Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Legal Issues - Designer Babies Part 7

Hello peoples! Today we'll be talking about all of the legal issues surrounding IVF. Let's get started!

The main legal issue is ownership and custody.

What if a couple started on the process of IVF, but before the embryo was placed back inside the woman, the couple divorces, and they have to decide what to do with the baby. It is possible that both of them still want the baby, and they will have shared custody, but what if the father does not want the baby? The mother can still have the baby, but what if the father refuses to pay child support, and the mother can not afford to provide for the baby? There is no "right" way to resolve this issue, since the mother wants to provide for the baby, but is not able to. The father should also be able to not have the baby, since they divorced before it was even in the womb. This is a very difficult topic but it does occur sometimes in IVF.

What if a couple uses IVF, but uses a donor egg? Whose baby is it now? Is it the father and his wife, or is it the woman who donated her egg? Technically, the egg donor can fight for legal ownership of the baby, but it would be a very long and messy process. If the woman who donated her egg does not win, but still wants to be active with her baby, then she could be forced to pay child support.

What if the wrong embryo was placed in the woman? For example, if two women were going to the clinic to have the embryos placed back inside of them, what happens if the wrong embryo is placed in the women? For an example of this happening in real life click here. Also, just November of 2015, a woman was implanted with the wrong embryos, and instead of the doctor telling her that they made a mistake, the aborted the babies without her knowledge. For the full article please click here.

Just for the record, I did not come up with these articles by myself. I give all credit for the links to my best friend Sophia, or All Schafsnitz, who has a blog over here. Go check her out! Sophia rocks!

Hope it helped and again thank you Sophia for letting me use your articles,

Lydia

What does the Catholic Church Teach about IVF? - Designer Babies Part 6

Hello guys! Now we're going to talk about what the Catholic Church teaches about IVF. First, we'll be talking about the major issues the Church had with the whole process.

The Church teaches that conception should take place in the womb, which they call natural conception. The reason the Catholic Church also teaches against IVF is that if the embryos are not properly taken care of, they can be killed in the laboratory. If even just one person makes a mistake, any embryos could be damaged or killed.

 Even if the embryos are not killed, they are usually frozen in liquid nitrogen. Also, embryos are used for stem cell research. Also, if someone messes up, the embryos can be labeled wrong and placed in the wrong woman's body.

Hope this helped!

Lydia

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Concept Map


Egg Donation and Surrogate Mothers - Designer Babies Part 5

Hey guys! Today's lesson is about Egg Donation and Surrogate Mothers.

What is Egg Donation? Egg Donation is a process in which a woman is put on fertility medication and one or several of her eggs is extracted and sold to a laboratory, where it is fertilized through IVF.

What is a Surrogate Mother? A Surrogate Mother is a woman who carries and gives birth to a child and then gives it completely over to the father and his wife. This way, if the wife is infertile, the father can fertilize another woman's egg, and then custody of the child is passed completely to the father.

Hope this helped!

Lydia

Savior Siblings and Snowflake Adoption - Designer Babies Part 4

Hi guys! Today's lesson is about Savior Siblings and Snowflake Adoption. Let's get started!

What is a Savior Sibling? A Savior Sibling is a child born for the sole purpose of donating organs for living siblings with a fatal disease. For example, if a child has a non-functional liver, the parents can use IVF to create another child. The doctors can then remove the second child's liver, and donate it to the first child, saving his or her life.

What is Snowflake Adoption is when an organization adopts any leftover embryos from IVF and raise them. In my previous post about IVF, I mentioned that any leftover embryos are preserved in liquid nitrogen. Well, if the embryos are left too long, they can die. To prevent this from happening, some people adopt the embryos, and raise them as their own children.

Hope this helped!

Lydia

Genetic Engineering and More... - Designer Babies Part 3

Hello everybody! Today, continuing with my Designer Babies project, we will be talking about some more things that go along with IVF.

Sometimes during IVF, a process called Genetic Engineering takes place. Genetic Engineering is when doctors add new DNA to an organism, giving them different traits than the traits they would have had originally. (e.g. if the child has the genes for blonde hair or brown hair, the doctor can make sure that the child has blonde hair, instead of the possibility of brown hair).

Something else that kind of goes along with Genetic Engineering is Three-parent In-Vitro Fertilization, or TPIVF. TPIVF is a process in which the nucleus of an egg is inserted into the cytoplasm of another egg with different DNA, and fertilizing the hybrid egg with a sperm. In simpler terms, the doctors combine the DNA of two eggs from different women, and fertilize it. The reason why some people would want to do this is maybe neither parent carries  the gene for a certain trait which they want their child to have. The parents then find an egg donor with that trait, and purchase that egg. Then the nucleus of the mother's egg is dipped into the cytoplasm of the donor egg.

Hope this helped!

Lydia

In-Vitro Fertilization - Designer Babies Part 2

Hey all! Today's lesson is about In-Vitro Fertilization, or IVF.

What is IVF? IVF is the process of manually combining the egg and sperm in a laboratory dish, and then placing the embryo back in the uterus. Sometimes the embryo is placed in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus. Usually, when the doctors extract the eggs, they extract more than one, so that if the first egg does not get fertilized, they will have extra eggs to complete the process. If any eggs that have been extracted are not used, they are preserved in liquid nitrogen, enabling them to be used again.

Before the embryo can be placed in the uterus or fallopian tube, there is a test done, called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis, or PIGD. PIGD is a test used to confirm that there are no genetic or chromosomal disorders in place during IVF. This can also be called Embryo Screening.

That's all for now! Hope it helped...

Lydia

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Designer Babies - Designer Babies Part 1

Hello, everybody! Today's lesson is about designer babies. If you don't know what that is, I'm about to tell you!


 What is a designer baby? A designer baby is a baby whose genetic makeup has been selected in order to confirm that a specific gene is present. In other words, the parents of the baby choose what genes, or traits, they want their child to possess before the baby is born (e.g. they decide whether the baby will have brown hair or blonde hair). The parents can also completely change the genetics of the baby. This all takes place through a process called In-Vitro Fertilization.

Hope this helped you all! There will be more posts on this topic very soon!

Lydia