The sperm sample of a person undergoing chemotherapy treatment, stored by a hospital for his benefit for future use in case the treatment made him infertile, was property owned by him whose loss or damage entitled him to bring an action for negligence. Moreover, where the circumstances showed there was a bailment of the sperm to the hospital unit storing it, a cause of action for bailment could arise for its loss or damage sounding in damages for psychiatric injury and/or mental distress.
A sample of sperm from a person undergoing chemotherapy, which a hospital stored in case he became infertile after the treatment, was that person’s property and its loss or damage was capable of establishing a claim in negligence. Further, where the hospital’s storage was undertaken gratuitously in the sense that it was a bailee of the sperm, any breach of duty in its safe storage causing loss or damage entitled the owner to recover damages in bailment for psychiatric injury and/or mental distress.
Drawn by payments of up to $10,000, an increasing number of women are offering to sell their eggs at U.S. fertility clinics as a way to make money amid the financial crisis.
Pilots are to be run in two areas of England to test the feasibility of a national sperm donation service in an effort to tackle the shortage of sperm donors. The Department of Health is to seek bids for the trial runs. Mark Hamilton, the consultant gynaecologist who chaired the working party of the British Fertility Society that recommended a national hub and spoke service last year, said, "We desperately need a national service framework. The closest analogy is the blood service. A very similar system could be put in place for sperm."
It is three years since the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority reviewed its guidelines for sperm, egg and embryo donation in the appropriately acronymed SEED report. But reproductive medicine has moved on so swiftly that Professor Lisa Jardine, who took over last April as the authority’s chairman, believes that it is time to return to the issue. In an interview with The Times she called for a fresh debate on two of the most controversial aspects of donation. First on her agenda is the question of when family members should be allowed to donate to one another. She is concerned about intergenerational donation, such as in two cases in 2007. In one, a Briton aged 72 provided sperm to his daughter-in-law, while in the other a Canadian, Melanie Boivin, froze eggs for her daughter, Flavie, 7, who has Turner syndrome and will become infertile.
A longstanding ban on selling sperm and eggs should be reconsidered to address a national shortage of donors, the head of the Government’s fertility watchdog says. Payments to donors could cut the number of childless couples travelling abroad for treatment, Lisa Jardine, of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, told The Times.
Legislative restrictions on the sale of organs, gametes and surrogacy services are often seen as having no basis other than mere prejudice or taboo. This paper argues instead that they can be read as instances of a broader decommodification of healthcare provision established in Britain with the creation of the NHS in 1948. Restrictions on the marketisation of medicine were justified by Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS, and by Richard Titmuss, one of its chief academic defenders, in distinctly utopian terms. On this vision, the NHS would function as a utopian enclave prefiguring an idealised non-capitalist future. This commonsense of post-war medicine was fatally destabilised by fiscal crisis and social critique in the 1970s. Influential comme
The single greatest change to affect the UK fertility sector in nearly two decades will take place tomorrow, Thursday 1 October, as the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 (as amended) comes into force. Changes which will come into effect with the new legislation include: * increasing the length of time people can store their embryos * a ‘cooling off’ period if one partner withdraws consent for embryo storage * extending information access rights for donor conceived people and donors * opening the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s (HFEA) Register for research * introducing supportive parenting into the welfare of the child provisions * banning sex selection for non medical reasons * clarifying the scope of embryo research
A hospital mix-up last January forced would-be mom Carolyn Savage and her husband Sean to make a heartrending decision. Ten days after the Savages went to a fertility clinic to have embryos transferred in hopes of conceiving, they got a devastating phone call. Savage had successfully gotten pregnant, but the baby wasn't hers—the embryo belonged to Detroit-based couple Paul and Shannon Morell. The Savages were stricken. "It was such a nightmare and, in a way, I felt violated," Carolyn Savage told CNN last week. Yet what had the potential to be a scarring and devastating turn of events ended up forging an incredible, if unlikely, bond between two families. Savage decided not to abort the fetus, and to give the biological parents the baby.
Mistakes and near misses in fertility treatment are recorded by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority but until now details of the most serious cases have been kept secret. Eight of these mistakes were given grade A status, meaning they were the most serious incidents could involve events such as embryo mix ups, the death of a patient or an incident which affects a number of patients, for example, when a storage unit malfunctions and all embryos are defrosted and lost. In 2007/8 two of the eight grade A incidents involved mix-ups. A spokesman refused to give details but said they could be cases where the wrong sperm was used to fertilise and embryo or the wrong embryo was defrosted for use, but neither involved the implantation of wrong embryos. Last year there were 182 incidents out fo 52,000 cycles of treatment provided in Britain, the HFEA said.
