by Anna Louie Sussman, photographs by Dru Donovan, New York Times, March 25, 2025
The political fights over abortion demand a great deal of attention. But embryos also demand and warrant a meaningful conversation about everything they represent: values, knowledge, family, religion, health, life, death and more. The boundaries of what we are doing with embryos are shifting quickly. Any attempt to shape the future of how we treat them has to engage with these questions now.
For many years, people have kicked the proverbial IVF can down the road rather than deal with the problem of “excess” frozen embryos. These are embryos that have accumulated in fertility clinics after couples, who for any number of reasons, have decided that they do not want any more children. The 2024 Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos destroyed in an IVF clinic were grounds for wrongful death (“Warnings of the Impact of Fertility Treatments in Alabama Rush in After Frozen Embryo Ruling”) and President Trump’s executive order (“Trump Wants to Lower the Cost of IVF. A New Executive Order Seeks Ideas to Do That”) have both prompted several media articles about the questions surrounding what to do with excess embryos (“Inside the Strange Limbo Facing Millions of IVF Embryos”). Once such series in The New York Times, called “The Embryo Question” by Anna Louie Sussman, explores the ethical, political, social, legal, and scientific questions surrounding embryos.
In Sussman’s first installment in the Time’s three-part series, she reflects on the creation of embryos, their use in research, and even the creation of embryonic entities from pluripotent stem cells. She cites ethicists and scientists from various perspectives while reflecting on her own IVF experience and her decisions around the six embryos that are left in cryogenic storage.
by Anna Louie Sussman, photographs by Dru Donovan ,New York Times, April 1, 2025
Today the United States is known for its wide range of available services, which include sex selection and even eye color choice, as well as polygenic embryo screening, and has become a destination for fertility patients from around the world. . . . By animating embryos and enabling a close-up encounter with them, time-lapse microscopy renders them more human than they already are; polygenic embryo screening reduces them to a set of probabilities. I am not convinced that not using such technologies leaves one untouched.
In the second of the three-part series, Sussman looks at the murky world of embryo selection. In the United States, there is little regulation on what companies, like Orchid, can claim to select for and what criteria parents are allowed to discard embryos over. She engages with the enthusiasm of Silicon Valley elites over the ability to select embryos for IQ. Sussman asks the important bioethics question in all this: What does the ability to select embryos do to our views on children?
by Anna Louie Sussman, photographs by Dru Donovan, New York Times, April 8, 2025
In this last installment by Sussman, she addresses some of the legal questions surrounding embryos, including what rights they have and whether couples who divorce have a right to the embryos. Sussman concludes the series by reflecting on her own “embryo,” her daughter, who by the time of publication was two years old. Sussman was eight months pregnant when she began interviewing and researching this article after having gone through IVF. The series takes an honest look at the thorny ethical questions surrounding IVF, all the things that can be done with extra embryos, and the social implications of embryo selection.
by Sunita Puri, The Atlantic, March 18, 2025
I dreaded explaining to her, and all my patients’ families, that our hospital would allow a visit only if a patient became irreparably sick; even then, just one family member, unrecognizably ensconced in layers of PPE, could spend 10 minutes in their room before a physician removed life support. I struggled to tell those families that many of my patients still died alone, their condition sometimes worsening too suddenly and unpredictably for a loved one to arrive in time.
by David Zweig, The Atlantic, April 17, 2025
Of the many mistakes made in the COVID era, none were as glaring as prolonged school closures. The damages go beyond loss of learning, a dire consequence in its own right: Millions of families, both children and parents, still carry the scars of stress, depression, and isolation.
March 2025 marked five years since the world was put on hold while a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 spread. Several media outlets published articles reflecting on the lasting impact of Covid-19. The New York Times had an article with thirty interactive graphs showing how the pandemic changed several aspects of society (“30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything”). It also reflected on what worked and what didn’t in 2020 (“Science Amid Chaos: What Worked During the Pandemic? What Failed?”). The BBC looked at the countries that chose never to lock down (“Five Years on: The Countries That Never Locked Down for Covid-19”). Nature reported that no other virus has been sequenced as much as Sars-CoV-2, allowing researchers to see the evolution of a virus in real time (“Four Ways COVID Changed Virology: Lessons from the Most Sequenced Virus of All Time”).
Among the lasting impacts of Covid-19 are those who suffer from Long-Covid, a disease that has many of the same features as fibromyalgia. Additionally, there is a lasting shortage of healthcare workers, many of whom experienced burnout and moral distress after working in pandemic situations (“COVID Made Shortages of Doctors and Nurses Even Worse. Rural Hospitals Still Struggle”).
The Atlantic published two articles reflecting two mistakes made during the pandemic: people suffering and dying alone in the hospital and the extended closure of schools. The first, written by palliative care physician and professor Sunita Puri, points to a tragedy during the Covid pandemic that should have been handled differently. People were forced to die alone, their attending nurses sometimes the only ones to hold their hands at the end of life.
The second article, by David Zweig, addresses the extended closure of schools. The CDC’s influenza pandemic instruction book called for a two-week closure of schools to allow public health officials to gauge how severe the pandemic was and, if many people were hospitalized, to curb spread so the hospitals are not overwhelmed. However, according to those Zweig interviewed, once the threat from Covid was assessed, there was not an exit plan to undo the interventions that had been put in place.
