Church backs science to provide alternative to embryonic stem cells
[AP] The Vatican is pushing for research of adult stem cells as an alternative to the use of embryonic stem cells, which the Catholic Church opposes because it maintains that the destruction of the embryo amounts to the killing of human life.

On Friday, the Catholic Church [...]

[msnbc] The number of women dying in childbirth worldwide has dropped dramatically, a British medical journal reports, adding that it was pressured to delay its findings until after U.N. meetings this week on public health funding.
A new, separate report by a group headed by the United Nations reached a very different conclusion on maternal mortality, [...]

[AP]  An American infertility clinic is offering free human eggs to one British participant for attending an informational seminar Wednesday in London.
The promotion, which has been described by some as a raffle, has sparked an ethical debate in Britain about whether women should be paid for their eggs — which is illegal in the European [...]

Thousands of preserved human embryos will be disposed of next week following the implementation of a federal law that bars fertility clinics from conducting this medical procedure on religious grounds.
The Dubai Gynaecology and Fertility Centre that stores an estimated 5,000 eggs fertilised through In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) will start the disposal procedure next week, according to [...]

[Reason.com] In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann as the chair of the new Bioethics Commission. Such commissions are charged with working through tough questions about intellectual property rights, the protection [...]

[RFERL]  In late December, Snezhana Mitina received a tearful phone call from her friend Svetlana. Sobbing, Svetlana explained she had just read a newspaper article calling for babies with mental disabilities to be killed at birth.
The author, Aleksandr Nikonov, used the word “debil” — a deeply offensive term in Russian — to characterize such children. He [...]

[liveScience] Like babies that can be lulled to sleep with swaying, embryos also prefer to be rocked.
By gently rocking embryos while they grew during in vitro fertilization, scientists increased pregnancy rates in mice by more than 20 percent. The same rock-a-bye procedure could lead to more success for in vitro fertilization in humans, the researchers [...]

[People's Daily] When Xiao Luo arrived in south China’s Guangzhou city in May last year, the 30-year-old was struggling to raise her 6-year-old son alone in Hunan Province. Her husband never showed up soon after a business failure. “I was devastated that my husband abandoned us just like that, leaving dunners knocking on the door [...]

The Obama administration has begun approving new lines of human embryonic stem cells that are eligible for federally funded experiments, opening the way for millions of taxpayer dollars to be used to conduct research that was put off-limits by President George W. Bush.
Launching a dramatic expansion of government support for one of the most promising [...]

[The Independent] All research involving the controversial creation of animal-human “hybrid” embryos has been refused funding in Britain and one of the three scientists licensed to carry out the work has left the UK for a job in Australia.
Every one of the three projects to develop embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos created by fusing [...]