Some people use the word pre-embryo. It's certainly entitled to heightened respect, but it's not at all even a unique individual, it could become two individuals, so there is this zone where we tolerate a certain amount of research. The main organization representing infertility specialists, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, wants the NIH to fund embryo research and generally welcomes the intense scientific scrutiny for which the NIH is famous. Sean Tipton is the medical groups' lobbyist. He says the 24-year ban has harmed infertile people by slowing the advance of reproductive science.
Treatments used today are imperfect.
For instance, doctors can't control how many babies some procedures will produce. Fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization often result in expensive, dangerous, multiple births. Infertility treatments are more expensive than they need to be, they're probably not as efficient as they need to be. There's a lot about the fundamental, underlying dynamics of infertility as a disease that we need to know more about. It's very difficult to do that kind of research when you have the kind of prohibitions that exist now.