Posthumous fatherhood and postmenopausal motherhood raise a multitude of legal, ethical, and social concerns that the law and regulatory agencies have not been able to adequately address to date.
Patients seeking IVF are highly motivated to become parents and may wish to preserve financial resources for surrogacy or adoption should IVF not succeed, so risk sharing appeals to them, which makes its high cost especially problematic.
When deciding whether to provide assisted reproductive services to a postmenopausal woman, the doctor must consider the well-being of the future child but not put social concerns above the individual patient's interests.
This month, Virtual Mentor theme issue editor, Katie Falloon, a medical student at the Duke University School of Medicine, interviewed Dr. Thomas Price about the ethical and regulatory issues associated with assisted reproductive technologies (ART).