AmericanPapist Comments
Of course ACT has a track history of press releases that turn out later just not to be true.
I post the following from an expert in the field re: this story:
"Embryo friendly my foot ... The technique they are using in that article is called blastomere separation - and they don't tell you all the nasty parts. First...the process of removing one cell from the early embryo is done in PIGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) to screen out those "bad" embryos that have a genetic disposition to say, Huntington disease or some other ailment. They use it also to determine what the sex of the embryo is ... so now, if you are parents wanting a boy and that embryos is a girl, heck, flush that one...next. They also don't tell you that because the separation occurs at such an early stage of the embryos development - that each one of those blastomeres has full capability of becoming another embryo. The cells are "totipotent" (totally capable of forming all the cells, tissues and organs and a whole new embryo) You notice Father how they get all excited about all the stem cells they could generate by just removing one cell...well sure! They just continuously create new embryos."
And they don't know whether or not this harms the embryo in question. Implanted embryos have much higher rates of being born prematurely and with birth defects, and no one knows why. It could be the placement of the implantation (lower in the uterus than natural impantation?) or the whole freezing-thawing-separating-testing process to which the embryos are subjected before implantation. But to say that this process usually doesn't harm the embryo is misleading.
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Commenting by HaloScan
