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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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.....you can rent a uterus, but it is illegal most places to rent a vagina.....so I guess that means renting the uterus grants you vagina flyover rights? otherwise how are yo ugoing to get there?
Don't waste your time, they are only offering a 9 month lease.
"So, what I want to know is if it's cheaper than my current apartment"
That depends if it's a womb with a view.
BA-DUM-CHA!
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
So, what I want to know is if it's cheaper than my current apartment, and if utilities are included
Yep, the utilities are included, but the plumbing tends to leak a lot for the first couple years.
if( read(this) ) { you = programmer; }
I Think I'm A Clone Now
Isn't it strange
Feels like I'm lookin' in the mirror
What would people say
If only they knew that I was
Part of some geneticist's plan (plan-plan-plan)
Born to be a carbon copy man (man-man-man)
There in a petri dish late one night
They took a donor's body cell and fertilized a human egg and so I say
I think I'm a clone now
There's always two of me just a-hangin' around
I think I'm a clone now
'Cause every chromosome is a hand-me-down.....
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.
IVF has reduced the number of tubal surgeries by 50%.
Nova recently had a great episode about IVF and other techniques. Some of it was actually kind of scary, like the tech in a fertility clinic who explained why multiple births are so common. His take was that it's all market pressure. If women look at the statistics for a fertility clinic, they will see that some percentage of all IVFs resulted in birth. Well, if you cram 5 viable eggs back in, instead of 2, you *are* more likely to get multiples, but you're also less likely to damage your success record in terms of viable implantations....
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.
In the August issue of Wired magazine, there was quite a disgusting infoporn about how you could sell your body for $46 million. It priced egg cells at $7,000/egg and sperm at $75/donation.
It's... News for Nerds! Stuff that Matters! La-de-da-de-da-DE-da!
I have sex with women, you insensitive clod!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
There are lots of genetic problems that technology is able to overcome. Do you have vision problems? Surely you arent suggesting that folks with inferior vision shouldnt have been born in the first place, rather than having their vision corrected via glasses and / or medication? Do you suffer from asthma? Today, with the proper medication, there are asthma sufferers who are able to compete in the Olympics. Do you have diabetes (OK - not sure if this is a genetic defect, but the point still stands)? Should people with diabetes be allowed to die in order to "purify" the gene pool?
Human evolution is a different ballgame. People today are physically larger overall than their medievial ancestors because of better nutrition. They live a lot longer because of better health care and dentistry. They can live in harsh environments thanks to technological solutions like air-conditioners and winter jackets, and shoes. Why do you think the Luddite way is any better? IMHO, the good old days werent really that good - and if people do think so, its only because they tend to forget the numerous small nits from earlier days rather easily.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
It's fairly obvious, by now, that humanity is no longer at a point where natural selection, in the genetic sense of the term, applies.
People who possess survival advantages don't tend to breed more. Almost any survival-limiting problem (problems controlling weight, respiratory problems, bad joints, whatever) are corrected or otherwise overcome via modern medicine, at least to the extent that you can still generally find someone to bear children with you, if you're so inclined.
Also, the majority of evolution for humans, now, is social rather than genetic in nature. That is to say, much more of our adult skillset is learned rather than genetically hard-wired. So, lack of genetically-driven selection isn't really a problem except where learning disabilities become a factor.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
When I was a kid, sex education was fascinating. So was masturbation. So was my Jr. Scientists microscope.
Let me put it another way, i've seen my own sperm.
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.
If a baby is conceived by IVF, they're called test tube babies.
If a baby is conceived after drunken passion, then could it be called a beer bottle baby?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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.
"Still more Sex.com"
"Petri Dish Babies, 25 Years Later"
For crying out loud, what's happening to slashdot??!
Oh wait...
"Laptops for warm climates"
Much better
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
For the price of IVF, they can probably afford adoption too. Another post quoted one cylce of IVF treatment as costing more than $12,000
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
I agree with your points entirely -- I'm extremely frustrated by the resources devoted to fertility treatments vs. those devoted to the children we already have. (Multi-thousand-$ international adoptions also get my goat, BTW.) But one of your points needs clarification:
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.
In some cultures, there are rules that make it harder to adopt than to undertake extreme measures. In March, 2002, a Saudi Arabian woman underwent a uterus transplant rather than adopt or look into "hiring" a surrogate mother, because of religious and cultural reasons.
Again, I agree with you that this is a waste of resources, and quite likely counterproductive. Not only did the woman not conceive, but her new uterus lost its blood supply after about three months and was removed (again). Even if she had been able to conceive, the effects of powerful anti-rejection drugs on her baby would be hard to predict.
Meanwhile, if I may make a rash generalization, her Filipino maid probably could have put the woman in touch with an orphanage with plenty of healthy babies needing homes.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
What do bugs have to do with anything, anyway?
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?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
of whether diabetes is hereditary is yes (and no).
Type 1 (or juvenile) diabetes may or may not be genetic in all cases. It was thought for years that type 1 diabetes was sporadic... until some familial clusters were identified, and some related genes located.
Type 2 (or adult) diabetes is almost certainly genetic in a large number of cases, particularly as it relates to "syndrome X," a constellation of high blood pressure, high cholesterol/lipids, diabetes, and insulin resistance. If you want a cocktail that increases your risk for coronary artery disease, cigarette smoking aside, you couldn't ask for a worse mix than the above. It does seem, however, that people with these genes express the syndrome more acutely when they become overweight (weight loss often ameliorates these conditions).
Darwin has been largely supplanted these days, but to be fair, our environment is radically different, with different selection pressures. Everyone has genetic defects, but they may still contribute in a valuable way to society and the human race. Alcoholism may be linked to genetics in some cases, but we would certainly be poorer without the Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, etc.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
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.