Israeli scientists claim to have created human eggs from amniotic fluid:
Fertility scientists have created human eggs using cells from the amniotic sac that surrounds a baby in the womb.
Experts believe the discovery will lead to routine manufacture of human eggs…
“Doctors have been looking for an alternative to egg donation for a long time. We hope it will soon be possible to grow as many eggs as needed,” Professor Eliezer Shalev, of Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, northern Israel, who led the research, said.
And, the first birth certificate with three legal parents has been issued in the United States:
A Florida judge has made history by allowing a birth certificate to list as parents a married lesbian couple and a gay man.
Categories: The Future of Parenthood
it’s a step in the right direction- i believe the previous trend was to deny paternity if it didn’t happen via intercourse.
Better than denying his paternity altogether. although I still believe 3 is a crowd when it comes to parenting. It’s hard enough for 2 parents to get along, let alone 3.
The news from Israel is really interesting.
As for the three legal parents, i think it’s a good thing. The truth is, there are many kids out there who do have three parents; why not acknowledge that truth?
The news from Israel is interesting but raises some huge questions. Do you have a right to complain if your amniotic sac is used to make a slew of half brothers and sisters? Are you related and do you have any obligations to each other?
The amniotic sac is built by the mother’s body, not by the baby’s body. What is the basis for thinking that it belongs to the baby, rather than to the mother?
So my answer would be that although you have a “right” to complain – surely everyone has a right to complain about whatever they want – there isn’t a valid “someone misused my property” basis for the complaint.
And clearly, the others born from the eggs created from the amniotic sac are genetically related to the baby. Is there any difference, really, between a sibling via an amniotic sac that your mother dontated, versus a sibling via eggs that your mother donated? I don’t see what the difference is.
Barry Deutsch, that was one of the questions that came up at dinner tonight. Who does the sac belong to?
Everything about the baby is being made mostly with material from the mom’s body, so that’s not enough to base it on.
So if you use the amniotic sac are you getting a baby with the mother’s DNA or the baby’s?
I’m getting the impression from what I can find online, that the amniotic sac forms from the fertilized egg/embryo. So it seems a case could be made that it was part of the baby.
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/healthy_living/pregnancy/hic-fetal-development-stages-of-growth.aspx
and Wikipedia:
“In the human embryo during week 3 to 4, folding of the embryonic disc draws the amniotic membrane ventrally over the embryo leading to the enclosing of the embryo within the amniotic sac. Embryonic and fetal development from this time onward occurs fully enclosed within the amniotic sac floating in the amniotic fluid.”
http://php.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php?title=Placenta_-_Membranes#Amnionic_Sac
So if the amniotic sac is made from the baby’s DNA, it would be different from a sibling made by eggs your mother donated.
It would be as related to you as your own offspring.
The question would be, would this be your biological child? Someone your age, made without your agreement, and not raised by you.
Using amniotic sacs to make eggs is a good way to get eggs without harming the mothers. However, it doesn’t resolve any of the questions about biological relationships, openness, and connection versus separation from the child’s point of view.
And it may also be bringing up new questions, depending on the answer to whose DNA is in the amniotic sac.
That doesn’t seem persuasive to me.
The baby belongs to itself because to say otherwise would be monstrous, an endorsement of slavery. We make an exception to the rule (the rule being that what one makes out of one’s own property, one owns) in order to avoid a morally horrible outcome.
But just because there’s an exception to the rule doesn’t mean the rule ceases to exist in all other cases. What is built by the mother belongs to the mother. To say otherwise would be to erase the mother’s rights.
That’s a really fascinating question. Thank you.
I agree.
The child in that Florida case is only going to have two full-fledged legal parents (see the last paragraph in the linked-to article). It’s just that she will also have a legally-protected relationship with her biological father. From the perspective of recognizing the importance of biological relationships in the context of donor conception, isn’t that actually a pretty good outcome?
just shoot me now.
Barry I looked it up the baby really builds itself within the mother’s body has its own blood and get this the cells in that sac are the babies cells, not the mothers. The eggs they are creating are the babies eggs not the mothers eggs so any children created from those eggs three years down the line are the offspring of the baby – the grandchildren of the woman who gave birth if she is in fact the real mother or the grandchildren of the egg donor.
Its just so freaking sick I can’t believe that anyone would be so evil as to have already played around with the child’s cells that way. Oh they can’t even consent.
