Contrary to the expectations of many fertility clinics, demand for egg freezing has increased sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting longstanding ethical concerns about egg freezing clinics.

When the rapper T. I. disclosed on a podcast that he takes his 18-year-old daughter to a yearly gynecological examination to ensure that her hymen is still intact, the reaction of most people was condemnation. His obsession with her virginity is creepy, his subjecting her to an invasive procedure that has no medical value is controlling, and his willingness to talk about it publicly displays contempt for her rights to privacy and dignity. Some think that the law should prohibit physicians from performing or supervising virginity examinations. But the law is not the best means for dealing with the problem, and the problem is not simply virginity testing.

Professionals and the public in China first learned of the jail sentence of He Jiankui from the report of Xinhua News Agency. No information, including any interpretation, was provided by the Court. But the reported words of the sentence are so ambiguous as to leave room for different interpretations. We believe that the public has the right to know more than Xinhua News Agency reported.

Last month, the journal Nature published a call for a global moratorium on heritable human genome editing. Despite criticism, notably from CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, the moratorium is just what's needed now.

When the world’s first research on editing the genes of human embryos by Chinese scientists  was published in an international journal in 2015, a report in the New York Times characterised the key issue involved as “a scientific ethical divide between China and West.” Earlier this year, an art...

Last March, 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos were lost at University Hospitals Fertility Center in Cleveland when the temperature in cryogenic tanks spiked due to human error. Officials at University Hospitals have apologized repeatedly to the affected patients, and say that they are working to provide ...

Last month, England announced that it would allow women to take the second pill required for a medical abortion–misoprostol–at home, rather than requiring them to travel to a clinic. The policy brings England in line with Scotland and Wales, as well as many other countries, and it elimina...

A transgender woman has successfully breastfed a baby. This case has been hailed as a “breakthrough” for transgender families. I will argue that being transgender is only peripherally relevant, and the potential risks to infants are unjustified.

Little noticed in the United States but a big deal in France, President Emmanuel Macron announced in January that he is creating a bioethics commission to review the country’s policies on a wide range of subjects, including human reproduction, euthanasia, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. ...

With the wild popularity of the new TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, surrogacy is back in the limelight. The Hulu show, based on the cautionary novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood, follows Offred, a woman who is isolated and confined for the sole purpose of bearing children for the people who ...