A Canadian fertility clinic has come under intense scrutiny for refusing to provide IVF for parents of different races.

A Canadian fertility clinic has come under intense scrutiny for refusing to provide IVF for parents of different races. The Regional Fertility Program, which until recently had an official policy of not creating mixed-race babies, garnered media attention after one of its doctors told a single caucasian women she could only be inseminated with sperm from a white male. 

Dr. Calvin Green, the clinic’s administrative director, claimed that mixed-race IVF promotes a designer baby culture: “I’m not sure that we should be creating rainbow families just because some single woman decides that that’s what she wants”. 

In a statement last last month the clinic announced that it now provides mixed-race IVF, and that Dr. Greene’s comments merely indicate his own personal opinion.

Commentators have slammed the clinic former policy.

“This is not something that’s ethical”, said Gloria Poirier, executive director of the Infertility Awareness Association of Canada. “We certainly don’t support that”.

“If the assumption is that it is not in the best interest to be in a racially mixed family, that’s very bizarre”, said bioethicist Kerry Bowman from the University of Toronto. “Women will decide for themselves how they want their family to be constructed.”

Canadian fertility clinic refuses mixed-race IVF
Xavier Symons
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designer babies
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Xavier Symons

Xavier Symons is a bioethicist and scholar in residence at the Kennedy Institute for Ethics at Georgetown University.

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