IVF

Approximately 10-15% of U.S. couples of reproductive age experience infertility. One response is to pursue in vitro fertilization (IVF), which is fraught with many negative ethical and practical implications. Another way is to get to the root cause of infertility. Shouldn’t that be the MAHA way? President Trump expanded access to IVF with his February 2025 executive order. In October, he lowered costs for IVF and other fertility treatments. While IVF does indeed “create” more babies, it comes at a steep physical, emotional, and ethical cost for couples (for an in-depth discussion of these and other issues relating to IVF, please see my podcast episode with Emma Waters on Bioethics Babe). At its heart, IVF circumvents infertility by moving procreation Read More ›

Work continues apace toward the goal of gestating babies outside a woman’s body. Scientists have now implanted human embryos in “organoids” made of tissues that mimic the uterine lining. From, “Researchers are Getting Organoids Pregnant,” published in the MIT Technology Review:

In three papers published this week by Cell Press, scientists are reporting what they call the most accurate efforts yet to mimic the first moments of pregnancy in the lab. They’ve taken human embryos from IVF centers and let these merge with “organoids” made of endometrial cells, which form the lining of the uterus.

The reports—two from China and a third involving a collaboration among researchers in the United Kingdom, Spain, and the US—show how scientists are using engineered tissues to better understand early pregnancy and potentially improve IVF outcomes…

In each case, the experiments were stopped when the embryos were two weeks old, if not sooner. That is due to legal and ethical rules that typically restrict scientists from going any further than 14 days.

First, a semantical point. The organoids weren’t “pregnant.” That seems unduly anthropomorphizing to me. They mimicked natural processes. If gestating machines ever are used to mature human embryos and fetuses outside a woman’s body, as mechanisms, they won’t be “pregnant” either.

In this powerful episode of Bioethics Babe, Emma Waters, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person, joins Arina Grossu Agnew to unpack the hidden costs of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and the ethical questions surrounding the fertility industry. While IVF is often hailed as a miracle solution for infertility, few people stop to ask what’s lost when life begins in a lab instead of the womb. Emma explains why IVF bypasses the real causes of infertility, the moral and physical risks it poses, and how Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM) offers a healthier, more human-centered alternative that heals the body rather than replacing it. We discuss: If you’ve ever wondered what IVF means for medicine, Read More ›

Should men have the right to have their cells manipulated so they can become biological mothers? Should women past child-bearing age have the same right if their own eggs are no longer viable? More to the point, should we all have the right to do whatever it takes to have a baby if that is our desire and also, to obtain the baby we want?

These questions have ceased to be grist for science fiction authors. Researchers recently announced that they have genetically manipulated human skin cells to become eggs, including those of men (the idea being to eventually enable both members of a same sex couple to have a genetic connection with their child). Then, after more genetic tinkering, the eggs were fertilized into embryos via IVF. Finally, the biotechnologists monitored embryonic development until the experiment was stopped, and the embryos destroyed.

No pregnancy has been established with this technique. But that is cold comfort. The researchers plan to keep experimenting and I have little doubt that when they overcome remaining technical difficulties, someone will create a pregnancy using “skin cell” embryos. After all, what beyond self-restraint—currently in little supply in this field—is to stop them?

Resources are being invested at an astounding level in radical reproductive technologies. Now, researchers have created human eggs from skin cells and successfully fertilized some of them with IVF. From the Guardian story: Researchers have created human eggs from skin cells, potentially transforming IVF treatment for couples who have no other options. The work is at an early stage but if scientists can perfect the process it would provide genetically related eggs for women who are infertile because of older age, illness or medical treatment. The same procedure could be used to make eggs for same-sex male couples. The effort involved a cloning-like technique: The Oregon team took a similar approach by collecting skin cells from women and removing the Read More ›