The father killed the child in just six weeks. Amazingly, in the United States, almost no public policy exists around assisted reproduction: what procedures should be legal, how many babies a woman should be allowed to carry at one time, how old is too old for a woman to conceive.
In Europe, the enterprise of technology-enhanced baby-making is subsidized and also well regulated. Different countries stipulate different benefits: A woman is entitled to two cycles of IVF, a woman is entitled to four cycles of IVF, a doctor will implant one embryo, a doctor will implant up to four.
But the U. Who would possibly stand in the way of families having babies? Yet many procedures, most notably IVF, require producing excess embryos. So far in this country no rules have been set. Other than that, anything goes. Women in their 60s have been assisted in having children. Regularly the news is filled with stories: first surviving set of septuplets! Woman gives birth to two sets of identical twins! Miracle, multiple ART births have become so common that just this spring a Missouri couple perpetrated the first sextuplet hoax, soliciting donations of cash, gift cards, a washer and dryer, and a van.
A new technology called PGD—preimplantation genetic diagnosis—allows doctors to test for genetic defects just three days after fertilization, when the conceptus, not yet technically an embryo, is still in a petri dish. What about mild disabilities, say, dyslexia? And what about sex? Lawyers and bioethicists are fond of explaining that there are positive rights, known as entitlements, and negative rights, known as liberties. No matter how poor an idea, no one will stop you from a drunken dalliance and parenting the child who may result.
But there is no entitlement to have a baby. It goes without saying: The state will not furnish anybody a child. Nobody can demand a spouse for the purpose of creating a child, and, in this country at least, even if you do have a spouse, that spouse is not required by law to reproduce.
All we seem to have agreed upon as a society is that reproducing is deeply meaningful and important, and that any attempts to keep people from doing so—i. The case of Skinner v.
But legally this does not add up to a positive, enforceable right to access reproductive technologies. In the United States, there is not even a positive right to basic health care. Which raises an interesting question: Should infertility be viewed as a medical problem?
Treatment was discretionary, not necessary. A more logical line of reasoning might be to view her as having a social, not a medical, dilemma.
Should society step in to help her? Should this be covered by insurance? To get around this dilemma, those in favor of greater access to ART like to position infertility as a disease of a couple—a rather unconventional diagnosis. North Coast won this round of appeals. The CDC acknowledged that crucial health information was missing for about three-quarters of pregnant women with the virus, including whether they had preexisting conditions or required an ICU stay or mechanical ventilation.
For the vast majority of U. Because emerging diseases can have catastrophic consequences for pregnant women and their babies, close monitoring of new illnesses in this vulnerable population is important.
So is rapid communication with providers trying to keep their patients safe. But the U. To track the coronavirus in pregnant women and their babies, the CDC is instructing local health departments to check a box on the standard Case Report Form if a patient is currently pregnant.
Caught unprepared by the H1N1 outbreak of , and determined not to let that happen again, the National Institute for Health Research issued a call for studies in that could be up and running as soon as the next pandemic hit.
When the sirens began blaring this February, eight of the studies launched, including one by the U. Obstetric Surveillance System , a research platform devoted to rare disorders of pregnancy. By mid-May, UKOSS released its first findings from an analysis of every pregnant woman hospitalized in Britain from March through mid-April who tested positive for the virus, in total. About 1 in 10 women became so ill they required respiratory support.
Five mothers and five babies died. The study provided the kind of high-quality data that doctors and policymakers value most: populationwide, scientifically rigorous, immediately actionable. British medical organizations quickly issued new guidance about the heightened risks for women of color. Medical groups also reaffirmed earlier recommendations that women in their third trimester should avoid job settings, such as working as a doctor or nurse on the front lines, that could expose them to the virus.
The good news is that women now know when they should start to be particularly vigilant. By one estimate , more than 16, American women could be infected with the coronavirus when they give birth this year.
The U. The two nations also have very different approaches to maternal health, exemplified by how they confront pregnancy-related complications and deaths. This is the next generation. In the U. The general trend has been somewhat reassuring: COVID can make pregnant women very sick, but many seem to remain asymptomatic or become only mildly ill. Some red flags have also emerged: A couple of cases of heart-related complications, indications of placental abnormalities and reports of asymptomatic women who spiraled after giving birth.
The underlying data in many of these case reports is overlapping and confusing, with little or no peer review to vet the findings. Meanwhile, numerous efforts are underway to do larger scale, longer-term, more scientifically meticulous studies that could give a fuller picture of how the virus affects pregnant women and babies in different parts of the U.
In late May, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development announced a sweeping initiative, a series of studies at the 12 academic institutions in its Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network , the preeminent obstetric research collaborative in the U. One big study will compare women who delivered at the various sites between March and December of this year with women who delivered in the same hospitals in the same period in , Bianchi said.
Activists and politicians stress that some pregnant people will not be able to cross into Mexico without a passport or visa. As Mother Jones reported , the mounting abortion restrictions in Arizona over the past decade have resulted in increased use of underground abortion operations. Although it included information for abortion providers and their fees in several other countries, including Japan and Canada, most people who used the list went to Mexico for their procedure.
Mexican abortion networks are expecting an onslaught in the coming months. Texas Gov. Andrea Guzman. Inae Oh. Tim Murphy. Becca Andrews. Noah Y. Matt Simon. Dan Spinelli. Fairtrade America. Fred Pearce. Dan Friedman. David Corn. Alexander C. Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.
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