Contemporary ethical issues in third party assisted conception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: The last quarter century has witnessed remarkable changes in third party assisted conception practices. The historical domination of donor \ninsemination (DI) and ‘do it yourself’ surrogacy – both largely clandestine \npractices - has been replaced by a considerably more varied range of options \ninvolving donor sperm, eggs, and embryos and surrogacy that are available \nto much wider range of involuntary childless people including single men \nand women, same sex couples, post-menopausal women, widows using their \ndead husband’s sperm and parents of deceased persons wishing to conceive \ntheir grand-children. Furthermore, such practices have become increasingly \nvisible. Increased visibility is epitomised by the establishment of formal registers \nof third party procedures in a number of jurisdictions; informal registers \nestablished by service users and operating globally via the internet; legislation \nenabling people conceived following a third party procedure to have information \nabout their donor; and the vocalisation of the interests of people conceived \nas a result of a third party procedure (primarily DI). Both the \nexpansion of services and their increasing visibility have exposed a number \nof ethical concerns and important questions over how to regulate such an \narea in a morally pluralistic and globalised world. \nMaterials and Methods: The presentation is based on a review of policy documentation, \nlegislation, research studies, conference proceedings and media \naccounts of third party assisted conception services in a variety of countries \n(Europe, USA, Australia and Canada) over the last 20 years. The development \nof mechanisms of regulation in this area will be charted to provide an overview \nof current policy and legislation. The aim of this paper is to examine the challenges \nof regulating such an area in the age of reproductive tourism, moral pluralism \nand increasing globalisation. \nResults: The significant ethical issues concerning third party assisted conception \nwill be reviewed: different forms of third party assisted conception; \nthe commercialisation of gamete procurement; the range of people who may \nuse third party procedures; the interests of different family members in families \nbuilt as the result of a third party procedure; and the interests of donors and surrogates. \nSubsequently, the international legal response to these ethical debates \nwill be discussed The presentation will focus on the problems caused by the \nlack of a cohesive regulatory response to these dilemmas by international legislations. \nThese include “reproductive tourism”, that enables people to circumvent \ntheir own country’s ethical codes by travelling to receive treatment, \nuncertainty over acceptable limits to the use of such procedures and welfare \nof the child considerations. \nConclusions: The presentation will consider how bioethical principles can be \napplied to practices in third party assisted conception in the context of moral \npluralism and globalisation. It will conclude by considering the feasibility of \ndeveloping and implementing an internationally agreed code of ethics for \nhealth care professionals in this area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.046 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.026 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".