Both articles bring up important bioethics issues regarding the role of public health officials and the public’s responsibilities when it comes to children, the sick, and elderly during times of crisis.
by Jessica Elgot and Rowena Mason, The Guardian, June 20, 2025
Terminally ill people in England and Wales are to be given the right to an assisted death in a historic societal shift that will transform end-of-life care.
Great Britain voted to legalize assisted dying a month after the French National Assembly did so (“French National Assembly OKs ‘Right to Die’ Law”). As of this writing, France’s bill still needs approval by the senate and again by the National Assembly. Around the same time that these bills were being debated, New York was debating a bill that would legalize assisted dying in the state, which incited criticism from disability advocates (“New York’s Euthanasia Bill Targets Me: Suicide-by-Doctor Cheapens Disabled Lives”). The New York legislature passed the bill in June, and as of this writing, it is still awaiting Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature.
Amidst the media discussions on legalizing assisted suicide in New York, The New York Times Magazine was called out for violating journalism ethics by describing a suicide and showing the dead body in a pro-euthanasia article (“How NYT Magazine Threw Away Journalistic Ethics on Suicide”).
by Lydia S. Dugdale, New York Times, May 11, 2025
[Medical aid in dying] is about relieving society—government, medical systems, even families—of the responsibility to care for those who need the most help: the mentally ill, the poor, the physically disabled.
Looming in the background of the debates in Britain, France, and New York is Canada’s medical aid-in-dying law, which has garnered criticism even from those who are in favor of assisted dying. The UN Committee on Rights of Persons with Disabilities called for a rollback of the rapid expansions of Canada’s medical aid-in-dying laws (“Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”), while advocates in Canada resisted the rollback. As Dr. Lydia Dugdale points out in her opinion article in The New York Times, the bill in New York and similar laws in Oregon and Canada is not about dying well.
by Tina Reed, Axios, January 6, 2025
Mounting public anger over health insurance is leading more state legislatures to eye tighter oversight of the industry, starting with its use of AI to screen claims and issue denials.
by Isabelle Bousquette, The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2025
UnitedHealth Group said it now has a thousand artificial-intelligence applications in production, leaning into a technology that’s dragged it and other insurers into controversy over how claims are processed.
by George Joseph, The Guardian, May 21, 2025
UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate, has secretly paid nursing homes thousands in bonuses to help slash hospital transfers for ailing residents—part of a series of cost-cutting tactics that has saved the company millions, but at times risked residents’ health, a Guardian investigation has found.
Health insurance companies have an oversized influence in American’s healthcare, including Medicare Advantage plans. Several outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, have extensive investigations into large insurance companies’ prior authorization processes and Medicare Advantage billing practices. A Wall Street Journal exclusive report in May revealed that UnitedHealth Group was under criminal investigation for possible Medicare fraud by the Justice Department (“UnitedHealth Group Is Under Criminal Investigation for Possible Medicare Fraud”), while a ProPublica investigation revealed that Blue Cross Louisiana denied payments for breast cancer surgeries but gave special approvals for executives’ wives (“‘Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay’”).
The killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson and an antitrust probe initiated by the Justice Department has put what is normally a dull but important topic at the top of the news feed (“DOJ Investigates Medicare Billing Practices at UnitedHealth”). Additionally, several states have enacted policies that limit the ability of pharmacy benefits managers to negotiate drug pricing, and there has been continual pushback on how much AI should be used in the prior approval process (“Arkansas PBM Law Could Spur Lookalike Restrictions”).
by Caiwei Chen MIT Technology Review, January 24, 2025
The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost.
The beginning of the year saw the unveiling of China’s DeepSeek AI app, which experts say was likely made from interrogating and reverse engineering ChatGPT, a process known as distillation (“OpenAI Is Probing Whether DeepSeek Used Its Models to Train New Chatbot”). (Distillation is forbidden under ChatGPT’s terms of service.) Unlike ChatGPT, DeepSeek used chips that were not the latest state-of-the-art, making it cheaper and more efficient than ChatGPT. But, as soon as DeepSeek made the news, it seemed to dissipate from the headlines after users found that DeepSeek will censor sensitive information that is often censored by the Chinese government, such as information about Tiananmen Square or Tibet (“DeepSeek’s Chatbot Works Like Its U.S. Rivals—Until You Ask About Tiananmen”). DeepSeek also sends user data back to China, where data collection is part of the state’s surveillance system (“DeepSeek’s Popular AI App Is Explicitly Sending US Data to China”).
Other bioethics stories to note from January to June include questions about the energy consumption required to run AI (“We Did the Math on AI’s Energy Footprint. Here’s the Story You Haven’t Heard”) as well as bird flu (“Deadly H5N1 Bird Flu Strain Has Hit All But 1 Continent”) and the measles outbreak that started in Texas (“U.S. Measles Cases Spike Past 800 in 25 States, with More Than 600 in Texas”). And on the biotech front, the FDA approved clinical trials for implanting genetically modified pig kidneys in humans (“F.D.A. Approves Studies of Pig Organ Transplants for Kidney Patients”).
Heather Zeiger, "Bioethics News Stories (January–June 2025)," Dignitas 32, no. 1–2 (2025): 26–29, www.cbhd.org/dignitas-articles/bioethics-news-stories-january-june-2025.