County judge rules Friday.Attorneys on both sides of the abortion issue said it was the first such ruling they have heard of as the country debates whether stem cells derived from embryos can be used in research and medicine.Alison Miller and Todd Parrish hoped to conceive a child with help from the Center of Human Reproduction, but the one fertilized egg the couple created was thrown out in error by a clinic worker.Friday, Judge Jeffrey...

Latest Assault on the Prebornby William F. JasperEmbryonic stem cell research is neither an acceptable nor an ethical means of scientific discovery but is instead the purely utilitarian, cold-blooded murder of preborn children.‘‘Which one of my children would you kill? Which one would you take?" John Borden pointedly asked the committee members in the packed congressional hearing on July17th. He was holding his twin 9-month-old sons, Mark and Luke, while his wife, Lucinda Borden, held up a photo of the two infants, along with an embryonic sibling who did not survive, as they had appeared on January 31, 2000...