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NPR: Adoption Agency Offers Up Embryos to Couples (Embryo Brokering)

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Up2Late Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 07:29 PM
Original message
NPR: Adoption Agency Offers Up Embryos to Couples (Embryo Brokering)
(I find news of this new "Embryo Bank" VERY Disturbing. It was bad enough that our so-called "president" is helping to promote "Snowflake Babies" at the White House, as an alternative to using leftover Fertility Clinic Human Blastocysts (NOT "Embryos" as the MSM calls them) as an alternative to giving them to Stem Cell research labs and then turns around and say he is against International baby brokers and Human Trafficking, but this one takes unethical Capitalism to a new level.

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like just one step away from brokering and/or selling of extra Body Parts and/or Babies. The so-called "Embryo Bank" is not the brokering of extra Human Blastocysts, as you will see in the text (or hear in the audio) at the link below, the woman who runs this "Embryo Bank" recruits young women who are willing to supply (sell) her eggs and then "...charge $2,500 per embryo..." to her "clients." Ms Ryan says she's "...not troubled by what I do...," but to put it simply, she finds Poor Women willing to sell "extra" parts of their body to people who have the money to pay for them. Or am I over reacting here?)

Adoption Agency Offers Up Embryos to Couples


Listen to this story...
by Joe Palca

All Things Considered, January 8, 2007 · A company in San Antonio, Texas, is creating what it says is the world's first embryo bank. The embryos in the bank will not be used for research. Instead, they'll be available to infertile couples who wish to have a child. Even so, the very notion of an embryo bank raises some difficult legal and ethical questions.

The embryo bank at the Abraham Center of Life is run by Jennalee Ryan. For the past 20 years or so, she's been running an adoption agency. She says the bank is just one more way she can help people have children.

"I've labeled it the world's first human-embryo bank, although as of yet, it's a bank without anything in it," Ryan says. "And the reason for that is because, as these embryos become available to families that are looking for children, they're all taken."

To produce the first set of embryos for the bank, Ryan found a young woman willing to supply her eggs. She bought the sperm over the Internet. Put the two together, and you get an embryo.

"We charge $2,500 per embryo, which goes towards the cost of the services, and that includes the medications, the fees that the egg donors are paid, and so forth...."

(more and audio at link) <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6749036>


Also, here's a link to the best website I've found regarding the stages of the Human Embryo:

<http://www.visembryo.com/baby/carnegiestages.html>
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Ilsa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 07:44 PM
Response to Original message
1. One part donated and another part foraged?
All kinds of problems can come up from this unless there is some detail on the ethnicity of the couples (Tay Sachs, CF come to mind) and medical history on both of them.

What if you have a man who had been in Iraq for several years donating sperm? Those babies are more likely to have birth defects that the recipient of the embryo won't know about until she has to decide to keep the baby or abort.

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Up2Late Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 08:10 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. Yup, that too.
This almost sounds like the plot of "Brave New World" or some of the recent science fiction movies from the last few years. (I still need to read that book, keep forgetting to look for it.)
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Warpy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 08:42 PM
Response to Original message
3. The dirty secrets about embryo "adoption"
are that frozen embryos decline in viability over time, that few of them will actually implant, of those that implant, few go to term, and that the whole process is a hideously expensive one, comparable to in vitro and with less success rate. That's with DONATED embryos.

These are just fast buck people hoping to cash in on the misery of women, and getting to the point where one's eggs can be harvested for in vitro is a miserable one.

But then, hell they're only women, right?
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Ilsa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 09:37 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Not just frozen stuff, either.
I think I heard they are discovering that almost any form of reproductive assistance carries additional risks of possible disability for the baby, even just interfering by taking the sperm, "washing" it to make it easier to implant directly in the uterus of a woman who has had HCG shot, etc. I think any of the manipulation might be creating problems in a very small number of cases. Very small number, but higher than with unassisted fertilization.
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Up2Late Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-09-07 03:56 PM
Response to Original message
5. kick n/t
:kick:
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Megahurtz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-09-07 04:02 PM
Response to Original message
6. SICK!!!
:puke:
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