You knew it would come to this. To reduce costs, an IVF doctor is making mass quantities of embryos and selling them on the cheap. From the LA Times story:
Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments. He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back.
That’s about half the price for in vitro fertilization at many other clinics, which do not include money-back guarantees. Typically, insurance coverage is limited and patients pay again and again until they give birth — or give up . . . Zeringue sharply cuts costs by creating a single batch of embryos from one egg donor and one sperm donor, then divvying it up among several patients. The clinic, not the customer, controls the embryos, typically making babies for three or four patients while paying just once for the donors and the laboratory work.
The guy’s a veritable Henry Ford.
What a world: Now, it doesn’t even matter who and where the babies come from. The commoditization of human life continues. Regulate? Not in our entitled age.
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