Nah its reall freaking clear they want to make massive amounts of eggs from fluid they can steal from people who cant speak yet to complain. Nobody will ever know the difference, that’s the idea and how would they ever know because women are not tested to prove they are mothers when they give birth so there will be no way to stop the doctors and lab techs from stealing these infants cells and reproducing them with strangers its freaking rape is what it is. They are forcing infants to sexually reproduce does not matter if they penetrate their bodies they are violating their bodies by reproducing them they will have children just a few years older than they are that will then add to the group of people they should not date. Gd no they should not be dating thier own kids.
I may just have to quit all of this I can’t take it. Quit pull in the shingle shut the door and sew dresses or do laundry or something.
Wondering how those eggs might be fertilized – If they’d allow the father to fertilize his daughters eggs.
Legally I can’t see any reason why not. And there is always preimplantation genetic diagnostics testing Brothers and sisters (and cousins) could do this as well.
Unless a law is created stating that a fetus has autonomy and human dignity and that mothers and fathers matter. I don’t see that happening.
Why would this ever come up? The purpose of harvesting eggs is to help infertile women. If a fetus with a sac exists, then by definition the mother is pregnant, then she’s not infertile.
Because the eggs contain the dna of the fetus (as in the combination of the mother and father) but the combination is of the fetus (as in the daughter) not the individual genetic parents.
Eggs made from that fluid would contain the dna of the daughter and fertilizing those eggs by the father would be problematic…yes/no?
I guess any child conceived that way could say “I got a double dose of papa/grandpa!” Only a few degrees removed from cloning. Heck…Why not!
Barry writes:
“then she’s not infertile”
There are all kinds of ways this can be used. One of them is to be used if the mother is infertile and used an “egg donor”. She and her husband/partner could “build their family” using the eggs of their ‘daughter fetus’. How many other ways can we think of to use this? To supply the demand for “egg donors”? Do I even need to go into the problems social/ethical problems involved with that?
The article says this would be an infertility treatment but I suspect the real motivator is to get an abundant supply of eggs for all kinds of “cool” experimenting in labs.
@Barry – but the aminotic sac is connected to the baby, so if it is made by the mom, it could still be the baby’s just as the baby’s body is.
However, the question does not seem to come up as it looks like the amniotic sac is actually made from the egg cell that the baby grows from. Thus it has the baby’s DNA.
If someone suddenly developed the ability to make egg cells from hair, I would not want my hair stylist to sell bits of my hair to a fertility clinic. I would want to have a say as to whether or not my DNA were used to produce people who would in effect be my biological offspring.
Anyhow, it seems to me that this is probably a line of research that shouldn’t be followed because the baby in question has no ability to consent to its amniotic sac being used to make other people.
Recall that it was also Israeli scientists who extracted eggs from aborted female fetuses. Anything goes, I guess.
Doesn’t Israeli have any religious laws against this? Don’t their laws reflect their religion?
Elizabeth, do you have any idea what became of extracting eggs from aborted female fetuses? Is this still happening and legal? Any laws one way or the other about it?
no, israeli law is predominantly secular. the rabbinate has some influence but they do not govern. anyway they have not ruled on the issuw.
Kisarita writes:
“the rabbinate has some influence but they do not govern”
Well, I hope they have some influence over this. It’s a social/cultural/humanity atomic bomb.
@Karen, I don’t know what’s happening with it now.
@Karen (and Elizabeth),
If you read the articles online about it, you’ll see that the researchers never “extracted eggs” (the fetuses had not reached that stage of development), but they were able to get ovarian tissue to grow, and follicles to the point of producing estrodial.
From NewScientist back in ’03:
I really don’t think children conceived via the eggs produced from the amniotic sac qualify as the biological children of the baby. The DNA is not determinative. If I have an identical twin who has a child, I am not thereby that child’s biological father. Being a father or a mother, even a biological father or mother, is not a purely genetic relationship.
JHW
“I really don’t think children conceived via the eggs produced from the amniotic sac qualify as the biological children of the baby. The DNA is not determinative. If I have an identical twin who has a child, I am not thereby that child’s biological father. Being a father or a mother, even a biological father or mother, is not a purely genetic relationship.”
