| Today's post is shared from jurist.com/ The one dream that will never fade is falling in love, marrying the love of your life and starting a family. Now, imagine John and Jane Doe, a couple who fell in love in high school and got happily married after years of dating. The only thing missing to complete their fairytale romance was a family. After many unsuccessful attempts, the couple soon learned that they were infertile. Seeking help from the medical profession, they learned about the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to enhance their chances of becoming parents. Pursuing the ART method, John and Jane found a donor whose sperm or eggs they wanted to use. They were assured from the sperm or egg bank that they chose a donor that had undergone careful screening and had been tested for health problems as required by law. Based on these assurances, the couple conceived using the donated reproductive tissue (DRT) that they procured from the bank and successfully gave birth to twins. Shortly after birth, both twins were diagnosed with a life threatening genetic disorder. This unfortunate outcome is the sad reality that arises from inadequate federal regulation of DRT in ART fertility treatments. ART treatments entail surgically removing eggs from a woman's ovaries, combining them with sperm in the laboratory and returning them to the woman's body or implanting them in another woman's body. In the US alone, 20,000-30,000 babies a year are conceived (PDF) using... |
