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Ethics Questions Arise as Genetic Testing of Embryos Increases

Genetic testing of embryos has been around for more than a decade, but its use has soared in recent years as methods have improved and more disease-causing genes have been discovered. The in vitro fertilization and testing are expensive — typically about $20,000 — but they make it possible for couples to ensure that their children will not inherit a faulty gene and to avoid the difficult choice of whether to abort a pregnancy if testing of a fetus detects a genetic problem. 

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Fertility Models Baby Love

Ebenezer Scrooge eventual hero of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”, famously suggests that the poor could “decrease the surplus population” by dying rather than entering the workhouse. Little did the author know that the book’s appearance in 1843 was to coincide with an enormous demographic shift: in the rich world fertility dropped by more than half between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth century.