Strict new regulations following IVF deception
by Xavier Symons | 11 Jun 2016 |
Australian IVF clinics will require donor recipients to be tested for pregnancy, following a case where a client deceived an IVF clinic about the outcome of her donor-gamete fertility treatment.
Earlier this year it was reported that a donor recipient had lied to a clinic about miscarrying a child conceived using a donor egg; the woman wanted to avoid honoring an arrangement with the gamete donor to allow for contact with any children resulting from treatment.
The Fertility Society of Australia, the industry’s peak regulatory body, unanimously agreed on new regulations this week, saying the extant IVF guidelines were open to abuse.
Clinics will now require women who use donor eggs, sperm or embryos to give a written undertaking to have a blood test to verify whether they fall pregnant. Recipients of donor treatment who fail to provide the results of a pregnancy blood test will be reported to State authorities.
FSA vice-president Professor Luk Rombauts said the new guidelines were a way of “reducing the risk of unfortunate outcomes in the future.”
The amendments also included provision for the documentation of agreements made between donors and recipients during counselling sessions.
You probably remember the scene in The Matrix in which Morpheus explains to Neo the terrible secret: “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
In the jargon of The Matrix, I’m a blue pill person and believe that I’m in touch with reality. Perhaps I am deluded.
Elon Musk, billionaire co-founder of PayPal, and the boss of Tesla and SpaceX, on the other hand, is definitely a red pill person. Last week he told a conference of geeks in San Francisco that we are probably part of a powerful computer simulation. In fact, he estimates that "There's a one in billions chance that this is base reality”. (See story below.)
Musk is an intelligent man, but I wonder if he understands the ethical implications of the red pill. If we are really marionettes in a super-human intellect’s simulation of reality, nothing much matters. Certainly worrying about right and wrong is a waste of time. Human life doesn’t matter much either, as we are all just blips in a gigantic computer game. There’s not much incentive for social solidarity.
What do you think? Are we living in The Matrix?
Michael Cook
Editor
BioEdge
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Recently we spoke with COL Nelson L. Michael about bioethical deliberation in an age of rapid social and scientific change.BioEdge
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