A new Penn bioethics study led by Andy Gurmankin made AP today:
They’ll check her ovaries and her bank account, but few U.S. fertility clinics have policies for determining a woman’s emotional or mental fitness to have a child, let alone whether it’s OK to help one who is past menopause…most American clinics said they’d help a 43-year-old get pregnant. One in five would refuse single women, but 5 percent don’t even ask about marital status. One in four would help a woman who has the AIDS virus. “A gay couple and a couple on welfare were about equally likely to be turned away,” said Andrea Gurmankin, a Harvard School of Public Health psychologist who led the study when she previously worked at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Three percent said they were unwilling to deal with a blind couple. We thought that was fascinating,” Caplan said.