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Sperm bank claims $20,000 from woman who locates her daughter’s donor
Danielle Teuscher, a 30-year-old single American mother, underwent a genetic test for herself and her daughter Zoe, conceived five years ago using sperm donation. The gamete donation came from Northwest Cryobank, a sperm bank that guarantees donor anonymity under...
Women receiving IVF increase risk of serious complications on delivery by 40%
IVF increases the risk of serious complications on delivery such as sepsis, bleeding or ICU admission by 40%. A Canadian study has just published this figure. The team of researchers at McGill University in Canada followed up 60,000 women, 11,500 of whom had conceived...
US sperm bank sued for providing sperm from a schizophrenic donor
On 4 February 2019 in Atlanta, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit against an Atlanta sperm bank accused of having "fraudulently promoted a donor as healthy and highly educated when he was actually a schizophrenic convicted felon who dropped out of...
Euthanasia, an alarming review of legislation in Switzerland, Belgium and Holland
Whilst the question of euthanasia is regularly raised with French legislators, an initial evaluation of the legalisation concerning euthanasia and assisted suicide in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland was published in La Revue du Praticien in January 2019. This review...
Donald Trump opposes late-term abortions
On Tuesday, during his State of the Union address, US President Donald Trump raised the issue of abortion. He called for a restriction on late-term abortions, referring to controversies over the recent laws adopted by the states of New York and Virginia (see US:...
US overdose deaths account for 17.6% of organ transplants
Between 1999 and 2016, the number of overdose-induced deaths more than tripled in the United States. This impacted on organ transplants with a concomitant rise in the number of organs harvested from overdose victims. 17.6% of organs transplanted in the USA have since...
Genetically modified babies: WHO launches ethics committee
Following the announcement by Chinese researcher He Jiankui of the birth of genetically modified babies[1],, the WHO is set to "launch an ad-hoc committee on genome editing in early March, aimed at making recommendations and acting as a sounding board for a number of...
Organ trafficking in China: scientists call for 400 studies to be retracted
A group of Australian researchers has requested the retraction of more than 400 scientific articles following the publication in the journal BMJ Open of work revealing that countless human organs have been harvested unethically from Chinese prisoners in recent...
Abortion: Louisiana law blocked by US Supreme Court
On 7 February, the US Supreme Court blocked a Louisiana law from taking effect. Opponents said it was supposed to "restrict access to abortion". The decision was taken by a "narrow majority", with Chief Justice John Roberts voting for the stay. Adopted in 2014,...
Genome editing: towards new international guidelines?
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Dr Victor Dzau, President of the National Academy of Medicine in the United States, said that the current guidelines for gamete and embryo genome editing were "not clear enough". He called for a review of the current...
In Scotland, NHS covers in-vitro fertilisation for gay couple
In Scotland, in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) for a married gay couple will be covered for the first time by the National Health Service (NHS), which will fund "the process of fertilising a donor egg and implanting the embryo into the surrogate mother". Since 2013,...
UK Department of Health to extend sequencing to “genomic volunteers”
Following the genomic sequencing programme of 100,000 genomes[1] , the NHS wishes to make this available to healthy individuals on a voluntary basis. The aim is to enable scientists to "have a better understanding of diseases and human genetics" and to "gain an...