Daddys-to-be: Tom Daley and husband Dustin Lance Black don’t know which of them is their baby’s biological father
Olympic swimmer Tom Daley has confirmed that neither himself nor his husband Dustin Lance Black know which of them is the biological father of their unborn child.
The couple were able to conceive the baby boy, who Daley revealed is due in June, through “an egg donor” and surrogate mother.
“We found an egg donor and we are the sperm donors, we have fertilised half the eggs each,” Daley said in an interview with The Times. “We put in a boy embryo and a girl embryo and we don’t know whose is whose.”
The recently proposed Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016 emphasizes on controlling exploitation of surrogate mother but lacks adequate maternal health safeguards for surrogate mother. Surrogate pregnancy like any other pregnancy not only carries the risk of maternal mortality but involves aggravated health risks including negative drug reaction or allergies, nausea and vomiting, stomach pains and swelling, shortness of breath, faintness, ovarian hyper stimulation Syndrome (OHSS) (hyper stimulation) which may be life-threatening following hormonal treatment, in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique for facilitating conception in surrogate mother.
Access to NHS fertility services can be a postcode lottery, resulting in couples travelling abroad for treatment
The UK may have been the birthplace of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), but cuts to NHS fertility services have led some people to consider travelling across the globe for fertility treatment.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommends three cycles of IVF for those who are eligible, but whether you get anything approaching this depends entirely on where you live.
A survey carried out by Fertility Network UK and Fertility Clinics Abroad found that patchy NHS provision and the high cost of private IVF were the main drivers for people travelling overseas. Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Eastern Europe are all popular, along with destinations further afield such as the Caribbean.
Three gay couples in the northern city of Turin have been able to legally register their children to both parents, in a first for Italy.
“Today an important page of history has been written,” said the mother of one of the children, Turin councillor Chiara Foglietta.
Foglietta, who gave birth after undergoing artificial insemination in Denmark, said staff at the public records office had told her “no form exists” to recognize the child’s birth through the procedure, which is subject to strict rules in Italy.
Instead, the staff reportedly told Foglietta she should declare that she had had the baby with a man. On Monday, the councillor said she “cried with joy” after signing the documents in which both she and her partner, Micaela Ghisleni, were recognized as parents of their son.
The world’s largest sperm bank has recently warned the European Union (EU) that access to donor sperms must be improved to reinvigorate the continent’s birth rates, media reported on Monday.
According to figures provided by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, fertility rates has steadily declined from the mid-1960s, through to the turn of the century in the EU member states.
“In 2015, the total fertility rate in the current 28-member bloc was 1.58 live births per woman. “The level is below a fertility rate of around 2.1 live births per woman, which is considered to be the average number required to keep the population size constant in the absence of migration,’’ Eurostat added.
The pain of growing up fatherless is behind a Brooklyn man’s fight to stop his ex from using their frozen embryos to get pregnant, according to new court papers.
In an increasingly bitter legal battle, Kevin Heldt ran to court last month to stop Ilissa Watnik from getting pregnant with fertilized eggs they’d been storing at a Manhattan fertility clinic.
Watnik, 42, argued the couple had already agreed she could have the genetic material if they broke up, and accused Heldt of using legal maneuvers as a “weapon” to run out her biological clock.
Gretchen Rossi, former cast member of the Real Housewives of Orange County, is opening up about her IVF story, the struggles of getting pregnant and more in a brand new interview.
“Many celebrities in Hollywood glamorize the ability to have babies way up into your late 40s and the truth is that some of them are not telling the full story,” Rossi told PEOPLE. “A lot of women in their 40s are getting pregnant using an egg donor and not disclosing this. This is why we find it important to encourage women who are either career-focused or think they can just get pregnant way into their 40s to consider freezing their eggs while they are younger.”
