January 21, 2025
(Associated Press) – Vermont’s child welfare agency relied on baseless allegations about a pregnant woman’s mental health to secretly investigate her and win custody of her daughter before the baby was born, according to a lawsuit that alleges the state … Read More
January 15, 2025
(The Atlantic) – Thanks to more sophisticated genetic-testing techniques, IVF—an expensive, invasive treatment originally developed to help people with fertility troubles—is becoming a tool for optimizing health. A handful of companies offer screening for diseases and disorders that range from … Read More
December 11, 2024
(Wired) – “People don’t always realize they are creating a human being and not a piece of furniture.” For years now, aspiring parents have been designing their children. Screening embryos for disease-causing genes during IVF, selecting their future baby’s sex, … Read More
November 12, 2024
(The Atlantic) – Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. … Read More
November 7, 2024
(Nature) – Scientists raise the alarm following updated research ethics guidelines on heritable human genome editing. Researchers have voiced concerns after South Africa updated its health-research ethics guidelines to include a new section on heritable (or germline) human genome editing. … Read More
November 4, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Cast aside in favor of sons, some women say trauma of one-child policy shattered their sense of family Having scrapped the one-child policy, the Communist Party is now championing the term “family values” and pressuring women … Read More
October 24, 2024
(Wired) – The web’s biggest AI-powered search engines are featuring the widely debunked idea that white people are genetically superior to other races. AI-infused search engines from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity have been surfacing deeply racist and widely debunked research … Read More
October 23, 2024
(The Guardian) – There is broad scientific consensus that intelligence is partly inherited and that genes play a significant role. But pinning this incredibly complex trait down to precise contributions from specific genes is a far more thorny scientific challenge … Read More
October 18, 2024
(The Guardian) – Heliospect’s services were marketed at up to $50,000 for 100 embryos, undercover footage shows A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the … Read More
September 27, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – Long-distance space travel can wreak havoc on human health. There’s radiation and microgravity to contend with, as well as the psychological toll of isolation and confinement. Research on identical twin astronauts has also revealed a slew … Read More
September 20, 2024
(The Atlantic) – Deb Jenssen never wanted her children to suffer from the disease that killed her brother at 28. The illness, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, initially manifests in childhood as trouble with strength and walking, then worsens until the heart … Read More
September 18, 2024
(Plough) – If only her parents had been spared the terrible freedom of having to choose whether to have a child with a disability. “My husband and I decided that it was a loving decision not to bring her into … Read More
September 17, 2024
(The Times) – In the state’s low-regulation fertility clinics the perfect child may soon be available — for a price. Megan Agnew meets the doctors, mums and surrogates Welcome to California, fertility capital of the world. Thanks to many years … Read More
September 9, 2024
(New York Times) – A generation ago, bioethicists fought over whether assisted reproductive technology would be normalized or made taboo. Now there’s strong public consensus that it should be not only tolerated but also celebrated. But this may be a … Read More
September 6, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Beijing formally ends a program that was propelled by birth restrictions and that had been largely on hold since the pandemic China said it was formally ending almost all international adoptions, shutting down a process that … Read More
August 22, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – Futurists who write about the destiny of humankind have imagined all sorts of changes. We’ll all be given auxiliary chromosomes loaded with genetic goodies, or maybe we’ll march through life as a member of a pod … Read More
August 16, 2024
(The Conversation) – I’m a medical anthropologist and bioethicist who studies the values and experiences driving prenatal gene therapy developments, including genome editing. Human prenatal genome editing has not happened yet – as far as we know. Prenatal genome editing … Read More
July 26, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist whose controversial 2018 experiment led to the birth of three gene-edited children, says he’s returned to work on the concept of altering the DNA of people at conception, but with a … Read More
July 18, 2024
(Newsweek) – China’s fertility rate, or births expected per woman during her lifetime, amid the rising cost of living in major cities and shifting cultural attitudes toward having children, is 1.0. This puts the country in the company of neighboring … Read More
July 12, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – The policy supercharged the country’s workforce: By caring for fewer children, young people could be more productive and put aside more money. For years, just as China was opening its economy, the share of working-age Chinese … Read More
July 4, 2024
(ABC News) – In a landmark decision, Japan’s Supreme Court ordered the government Wednesday to pay suitable compensation to about a dozen victims who were forcibly sterilized under a now-defunct Eugenics Protection Law that was designed to eliminate offspring of … Read More
June 7, 2024
(STAT News) – Federal officials, medical organizations, and reproductive health advocacy groups have expressed outrage in response to STAT’s recent investigation revealing that women with sickle cell disease have felt pressured into sterilizations as recently as 2017 and 2022. (Read … Read More
June 7, 2024
(Harvard Medical School) – Three out of four adults in the U.S. support the use of emerging technologies that estimate a future child’s likelihood of developing certain health conditions influenced by multiple genes — such as diabetes, heart disease, and depression … Read More
May 14, 2024
(The New Atlantis) – It’s pretty simple. People want children who look like them, who will be healthy and succeed in life,” said Lillian Tara, a master’s student at Harvard University who offers fertility education to young women. More specifically, … Read More
May 9, 2024
(Slate) – Having a baby via IVF first requires creating an embryo in a Petri dish. Embryonic testing can reveal secrets like genetic disorders. That allows it to serve as a screening tool for parents who carry genes for rare … Read More
