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Petri Dish Babies, 25 Years Later
bl8n8r writes ""You can't buy a baby in the United States," said Caplan. "... But you can buy the sperm, you can buy the egg and you can rent the uterus." So, what I want to know is if it's cheaper than my current apartment, and if utilities are included :D" See also a good story about IVF in the Mercury News.
The NY Times also ran an article recently about the topic, that included an interesting statistic: IVF babies now account for 1% of all births in the U.S. I was genuinely surprised that it was that large a portion.
As the proud papa of IVF twins born last year, I've got to say it's an amazing process. Of course, as the male, that's easier to say. I didn't have to go through 100+ injections and get stuck with a foot-long needle to have eggs extracted, only to then get to go through pregnancy!
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I think this is going to cause trouble later on. If two people can't get pregnant on their own, there's a reason for it. It's the gene pools way of saying you're not supposed to re-produce. (aka Darwinism)
By overriding this mechanism in nature you create a child of inferior genetic make up who would no otherwise be by natural process. I think this is going to bite us in the ass in a few generations.
While I'm sure it's nice for the parents (yay! we had a baby! look at the odds we've overcome!) I think it's unfair to create a child that may have genetic defects / other problems because of their parent's own selfishness.
I also think the initial public reaction was much along those lines, how it was something unholy and a Frankensteinian perversion of natural conception.
We've come a certain distance, I guess, but I won't say a long way, I don't think.
They're all great, and I'm happy for those parents who couldn't have children otherwise.
But, has the number of couples that can't have children gone up? It always worried me. Am I just being paranoid?
Also these procedures are not cheap! That money could really change an orphan's life...
-- taking over the world, we are.
god knows there are plenty of kids who need homes, and while there's that certain [stupid] ego-stroking factor of having a kid born in [about half of] your genetic image, what about... you know- doing something good for someone who NEEDS it rather than contributing to the overpopulation problem?
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
However, there are many positive ways to deal with that situation. Adopting within N.America is a long and difficult process, partly because we don't have orphanages full of adoptable children. China, Russia, and some S.American countries do. If you have the means to get invitro fertalization done, then you probably have the means to do international adoption.
It may not be a popular point of view, but there is no rule out there that says everyone has to or should be able to have a baby if they want to, even though they can't naturally. I think it is unwise to go through all sorts of unnatural steps to have your own child, ignoring what Mother Nature decreed. This is just the point of view of an environmentalist, applied to humans. I think we need to be responsible in our environment.
I have nothing against people who have been born due to fertility treatments of one sort or anther, but I would be interested in studies tracking those people and seeing if they had higher rates of cancer and other health problems than the general population. And is a child born to an infertile couple more likely to be infertile themselves?
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
It was never really survival of the fittest, it has always been reproduciton of the fittest...
It is just that now it is social skills that make you fit rather than physical ones. Darwinism still applies...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Of course, as the male, that's easier to say. I didn't have to go through 100+ injections and get stuck with a foot-long needle to have eggs extracted, only to then get to go through pregnancy!
:-)
This is true enough. My wife went through two (failed) IVF procedures, and it's no picnic. Hormone injections mess up a woman's emotions something fierce. Overproduction of eggs can be moderately painful, as can the harvesting of those eggs (anesthetic be darned). Implantation is fairly straightforward, but then she had to remain nearly immobile on her back for several days to help the implantation "take".
Since they almost always implant more than one embryo (four was the usual number, since statistically only about 25% of implantations take), there's the higher-than-usual risk of multiple births, which sometimes means one or more must be sacrified to help the other(s) survive. And there's still no guarantees, which can be another high emotional cost for both the man and the woman.
We live in Illinois, which is almost the only U.S. state to require insurance carriers to cover IVF as a treatment for infertility -- up to either three or four times per couple, I forget which. That's not to say we never spent any money on the procedures, just that it was thousands less than it could have been.
In summary: while IVF is a remarkable medical advancement, it's still far from an exact science, even by medical standards (where they can never guarantee success in anything).
But congratulations on your twins, nevertheless.
This is like arguing that the $100,000 spent to prolong the life of your father dying from heart disease would be better spent preventing the disease in others, and you should just let him die.
For the price of IVF, they can probably afford adoption too. Another post quoted one cylce of IVF treatment as costing more than $12,000
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Money spent on IVF could be used to help [the millions of unwanted children]
So could the money spent on CDs, DVDs, video games, dining out, Rolexes, Jimmy Choos, bigger houses, Hummers -- you name it. Heck, IVF is only a fraction of the cost of raising a child -- why pick on IVFers?
Egomaniacal yuppies continue to satisfy their own selfish desires.
Unlike everyone else, selfless humanitarians all.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Call me crazy, but it seems a lot better to adopt a child than go to all of this trouble. In fact it seems downright selfish that one would rather spend tons of money rather than adopt a child that already exists. It seems so selfish that I might go so far as to argue that perhaps this desire that the child must be mine mine mine might go so far as to make people bad parents due to the fact that they are so slefish thinking of thier own needs and wants and are unable to love a child just becuse it doe snot have their DNA.
Now before I'm modded as a troll. Tell me, why isn't it selfish? Why is the idea of adoption so repellant that one would rather go through such effort to create a child?
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who is currently approximately the size and shape of a very unfit hippo - with sprog #2 due anytime now - I have to say that you probably couldn't pay me enough to go through this for any reason other than the prospect of the kiddo at the end of it - and I have (so called) easy pregnancies.
Then again, I'm in the lucky position that I can earn enough money via 'normal' channels that the prospect of a few (tens of?) thousands souldn't make me likely to do it - I appreciate that the surrogacy fee is probably a make or break figure for some.