Gretchen and her long-time man Slade Smiley are currently working with Dr. Surrey at SCRC, who she says has been “giving us hope.” She added, “We are awaiting the outcome of our last IVF cycle to find out if we have any viable embryos in order to implant and hopefully become pregnant.”
Dr MIRIAM SCIBERRAS, Chairperson Life Network Foundation Malta, speaks to Rachel Attard about the amendments to the much-disputed IVF law. While she says that regulating the law to help couples while also safeguarding the human embryo is a good thing, she argues that the amendments being proposed are introducing new concepts which are not in principle part of Maltese society
In principle, are you against IVF?
In 2012, I was part of a group named Professionals Against Embryo Freezing that was involved in the amendment of the law regulating IVF, in the belief that helping couples while also safeguarding the human embryo is a good thing.
Are we not in the same situation now with the government proposing further regulations?
The amendments proposed are introducing new concepts which are not in principle part of Maltese society. The law in essence makes the human embryo an object by using terms like adopting and freezing. Although embryo freezing is already part of the law, it states that the case needs to be an exceptional one. If a woman cannot attend the session of implantation due to, for example, illness or an accident, the embryo is frozen until the woman has recovered. Now it will become a choice to freeze them.
An IVF lab. “The child born from such a technocratic procedure would never be able to know who their natural mother is, who their natural father is, whether they have any siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents… maybe not even who carried them in the womb that give them birth.”
Minister Chris Fearne has stated that the proposed amendments to the existing law that regulates IVF and grants protection to embryos “address one of the most powerful forces in human nature – the will to procreate and have a family” (Times of Malta, April 4). It is quite sad and ironic then, that the proposed legislation turns human procreation into a totally unnatural act.
The Embryo Protection Act sought to regulate the use of technology wisely by restricting it to assisting infertile couples in a stable relationship. In doing so, it also protected the embryo’s dignity from the beginning of life and throughout their development into childhood by making sure that they would be born and raised by their natural mother and father.
Not so in this proposed Act. Unashamedly, the proposed Act goes down the rabbit hole where not only does the embryo cease to have the lifelong protection of growing into and being sustained by their natural mother and father but it effectively makes redundant those natural family bonds, replacing them by the cold hand of technological procedure, registers and an (unspecified) “protocol”.
World’s biggest sperm bank calls for fewer regulations to revive Europe’s childbirth rates
The world’s biggest sperm bank has warned the EU that access to donor sperm must be improved to reinvigorate childbirth rates amid the continent’s slump in population growth.
Sperm banks across Europe have closed after the enforcement of new EU regulations on staffing levels, executives at the Danish firm Cryos International told European commission officials in a private meeting.
Some member states’ insistence on making the identity of donors traceable was cited as a further obstacle to access, released minutes reveal. The executives also raised the 2011 decision by the Danish courts to treat sperm as a “good” liable to VAT. Donor sperm is subject to as much as 25% VAT in some EU countries.
Much is being said, and will be said, about the current IVF Bill being proposed. From the very outset of assisted fertilisation, two simple sacrosanct rights should always be maintained.
These are the principle of being pro-life and the principle of protecting the rights of the child – born or unborn.
Pro-life points to a mentality that seeks to create life and not destroy it. The rights of the child include primarily the right to know his identity and also to be given an upbringing by a parent/parents who strive to give the child what is best.
Any decision affecting reproduction/fertilisation needs to respect these two principles to the full.
When Selina Robinson agreed in 1999 to carry a friend’s baby, doctors did not do surrogacies in B.C. so she travelled to Calgary to have the embryos implanted. Today, surrogacies are far more common, thanks to an increase in demand from same-sex couples and infertile women. As a result, a debate is raging about whether Canada should change its laws to allow surrogates, as well as egg and sperm donors, to be paid, as they are in the U.S.
