Word: vitro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another casualty of the Administration's pro-life offensive is Government support for research on in-vitro fertilization, in which eggs are extracted from a woman's ovaries, fertilized in a glass dish, then implanted in the donor's womb. Next week a House subcommittee will release a report charging that the Department of Health and Human Services has shied away from funding research on "test-tube fertilization" because of pressure from right-to-life groups. As a consequence, the discovery of new techniques to make the procedure more reliable and lower its cost (currently $6,000 for each attempted...
...Administration's hostility to in-vitro research is more puzzling than its opposition to experiments with fetal tissue. The goal of the technique is to assist infertile couples who want children, an objective that seems to square with the President's pro-family views. Opponents argue that since human life begins at conception, the accidental but inevitable destruction of some embryos during in-vitro fertilization is murder. The irony is that in their zealous defense of the lives of "unborn children," the foes of in-vitro fertilization are preventing other children from ever being born...
...polar body is detached, and a new genetic test called ! polymerase chain reaction is employed to analyze the chromosomes, which are complementary to those left in the egg's nucleus. Eggs that are not defective can then be selected and used in an increasingly common procedure known as in vitro fertilization. This involves placing the eggs in a soup of sperm and implanting resulting embryos in the mother's womb. The main difficulty is that only one in ten tries results in a birth. Yet the success rate may improve, and prefertilization diagnosis could someday be used to intercept defective...
Many medical and legal experts fear that the ruling, if upheld, could slow in-vitro research and intensify the national abortion debate. "A bad decision," says Ellen Wright Clayton, a specialist in law and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. The judge could simply have weighed the respective interests of each spouse, Clayton contends, and decided to award the eggs to Mrs. Davis without going on to say when life begins...
Such controversies underscore the lack of clear rules to help resolve many of the ambiguities raised by the decade-old, $1 billion in-vitro baby business -- particularly when the clinics and couples, like the Davises, fail to set out their rights and responsibilities in contracts. "Legislators don't want to touch this hot potato," says Boston University Law School professor Frances Miller, "so the courts have to deal with these issues." With more than 200 conception clinics around the country, and 2 million couples seeking their services, the judges may get a workout...