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Surrogacy: twins born of different fathers and therefore with different nationalities?
Andrew Dvash-Banks, an American, and Elad Dvash-Banks, an Israeli, live in Canada and married in 2010. In September 2016, a surrogate mother gave birth to twins Ethan and Aiden for them, who were conceived using an egg donor and two sperm samples from the two men. The...
A constitutional “right to abortion” in Kansas?
Last Friday, the highest court in Kansas deduced a “right to abortion” from the State Constitution According to the court, the “equal and inalienable rights” proclaimed in the Bill of Rights of the Kansas Constitution imply a “natural right of personal autonomy”....
U.S.: Alabama criminalizes abortion, Oklahoma forced to extend its time limits for medical abortion
Alabama's House of Representatives voted 74 to 3 on Tuesday to pass a bill that would make abortion a Class A felony, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 99 years. Attempted abortion would become a Class C felony, which holds a sentence of up to 10 years in...
Donald Trump defends the right of conscientious objection for all health care workers
“Just today we finalized new protections of conscience rights for physicians, pharmacists, nurses, teachers, students and faith-based charities”,Trump told an interfaith audience in the White House Rose Garden. The objective is to protect all health professionals...
An American arrested for surrogacy scam
A federal criminal complaint has been filed against 37-year-old Grégory Blosser, from Florida, in connection with his business activities as head of company TSG, The Surrogacy Group, which he had operated since 2012. He is accused of setting up a scheme to defraud...
Pig-human chimeras: a clinical trial announced in Japan
The researcher Hiromitsu Nakauchi has announced that an experiment is starting in Japan to culture a human pancreas in pigs. This statement comes as Japan has just relaxed its legislation on chimeras [1]. Nevertheless, Nakauchi still needs to obtain approval from the...
An autonomous surgical robot in a beating heart
The latest innovation by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital is an autonomous robot navigating through pig hearts. This autonomous catheter can move by itself in a beating heart: it is equipped with optical ‘whiskers’, enabling it to move like certain rodents...
Towards new regenerative therapies to create in-vivo blood vessels?
Faced with the permanent shortage of organ donors, researchers are looking into alternatives. 3D-bioprinting "to build fully functional organs outside the body" has already begun to prove its worth: for example, to create artificial corneas that can be transplanted...
Egg freezing to compensate for Scotland’s falling birth rate?
In response to declining fertility rates in Scotland, the Conservatives have asked the government to consider "freezing oocytes" [1] for all women in Scotland. "Such opportunities are important and are increasingly becoming the norm throughout the world," said Miles...
The United Kingdom: presumed consent to organ donation will not apply to genitals
The United Kingdom has recently adopted the presumed consent system for organ donation (see United Kingdom and Scotland introduce presumed consent to organ donation). The new law will come into force next year and specifies that a deceased person’s genitals and...
Using CRISPR-Cas9 on cassava in Australia leads to the spread of mutated viruses
To make cassava plants resistant to ‘mosaic virus’, which can cause almost total loss of these plants in an epidemic, Australian researchers tried to "recombine the virus’s DNA" by genome editing, using CRISPR-Cas9. Both frightening and unexpected results were...
Surrogacy: “A woman cannot be used as a means of reproduction”
"Faced with these undeniable advances in managing infertility, potential problems have arisen from their use". During a debate organised by the European Lawyers' Union (UAE) in Marseille, Gérard Abitbol – the UAE’s dean of honorary presidents – addressed a panel of...