fetus

On July 1st, we report that an aborted fetus can now become a mother. Martin Hutchinson writes in bbcnews.com that the bizarre experiments haven’t stopped: a U.S. scientists has created a hermaphrodite embryo that is both male and female.

Dr. Norbert Gliecher created the mixed-sex embryo to cure illnesses, but critics say it could lead to an ethical dilemma. The process he used creates a “chimaera,” which is a blend of two embryos that each has its own separate genes. No one knows if these embryos could have developed into babies, since they were destroyed after a few days, but sometimes cells from two different embryos do fuse naturally in humans and become one individual, and this causes no apparent bad effects on the baby.
read more

Even those who are passionately pro-choice may find this new innovation disturbing: eggs from aborted female fetuses can now be kept alive and grown in a lab, for later implantation into an infertile woman’s uterus. This means that even though a fetus has never been born, she can still be a mother.

This may be illegal in the U.K. Suzi Leather, of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, says, “It would be difficult for any child to come to terms with being created by aborted fetuses.”

Researcher Tal Biron-Shental says, “I am fully aware of the controversy about this, but probably, in some places, it will be ethically acceptable.”
read more

James Greenleaf, Paul Ogburn and Mostafa Fatemi of the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minnesota have found that ultrasound examinations during pregnancy expose the fetus to a sound as loud as a subway train coming into a station. But they don?t think the experience causes the baby any lasting harm.

Ultrasound machines generate sound waves in pulses lasting less than one ten-thousandth of a second. Pulses are used because a continuous soundwave could generate too much heat in the tissue being examined.

Neither adults nor fetuses can hear the actual ultrasound waves because they vibrate at too high a frequency for our ears to detect them. But researchers found that ultrasound causes secondary vibrations in a woman?s uterus.
read more