Word: egges
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Another intriguing method involves harvesting not a woman's eggs but bits of her egg-bearing ovarian tissue. Like egg freezing, this procedure could preserve fertility for women who know they are about to lose their ovaries. It could be used on females who are far too young to produce mature eggs--girls who are undergoing radiation treatments, for example. In theory, the tissue could eventually be placed back in the body and lead to successful pregnancies. (This has been done in sheep but not yet in humans.) Men's sperm-generating testicular tissue could also be removed, and presumably...
...Grifo's eggs have not yet resulted in any births, but an upside-down version of the procedure has succeeded. At the St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., Drs. Richard Scott and Jacques Cohen have been taking cytoplasm--the nonnuclear part of a cell--out of young women's eggs and injecting it into the eggs of older women. One egg with refurbished cyotoplasm has grown into babyhood; another birth is expected next spring...
...Egg freezing may actually ease one ethical dilemma. When clinics freeze test-tube embryos for later use, what happens if that use never takes place? If the parents divorce or die, who gets custody of the embryos? Courts have addressed both these thorny situations in specific cases, but no nationwide policy exists...
Substitute frozen eggs for embryos, however, and these problems go away. No one considers an unfertilized egg to be a human being (though the Catholic Church officially opposes IVF, as it does nearly all assisted-reproduction procedures, including artificial insemination). Moreover, there is no controversy about whom the egg belongs to. An unfertilized egg, after all, has no father...
...even as it eases one ethical controversy, egg freezing may exacerbate another. Menopause, doctors now know, simply marks the end of a woman's egg supply. Otherwise, her reproductive equipment can still function if supplied with hormone supplements. With IVF, hormones and another woman's egg, even a postmenopausal woman can give birth...