The Daily Mail and MailOnline have given massive coverage to the news that the Department of Health has donated £77,000 to fund a national sperm bank which will be based in Birmingham, aiming to recruit 1000 sperm donors within the next 3 years. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2714321/NHS-fund-sperm-bank-lesbians-New-generation-fatherless-families-paid-YOU.html The National Gamete Donation Trust is apparently setting […] Read more
Gretchen Vogel in SCIENCE, 21 February, 2014, explores the ethics of creating a child using DNA from three adult sources (mother, father, egg donor). http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/02/fda-considers-trials-three-parent-embryos CORE is totally opposed to the proposed experiments but we recommend this article as the science is explained in very accessible language and the ethical dilemmas are presented in an […] Read more
When the newly appointed UK Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, announced last week that he would support lowering the upper limit for abortion to 12 weeks, nobody could have imagined what a headline grabbing statement it would turn out to be. Much of the subsequent media attention focused on discussions about the beginning of life and […] Read more
We share the dream of seeking cures for strokes, spinal injury, cancers and all the other conditions which beset modern man, but the realization of that dream cannot depend on the taking of life of other human beings, no matter how early in development those tiny lives may be.
RCOG blatantly endorses status quo of UK Abortion Law in Government commissioned reports Two reports, commissioned by the Government in relationship to abortion were published last week by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) on ‘Fetal Awareness’ and ‘Termination of Pregnancy for Fetal Abnormality’ (*). CORE works with many colleagues nationally and internationally […] Read more
For some years now there have been big question marks relating to the overall safety of assisted reproductive technology, and whether the children born have any increased risk of poorer health outcomes than those conceived naturally. The processes involved in sperm selection and subsequent fertilisation procedures (ICSI), as well as pre-implantation testing of the embryo […] Read more
Prof Stephen Wilkinson, from Keele University, has published a controversial article supporting social sex selection on the BBC site, ‘Scrubbing Up’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8665282.stm Wilkinson argues that it is time to lift the prohibition in the United Kingdom on using assisted reproductive methods to identify and choose the sex of one’s child for social reasons. In a […] Read more
A philosopher, Robert Sparrow, and a stem cell scientist, David Cram, from Monash University in Victoria, Australia, in the May edition of Reproductive Medicine Online argue the case for ‘Saviour embryos? Preimplantation genetic diagnosis as a therapeutic technology.’ (*) Reading this title quickly you might question what is new in this proposal. Read it again […] Read more
The offer of free egg donor IVF to one lucky participant at a meeting in London this week has hit the headlines worldwide. CORE has commented on the vulnerability of the women selling their eggs and recommends that you read the attached witness statement from a woman seriously affected by the process, and which was […] Read more
Clinics Using Embryos for Target Practice The number of procedures required for a trainee to reach proficiency in embryo-transfer is unknown. A new study* attempted to determine the learning curve of embryo-transfer by monitoring the pregnancy rates (PR) per transfer, carried out by five trainees. A PR of 40% was chosen to define adequate performance, […] Read more