JHW no you don’t. Don’t twist stuff around to suit yourself. The person whose cells are reproduced is the parent organism and the person produced is their offspring. In terms of holding people accountable for their own offspring in real life we’d look to the twin the cells were taken from. However for medical purposes, your twin’s offspring and your offspring would have the same genetics as if they were paternal siblings providing that their mothers were not different women. That means reproducing together is even more of a risk than if they were cousins. Forget all your social constructs here. These are the fundamental building blocks of life where one person originates from two specific individuals. This is essential to keep track of or we will inbreed ourselves out of existence in 200 years.
We are so green now concerned with preserving the environment for future generations but if we are not careful those future generations are going to be a bunch of mutant inbred sickly freaks of nature.
K your not going to get a law passed about the personhood of a fetus. Think of what you’d be up against – no way are they ever going to end the right to an abortion.
Think simpler.
You have the right to reproduce your own body (your own sex cells) and that’s it. You may not reproduce cells that are not your own you may not cause offspring to be produced that are not genetically your own.
The right to reproduce comes with the inherent obligation to be accountable to and for your own offspring as their parents on record at birth or whenever the fact that they are your offspring should become apparent.
You have a right to keep your own information private and that’s it. Information that pertains to people other than yourself is not yours to control or conceal and must be shared with or made available to those individuals at any age.
Doctors and labs should only possess people’s cells for reproductive purposes with those people’s written consent and those people’s understanding that they and only they will be the legal parents of any offspring produced from their cells. No other person will be able to record themselves as the parents of their offspring even if they give birth. PERIOD
Adoption procedures for the rest of it. Finished. That’s it personal accountability and rights not transferrable or saleable. Can’t sell my right to vote cant sell my right to reproduce. done.
It’s not me that you need to convince my dear Marilynn…
@JHW – if your identical twin has a child, the baby won’t have the same genes as you. There is a mother involved!!!
The more relevant example is a twin. If you have an identical twin, you are not their parent because you are both created at the same time from the exact same fertilized egg.
Nobody decides to make twins now, so there isn’t an issue of whether or not someone is making a choice for you.
So what is a parent, from a biological point of view.
Before we had any modern technology, a father was a person who had some kind of sexual activity with someone and passed his sperm cells to her. A mother was a person whose egg cell was fertilized by someone’s sperm through sex and then grew inside her body.
Over a century ago, we were able technologically to pass the sperm into a woman without having actual sex. So the biological father was the guy whose sperm fertilized an egg and the mother was the woman whose egg was fertilized and grew inside her body.
Then we gained the ability to take the egg out of the mother and fertilize it outside her body before putting it back into her. The definition of the biological mother didn’t change.
About 30 years ago, we gained the ability to put the fertilized egg inside someone else’s body. Now we have the situation we argue over – is the mother who carries the baby also a biological mother? Is motherhood something different from fatherhood? But in either case, we still see the woman whose egg is used as a biological mother, possibly the more important one.
But what we still have is:
Biological father = the man whose sperm cell fertilized the egg and
Biological mother = the woman whose egg cell was fertilized and maybe the woman who grew the baby in her body.
Nobody else is a biological parent, not the doctors, not the people asking for the baby to be made, nobody.
So if we gain new technology where a cell that is not an egg cell can be turned into an egg cell, I think the source of the egg cell would have to be the biological mother.
And weirdly, the biological mother could in fact be a male.
So we’d have a biological father whose sperm was used to fertilize an egg and a biological mother whose aminotic sac was used to make an egg that was then fertilized and a biological mother (or not) who grew the baby inside her.
Anyhow, it comes back to the idea that you would be the biological parent of a being that was made without your consent.
If the person whose genes were used to make the egg cell is not the biological parent who is?
marilynn, individuals do not have a right to reproduce, they have a right to marry, and marriages have a right to reproduce. Fertility clinics should be required to only help marriages reproduce together, and prohibited from joining unmarried gametes all together. It wouldn’t be hard. It violates human rights to allow donor conception, even if arrangements are made for support obligations.
You are mistaken Manny at least in the US. We have a right to reproduce without government interference.
No we don’t, the government can prohibit incest and cloning and gamete donation and even unmarried sexual intercourse. I agree that the government should never be able to prohibit a marriage from having sex and conceiving children, and should never prohibit anyone from marrying the person of their choice, except where there is a supportable basis that applies to everyone equally, such as “Section 1. No man shall marry his mother, grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, stepmother, grandfather’s wife, grandson’s wife, wife’s mother, wife’s grandmother, wife’s daughter, wife’s granddaughter, brother’s daughter, sister’s daughter, father’s sister or mother’s sister.” To that we should add: “or a man.”
