Television actress Sofia Vergara and her ex-fiancé are tussling over what should happen to embryos they created through in vitro fertilization in 2013.
The 42-year-old Modern Family actress wants the two female embryos to remain frozen indefinitely. Her ex, Nick Loeb, is suing to gain control over them. In a New York Times op-ed, Loeb wrote that he wants them implanted in a surrogate and that he intends to raise the children himself.
Courts in similar cases have typically ruled in favor of those wishing to avoid bringing such embryos to term. In this case, the contract states that the embryos can be brought to term only with both parties’ consent, but it did not provide for a plan in the event of separation — only death.
This clash is the predictable result of an assisted reproduction industry that some experts liken to the Wild West in terms of its regulatory environment, and to Frankenstein’s monster in terms of its ethical ramifications. It highlights the necessity of revisiting the ethical and legal questions at the heart of a business that’s based on the creation and commercialization of human beings.
Assisted reproduction technology (ART) is a multi-billion-dollar industry, encompassing in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, and surrogacy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1.5 percent of all American births are conceived through some version of it.
Because the technology is often expensive — one cycle of IVF typically costs about $12,000 — it has generated huge revenues, projected to top $4 billion by 2018, according to Time Magazine. Those sums will likely rise as more couples delay starting families and more companies cover treatments. In recent years, Apple and Facebook have announced plans to offer egg-freezing in their employee health plans.
Unlike many other Western countries, the U.S. regulates assisted reproduction lightly. The federal government requires fertility labs to be certified by medical societies and to report certain data to the CDC. But many important issues are left unaddressed.
Sperm banks, for instance, offer limited screening that reveals little about the health of donors. And there are no regulations on the number of times a man may donate his sperm or how many children he may father. A 2011 New York Times article profiled a donor who had fathered 150 children.
The introduction and mainstreaming of new forms of ART, such as preimplantation genetic screening (in which prospective parents select embryos with desirable traits) has prompted some experts and policymakers to re-think their support of the field altogether. Last year, fertility pioneer Robert Winston criticized breakthroughs in IVF that could “threaten our humanity” by giving doctors and parents the tools to create designer babies.
In March, the Utah legislature passed a law that would allow children created via sperm donation to learn the medical histories of their biological fathers. This seems like a very modest step toward transparency, oversight, and accountability.
But it also illustrates how utterly absent these are. More importantly, it shows how little concern the ART industry and state and federal governments have shown to date for those conceived and born through these processes. Their rights have mostly been forgotten amid both political parties’ reluctance to become involved in issues of reproductive technology. It’s time that changed.
