science + bioethics

I enjoy reporting on questions whose answers are not at all intuitive, especially ones about reproduction and technology.

For The New York Times:

– The Embryo Question: A three-part series on how reproductive science is testing our ethics and laws, from research labs to fertility clinics to the courts. Part One asks what time limit we should set on growing embryos in a lab in order to study them. Part Two looks at an emerging technology that promises parents they can choose the healthiest embryo, and asks whether human life should be optimized in this way. Part Three looks at the many ways courts have struggled to grasp embryos’ sui generis status as neither property nor people.

For The New Yorker:

– A new breed of entrepreneurs, backed by a flood of venture capital and private equity funds, is transforming the fertility industry, marking a shift from treating infertility to “selling fertility” in the form of preemptive procedures such as egg and sperm freezing.
– The development of human research protections for people participating in clinical trials has left pregnant women out in the cold. This has been particularly problematic for the millions of reproductive-age essential and frontline workers who need a Covid-19 vaccine.
– When Poland changed its IVF law to ban single women from accessing it, a number of women who had already begun treatment were caught in limbo. What happens when the government seizes your embryos?
– The question of whether the definition of infertility should be expanded to included the “socially infertile” — single women and queer couples, for example — opens up the larger question: Is there a right to have a baby?

For The Atlantic:

– Procreation, says philosopher Mara van der Lugt, might be “the greatest philosophical problem of our time.” I examine her inquiry into what it means to have a child.
– Egg freezing was never really about careers, a new book argues. The problem is men.
– Is rape is “inevitable” in conflict situations?

For The Cut:

– Patients of size are being told by fertility doctors that they’re too fat to freeze their eggs. I looked at what’s behind BMI limits for egg-freezing patients, and whether these patients are being needlessly turned away.
– Would you share your frozen eggs? Inside the ethical questions raised by a small but growing number of “freeze and share” programs, in which fertility clinics offer women free egg freezing, in exchange for giving away half of their eggs to an infertile patient.

For Romper:

– Women who’ve been told their BMI is too high to be an IVF patient are turning to Ozempic-type drugs to lose enough weight to begin fertility treatment. But whether or how these drugs affecting a pregnant woman or her fetus is still unknown.