Posted by
Playful Walrus on Wednesday, July 25, 2007 3:16:33 PM
Teri Sforza of the
Orange County Register reports on some of the consequences of our “brave new world” of “reproductive technologies”, which is another way of saying “making babies for profit.”
An audit of a defunct egg donor firm's records - suggesting that thousands of human eggs are unaccounted for - more likely reflects sloppy record-keeping than misappropriation by fertility doctors, a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine said Tuesday.
Too bad we can’t be sure. But hey, we’re only talking human lives, here.
The records at issue belong to Options National Fertility Registry, which was one of the nation's largest egg-donor registries for a decade, linking egg donors with infertility patients from coast to coast. Options was forced out of business in 2003 after getting caught up in a tangle of lawsuits in Texas, its bankruptcy petition says.
The company faltered after an Options donor, identified only as "Elizabeth," contracted to donate her eggs to one infertile couple, and later learned that the doctor gave some of her eggs to a second couple without her knowledge or consent, the bankruptcy documents say.
Isn’t that nice?
In the wake of this revelation, Options, then of Santa Fe Springs, combed through every "post-cycle" report it received from doctors over a decade of business. Those reports provide a snapshot of how many eggs each donor produced, and what became of those eggs. Information was supplied by the doctors themselves.
And none of them would
ever lie to say, protect their success rate, or make some money on the side, or feed their ego by experimenting, or by getting personally involved, now would they?
The most recent audit of those reports suggests that 2,189 eggs and 596 embryos were unaccounted for. Those cases involve 229 donors and 102 physicians at some of the nation's most prominent infertility clinics.
596 people unaccounted for – that we know about.
Options was formed in 1992 and filed for bankruptcy in 2005. At its height, it had 22 employees, contracts with hundreds of doctors and handled 60 to 80 donations per month. It earned about $2,600 for each donation.
To donors, the unaccounted-for eggs and embryos mean there might be children somewhere they do not know about.
Which can have all sorts of implications, including this one below.
It is possible, but unlikely, that her children could someday meet and accidentally marry their half-siblings.
Here we are, dealing with a situation where “extra” human beings are created and then experimented on as embryos, where you can’t really be sure you’re getting your own genetic children unless you have someone else run a DNA test, where someone else may get your children, where close relatives may be ending up in the sack or in marriages together.
If only there was
some natural source of newborns for couples unable to have children naturally to adopt. Oops- they’re getting sucked into sinks at Planned Parenthood.
Oh- and what happens if the sperm or egg or an actual human being as an embryo were given to someone else, someone who is no longer able to financially support the resulting child? Guess who can get hit up for child support? That’s right- the donor
who might not even know about the situation in the first place.