Diane: I’m not sure what your point is. No one’s biological children have the same genes as them. And if an egg were to be produced from the amniotic sac, implanted in another person, and fertilized by sperm, the resulting child would not have the same genes as the person whose amniotic sac it was either. This isn’t an issue of cloning.
JHW, the resulting child would have a biological mother who was only a year or so older than they were, and who didn’t consent to having a biological daughter. Your cute point about how an identical twin having a baby doesn’t make the other twin a biological father doesn’t apply, because in that case there IS a father, who happens to have a twin. Twins are separate people even though they have the same DNA. In this case, there is no mother, and the infant doesn’t have a twin. The mother is the infant.
Manny: I don’t think the reason A is not the father of the children of his identical twin B is that B is already their father. (Otherwise, why not just say that the child has two fathers, corresponding to the degree of genetic relationship the child has with two male adults?) The reason is that A has not actually fathered the children; the fertilized egg from which they originated was not fertilized by his sperm. Biological relationships are not reducible to genetic relatedness. There is an actual procreative process involved, and one that seems to me to be pretty far removed from manipulating the amniotic sac to create eggs. A child produced in this way is probably more analogous to a sibling (a kind of half-sibling, I suppose) than to a biological child.
@JHW – I don’t think this is cloning. I think it’s being the biological parent.
I thought from your earlier comment that you were saying the first baby would only be as related to the second baby as siblings. They would actually be more related.
So my point is, given the exact same biological relationship as between parents and children, why not call the baby the biological parent of the child made from the aminotic-sac-egg?
And if the baby is not the biological parent, who is?
@JHW “The reason is that A has not actually fathered the children; the fertilized egg from which they originated was not fertilized by his sperm.”
Or to put it another way, the reason a twin is not the mother of her identical twin is because the egg from which they originated came from their joint mother.
But in this case, the egg comes from the baby. It is a cell that didn’t start its life as an egg, but it originated with the baby.
The provider of the egg cell is the baby.
Look at it this way. Someday the child produced this way wants to meet its biological mother. Who would they meet? The only candidate I can see is the baby who provided the egg cell that came from its amniotic sac.
@Manny – the government could in theory prohibit anything. Thankfully, we live in a free country and the government does not get involved in trying to prohibit intercourse outside of marriage.
(Otherwise, why not just say that the child has two fathers, corresponding to the degree of genetic relationship the child has with two male adults?)
Because a person only has one father, so that would make no sense. If the father has a twin, the twin is an uncle. It doesn’t matter that he has the same DNA as the father. That isn’t novel, it’s been happening forever, and twins have always been uncles of each other’s babies, not fathers. The marriage is only to one of them, not both.
A person also has one mother. If the mother is an infant whose premature eggs were found in her amniotic sac and grown into mature eggs, the mother is an infant. You can’t just say, no, it’s the woman who gave birth or the legal parent or whoever, just because the real mother is an infant and her eggs were outside her body.
I think EM is right that the real market for this is labs that want to discard the nucleus and put in some other nucleus for experiments. They need lots of eggs to do those experiments. Currently lack of eggs is holding up cloning research.
Diane, the government cannot prohibit things we have a right to do, such as marry the person of our choice regardless of racial categories, or have sex with our spouse and conceive offspring and give birth, and raise our children. (In the case of unfit abusive or neglectful parents, the rights of the child take priority and the parents lose their right to parent their children.)
Fornication can be a crime without people being arrested or police being intrusive, and in fact it is very useful to be a crime, it helps people know what is expected of them and what to say “no” to. It is self-enforced. If it is legal, it is like being condoned and encouraged, which is stupid, why do that?
And donor conception and intentional co-parenting can be prohibited without harming anyone’s rights. It would still be a free country if people were not allowed to intentionally conceive outside of marriage, just like it was still a free country after people were not allowed to own slaves.
Diane: Not to get all metaphysical on you, but what does it mean to say that the egg “originated with the baby”? The baby’s body did not produce the egg. An object separate from the baby (the amniotic sac) was manipulated in a laboratory to produce eggs.
