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  Conception technologies give rise to ethical concerns By Gary Rotstein, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The field of advanced reproductive medicine has its modern symbols of success. There's the petri dish on Naomi Zikmund-Fisher's bedroom mantel in Point Breeze. The now-pregnant schoolteacher brought the memento home in September from a Virginia fertility clinic, where it had contained one of three embryos placed inside her. There's the snapshot of his future child that the Rev. David Hunte is happy to show a visitor in his office at First Presbyterian Church of Jeannette. The photo's three shadowy blurs depict the embryos planted in his wife during in vitro fertilization. One of them produced the baby she's expecting in August. And there are the 72,000 children already cuddled in the United States by infertile parents who relied on laboratory professionals to foster conception since 1982. But there are also distressing signs of where technological progress has led this growing and rapidly evolving field: --Young couples can receive false hope without understanding how slim the prospects for successful treatment may be. --Too many multiple pregnancies result from infertility treatment, producing undesired health risks and costs. --Court cases boggle the most modern of minds with child-related legal disputes that seem closer to futuristic Mr. Spock than baby guru Dr. Spock. And there are the fundamental questions about tinkering with the very essence of life itself. The advent of cloning, genetic testing and manipulation could help parents ensure their kids won't be sickly or weak or dumb like the offspring of others. A lot of people find such "progress" unhealthy. "There are major ethical issues we haven't come to terms with," observed Dr. Lori-Linell Hall, a reproductive endocrinologist in Franklin Park. "The technology has outpaced our ability as a society to figure out these things on an ethical, day-to-day basis. It makes a lot of it tough and sticky." Infertility specialists and wannabe parents ignore most such issues in going through months or years of efforts to overcome poor ovulation, low-quality sperm, blocked fallopian tubes or any number of afflictions. They often succeed over time, quietly, without ending up in court or People magazine. There's always some newly publicized case, however, to remind them of potential complications. Two of the most recent stirs surrounded the use of fertility drugs to produce the McCaughey septuplets of Iowa and the announcement by a Chicago-area physicist that he hoped to develop a fertility clinic using human cloning. It's evident that changing the way babies have been made for thousands of years attracts attention and controversy. "It's uncharted territory," explained Anne Reichman Schiff, a University of Pittsburgh associate professor of law specializing in new reproductive practices. "It's the shock of the new, and there's a lot of human interest in these stories. . . . They raise fundamental questions of how we and society want to view parenthood."
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