Word: embryos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Diana Barger of Virginia could be a textbook case of an infertile couple. Diana's fallopian tubes and left ovary are blocked with scar tissue, ironically the result of an intrauterine device (I.U.D.) she used for three years. Even if an egg did manage to become fertilized, the embryo might be rejected by her uterus, which has been deformed since birth. Richard has his own difficulties: his sperm count is 6.7 million per milliliter, considerably below the number ordinarily required for fertilization under normal conditions. Says Diana: "I never thought getting pregnant would be so difficult...
...there are virtually no new laws to deal with this method of conception. In the wake of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, however, many states passed laws forbidding or limiting "experimentation" with fetuses. Of the 25 such state laws, eleven specifically apply to embryos; doctors in some of these states fear that they might be prosecuted for carrying out the IVF, particularly if the technique fails, as it does about four times out of five. And six states have laws that seem to forbid freezing an embryo, on the ground that this would constitute illegal experimentation...
...sperm and stored it in an incubator. The next day the hospital doctor was furiously scolded by his superior, Dr. Raymond Vande Wiele, who not only accused him of dangerous and unethical practices but also stopped the experiment entirely by unsealing the incubated container, thus killing the embryo. The couple sued the hospital and Vande Wiele and won $50,000 in damages. Yet when the hospital opened its own IVF program in 1983, Vande Wiele became its codirector...
...Illinois, the first state to deal specifically with IVF, the legislature decided in 1979 to make any doctor who undertakes such a procedure the legal custodian of the embryo-and liable for possible prosecution under an 1877 law against child abuse. The result was that many Illinois doctors, though not specifically forbidden to perform IVF, refused to do so. The state attorney general said that most simple IVF procedures would not violate the law, so a number of doctors went ahead. Still, one couple, identified as John and Mary Smith, who have been married for nine years and have...
...Strasbourg tried to work out some international policies on reproduction technology, but they gave up in despair. In Germany, where there are no laws either permitting or forbidding surrogate motherhood, a man in Bad Oeynhausen was fined $1,750 for advertising for a woman willing to gestate an embryo and then give the child up for adoption to a childless couple. Before he could find such a woman, he was fined because the law forbids any ads in connection with adoptions...