I will not speculate about how a child produced in this way would relate to his or her various genetic relatives. But I do not think such a child would have a biological mother at all. Stretching somewhat, one might say that the “biological mother” is the couple who produced the baby, who are much more naturally understood as the instigators of the pregnancy and the associated physical material than the baby is. (This was why I suggested that siblinghood may be a closer status than parentage.) But that approach has difficulties too.
Manny I just can’t. You’re so sweet and cranky. You go on with that I’m not going to get into it. Anyone who wants to debate my hairbrain scheme based on like law or maybe just explaining politics to me I’m down. I just can’t dig on the moral stuff buddy I’m kind of a wild child.
Diane
JHW had a really great point and it was a challenge to answer it. I like the exercise it gave my brain he’s trying to really stretch the limits of his thinking. I think Diane you misunderstood him.
His point was sound; sometimes a positive paternity test is not enough to tell us who a person’s biological parent is. When the father has an identitcal twin brother he is correct, his brothers offspring are genetically no less related to him than his own offspring. They are separate individuals with separate brains and they are each responsible for their own actions and should each be accontable for the offspring they as individuals create. But medically their children would register as paternal siblings not cousins. They originated from the same DNA. Biologically they are no different than paternal brothers but the physical reality of two humans having the same dna makes them each responsible for the offspring they create. Very tricky.
We force plants and animals to reproduce for us. That is where we are going with this. The idea here would be to take the cells before they are a human being capable of consent so that they can’t object. I think the most ethical way to handle that is not to afford the status of personhood to fetus’ but rather simply pass a law that, quite appropriately I might add, limits people’s authority to reproduce human cells to reproducing their own cells and not as a service to anyone else trying to become a parent or a plantation owner. People need to stop selling their reproductive rights which is what sperm donors do, whose fault is it that they have 150 offspring California Cryobank? I’d like to sell my right to vote for $25K to california Cryobank they can vote for me in every election. How would that go over. But sell the ability to reproduce me sell my reproductive choice so now you have my sperm and I can’t change my mind and say no? We have some clean up to do. Personal responsibility is all out of allignment in the baby making business.
I believe that there is a fair chance of passing some kind of legislation that limits people’s authority to reproduce to only their own sex cells and not those of others. It will be acceptable to people who are prochoice since it leaves people in right control of their own bodies and does not try to turn fetus’s into people. Which by the way would just be an administrative nightmare. What would you like number them name them what? How would we just approach that from a paperwork standpoint? Far easier to have a sworn statement for every child born that the people claiming to be parents are to the best of their knowledge the genetic parents and if they went to a fertility clinic offer them an opportunity to confirm maternity and paternity in case of a mix up. Tell people who get help at fertility clinics that if they are mistakenly named parent of someone else’s child due to gamete mixups they cannot retain the title of parent to that other person’s child they should all have to sign before IVF or insemination. No finders keepers.
to their own damn cel
JHW
I really appreciate the way you think and that you are giving me a run for my money. I know what you mean because you’ve had me head scratching all day. But you know what I mean as well and if we are concerned about public health and we attempt to record births and keep track of these things on a federal level and we fund research on heritable disease and birth defects trying to keep track of who begat who it does matter how many degrees you are away from a shared ancestor. Reality is that one human results from the reproduction of two (and now sometimes more) humans and those humans are the parent organisms of the offspring organism.
It is a violation of the born individual to take their cells and own their cells because it is no different than owning the whole body – nobody should have ownership over anyone else’s body in whole or in part. With that comes the realization that nobody else is responsible for your body but you and if your body reproduces you are responsible for the offspring you create. What you do about that is your choice but as a society we can say its not your legal right to make that anyone else’s problem unless you follow some ethical procedures to protect your offsprings safety and wellfare.
I am reasonable like you seem to be. I really enjoy the way you make me think and I’m here for exactly the kind of challenge your giving me which is to think really hard about my beliefs. Cause I’ll change what I believe if I can be reasoned out of it. So I appreciate you very much. I want people to be free and treated equal I care very much about that and I need to be sure that what I’m saying is not being unfair to anyone. I’m real confident now when I say that people’s authority to reproduce starts and stops with their own bodies and I don’t think anyone has yet come up with a reasonable challenge to that assertion.
John Howard is that you?
Gosh MannyJohn sometimes you make so much sense and then you get on that pious ritous fornication marriage kick that turns me into a mad ex-stripper with a chip on my shoulder. Can’t swing around the pole all lopsided with a chip on my shoulder. Ugh prudes.