Stuart says the way the news was delivered added to the blow. His doctor walked into the room and bluntly declared: "You've got big troubles. You basically have one good sperm." Stuart says this "made me feel about an inch tall".

Like most illnesses, infertility does not discriminate. But somehow it makes people feel they are part of a brutal natural selection process that prevents the weakest from reproducing their inferior genes. It also has a cruel way of making well-matched couples feel they may not be truly compatible. Says Rachel, "I often think, in a way, that, as hard as it has been, I'm glad it was both of us that had problems because if it was just me, I would have felt as though Stu should go and find someone else."

The Maloneys borrowed most of the $30,000 they have spent on IVF to become pregnant with Nate. While they don't regret a cent of it and believe they have received good care, they still wonder why the often repetitive procedures cost so much. "The thing that always pulls me up is the embryo transfer," Rachel says. "It costs about $3000 and it's a bit like a pap smear. They basically pop a speculum in and use a catheter to squirt the embryo in with some sterile water. It takes about 15 minutes. The doctor is there, so we're obviously paying for his time, but the embryo has already been created and we pay storage fees of about $160 every six months to keep them frozen. A scientist obviously has to prepare the embryos, but $3000 for a 15-minute procedure? That really gets me." Continue reading

Sources

• The Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: The Guardian

"I was just catatonic," she said.

The shock turned into depression, as she began to mourn what she had lost. "I was a daddy's girl. I had a great childhood, and was the apple of my non-biological dad's eye. [I] adored my dad," said Blessing, a homeschooling mother of five, who lives in Tennessee.

"It really hurt to find out [my dad] wasn't mine in the way I thought he was," she said. "I grew up hearing about his dad being a cowboy. Everybody on dad's side of the family could tool leather like nobody…my grandmother, who is about to turn 100…they aren't mine anymore," she said.

Then, she began to mourn the loss of her biological father. "As much as my dad adored me, it hurts to know that the man who helped create me chose to have nothing to do with my life," said Blessing. "People are deceiving themselves if they think they can love somebody enough to make up for the person who isn't there."

She had never suffered from depression before, and her husband, an evangelical pastor, had no experience in dealing with an issue quite like this one.

Blessing was finally told her conception story due to concerns she had over her dad's failing health from progressive supranuclear palsy, a condition similar to Parkinson's disease. Once in robust health, her father was having an array of physical and cognitive problems, and his health appeared to decline more with each visit. Was Blessing genetically disposed to this disease? Would her husband have to take care of her the same way her mother now had to take care of her father? Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: examiner.com

Catholic Health Initiatives acknowledged it was "morally wrong" for lawyers representing one of its hospitals to cite the state's Wrongful Death Act in defence of a lawsuit brought by the husband of a woman who died with her unborn twins at the hospital in 2006.

CHI's lawyers argued that it could not be held liable for the deaths of the twins because under the Wrongful Death Act "a fetus is not a person until it is born alive".

In a statement, CHI also "unequivocally affirmed CHI's strict adherence to one of the Church's most basic moral commitments — that every person is created in the image and likeness of God and that life begins at the moment of conception.

"It is an unfortunate and regrettable point of fact that Colorado law, as it now stands, fails to adequately protect the rights of the unborn."

CHI said lawyers for the hospital "will not cite the Wrongful Death Act, which does not allow fetuses to sue, in any future legal hearings of this case. Although the argument was legally correct, recourse to an unjust law was morally wrong."

Meanwhile, the case has fuelled a long-standing debate in Colorado over whether unborn children should have legal rights.

A state legislative committee recently defeated a bill to make it a crime to kill an unborn child in cases such as mass shootings.

Another bill to be considered would make it a crime to kill an unborn child during a criminal act committed against a pregnant woman. That measure specifically states that the intent is neither to outlaw abortions nor to give unborn children additional rights.

Spurred on by advancing medical technology that makes unborn children more viable and more visible, nearly 40 legislatures in the United States permit wrongful death lawsuits on behalf of unborn children.

Sources:

Catholic Health Initiatives

Reuters

Image: Fox News

Tsiaras has made a video, "From Conception to Birth", in which the milestones of pregnancy can now be witnessed: the heart's first beats; the appearance of color in the eye; the emergence of toes and teeth; the brain and nervous system directing development; the first movement of tiny legs and arms; the first indications of gender; the wondrous symbiosis of mother and child; the symphony of the body's systems coming into being and working in concert.

All this is made possible by revolutions in two sciences. As biologists have decoded the molecular basis of life, computer scientists have developed non-invasive, three-dimensional techniques for visualizing the body.

Alexander Tsiaras has been a pioneer in merging these explorations and discoveries. He has created a virtual camera studio that enables him to view a human body or any part of it individually, scan it, enlarge it, rotate it, adjust its transparency so that we can view inside a living being, and light it from any angle. The result is an ability to illuminate the unseen elements that make us who we are, and the miraculous images in "From Conception to Birth".

"Even though I am a mathematician,"says Tsiaras, "I look at this with marvel: How do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us?"

"The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these mathematical models is beyond human comprehension," he says.

Watch excerpts from the video

Alexander Tsiaras is an artist and technologist whose work explores the unseen human body, developing scientific visualization software to enable him to "paint" the human anatomy using volume data. He's the author of Body Voyage and co-author of Information Architects.

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