This story from England strikes a familiar chord: a doctor has assisted a woman well beyond the typical age of fertility to undergo an IVF pregnancy; critics claim he should not have done so because it smacks of “selfishness” and because “it would be extremely difficult for a child to have a mother who is as old as a grandmother”. Art Caplan said much the same thing in a column about a year ago: “it was wrong because there was a terrible price to pay for using reproductive technology [in the case he discusses].”

I’m uneasy about this, in a lot of ways.

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