(BPT) – As the third largest global epidemic, fertility issues are much more common than people realize — yet very few people are talking about it. With 1 in 8 couples affected by infertility, there’s a growing interest in fertility treatments, including egg freezing and in vitro fertilization (IVF). However, for some individuals and couples struggling with infertility, relying on an egg donor is the only viable path to a healthy baby. Having worked with thousands of patients as a reproductive endocrinologist at CCRM (Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine), Dr. Aaron K. Styer knows that infertility can be scary and complex — and that there are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding egg donation. In honor of National Infertility Awareness Week, Dr. Styer breaks down the top five misconceptions about egg donation:
Rachel Weisz and husband Daniel Craig have happily announced that they are “going to have a little human” together – and it’s bound to be a ridiculously gorgeous baby. The actress, 48, (who, along with Craig, has an older child from a previous relationship) is part of a growing number of celebrities who have carried children well into their 40s; Janet Jackson welcomed son Eissa at age 50, Geena Davis delivered twins Kian and Kaiis at 48, Kelly Preston had son Benjamin at 48 and Halle Berry gave birth to son Maceo at 47.
While a healthy and hoped-for pregnancy is a joyous occasion at any age, it is especially in a woman’s late 40s; doctors refer to a woman over the age of 35 as of “advanced maternal age,” with the attendant risks and difficult odds that accompany that designation. Here’s everything you need to know about the likelihood of getting pregnant in your late 40s.
Source Vancouver Sun
When Selina Robinson agreed in 1999 to carry a friend’s baby, doctors did not do surrogacies in B.C. so she travelled to Calgary to have the embryos implanted. Today, surrogacies are far more common, thanks to an increase in demand from same-sex couples and infertile women. As a result, a debate is raging about whether Canada should change its laws to allow surrogates, as well as egg and sperm donors, to be paid, as they are in the U.S.
Nearly 20 years ago, long before she became B.C.’ s municipal affairs and housing minister, Selina Robinson offered to be a surrogate mother for a friend who had lost one baby and was left infertile after a second pregnancy.
Mitochondrial Genome Replacement Technology (MGRT) aims to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disorders from a mother to her child. Photo: Unsplash
SINGAPORE — Should a controversial genetic modification procedure, dubbed the “three-parent” technique, be allowed in Singapore to give a small group of women their only shot at having healthy children with their genetic stock?
The Bioethics Advisory Committee is inviting the public to provide feedback on the tricky issue before it makes its recommendations to the authorities.
Mitochondrial Genome Replacement Technology (MGRT) aims to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disorders from a mother to her child, by replacing abnormal mitochondria with normal mitochondria from a healthy donor at the egg or early embry
The Bioethics Advisory Committee has to consider the dilemmas associated with a new technology which allows a child to be born without serious genetic defects, but with three genetic parents.
Mitochondrial genome replacement technology involves combining the genetic material (DNA) of a couple – who would otherwise be unlikely to have healthy children of their own – with that of a female egg donor.
That would mean the child would have the genetic make-up of three people, although the donor’s contribution would account for less than 1 per cent of the child’s DNA.
A lesbian couple in Italy have been refused their request to register their baby unless the child’s mother pretends she had sex with a man.
Chiara Foglietta, from Turin, gave birth to a baby boy, Niccolo Pietro, last Friday after travelling to Denmark with partner Micaela Ghisleni last year to undergo artificial insemination treatment.
To the couple’s dismay, Italian law refuses to acknowledge the treatment for lesbian couples – only recognising its effects in heterosexual couples.
Italy has continued to ban several fertility treatments which have long been the norm in many other EU member states.
Despite legalising same-sex civil unions back in 2016 – the country is lagging far behind in its adoption of Europe-wide rights for same-sex couples.
Former Parliamentary Secretary Deborah Schembri said she has always been against embryo freezing, embryo adoption and surrogacy and “Prime Minister Joseph Muscat knew (this) from day one.”
Last week Health Minister Chris Fearne presented in Parliament a number of amendments to the Embryo Protection Act. Schembri said that she is in favour with some of them and against in others.