Drawing upon psychological and feminist theory to explore the notion of reproductive autonomy, central to my analysis is that its value lies in its instrumentality in fostering basic human needs and one’s sense of self. Exploring the value of reproductive autonomy by reference to human needs not only underpins the importance of that value, but also fleshes out ideas as to why protection of one’s physical integrity in the reproductive realm constitutes such an extreme situation, and is particularly commanding of our respect. Such an account is not only key to exploring important aspects of the nature and limits of the concept of reproductive autonomy, but also provides us with a promising and honest framework for addressing cases like Evans 2004, those involving third-party challenges to abortion decision-making, and perhaps most significantly of all, for reconciling these difficult cases with our equal respect for all reproductive desires, whether to reproduce or to avoid reproduction.
Despite appearances in public debate, there is a surprising amount of consensus across the political spectrum on two basic components of reproductive rights: the O.S.I. (the offspring selection interest) and the B.I.I. (the bodily integrity interest). In this article, Colb suggests that it is important to keep these two often-overlapping interests distinct in thinking about calls for reproductive rights. To illustrate the pitfalls of conflating the O.S.I. and the B.I.I., Colb takes up frozen embryo disputes between sperm and egg donors and intra-couple conflicts about abortion. She concludes that although opponents on the abortion issue are unlikely to reach a consensus, the scope of their disagreements can be narrowed and better defined by treating the O.S.I. and the B.I.I. as the independent and severable interests that they truly are.
A serious blunder at one of Britain's top fertility clinics dramatically increased the risk its patients would suffer a miscarriage or give birth to a child with serious health problems, sparking fresh fears about how IVF centres are run in the wake of a series of scandals. Unscreened sperm used by staff at the London Women's Clinic (LWC) to create dozens of embryos was later found to have a chromosome abnormality that could have been passed on to any unborn child, The Independent on Sunday has learnt. The British Fertility Society's screening guidelines make it clear that the clinic should never have accepted the donor. At least one couple suffered a miscarriage as a direct result.
Since 1991, sperm donors in the UK have had the legal right to withdraw consent for the use of their sperm in fertility treatment. This has the potential to adversely affect patients. It may mean that previous recipients of a donor’s sperm cannot have further children who are full biological siblings to an existing child, and that embryos created from the donor’s sperm and a patient’s eggs must be destroyed. We have informally investigated withdrawal of consent by sperm donors donating after 1 April 2005, when lifelong anonymity for gamete donors ended.
This note analyses Yearworth v North Bristol NHS Trust, in which the Court of Appeal accepted the existence of property interests in parts or products of the human body and considered the applicability of chattel torts where interference with such interests occurs. The writer questions whether the Court's decision to extend the law of bailment in the case was necessary, or whether the law of conversion or negligence should be available as the more appropriate causes of action.
Sports players and fans are being targeted in a campaign to get more sperm donors to help couples struggling to conceive. The National Gamete Donation Trust wants to increase the number of new donors in the UK to about 500, from its latest figure of 384.
Cash incentives and the payment of funeral expenses are two ideas being put forward to encourage people to donate human organs and tissue. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is asking the public if it is ethical to use financial incentives to increase donations of organs, eggs and sperm. Paying for most types of organs and tissue is illegal in the UK. The public consultation will last 12 weeks and the council's findings will be published in autumn 2011.
We provide our bodies or parts of our bodies for medical research or for the treatment of others in a number of ways and for a variety of reasons. However, there is a shortage of bodily material for many of these purposes in the UK. What should be done about it? The Council has set up a Working Party, chaired by Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, to explore the ethical issues raised by the provision of bodily material for medical treatment and research. Questions to be considered include: * what motivates people to provide bodily material and what inducements or incentives are appropriate? * what constitutes valid consent? * what future ownership or control people should have over donated materials? * are there ethical limits on how we try to meet demand?
Three years ago, Trudy Moore found that her daughter, Samantha, conceived using her husband’s sperm and her sister as a surrogate, was not a genetic match to her husband. Frantic for answers, she confronted her doctor, who suggested in e-mails to Ms. Moore that he may have contaminated her husband’s sample – possibly with 3168.
Ask a couple struggling to conceive what they would want most in life and "a child" is the obvious answer. They want something money can't buy, even with all the money in the world. For a couple needing egg or sperm donation this reality might change. Money could buy at least the chance of a child if donors were to be paid, if that's one of the outcomes of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) donation review. Various issues are being reviewed in the HFEA public consultation, but payment of egg and sperm donors is high on the agenda.