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"Sperm cells created from female embryo."

By Ann Althouse

The Telegraph reports, adding that "it may be possible for lesbian couples to have their own biological children."

Or any 2 women. They don't have to be lesbians.

It's just that we ? some of us! ? feel sympathetic to the desire of a lesbian couple to have a child that is biologically related to both of them.

But any 2 women could have a baby together ? once the technology advances so that sperm cells could be made from a woman's bone marrow.

And face it: A woman could be impregnated with her own sperm.

But right now, at this stage of the technology, a female embryo is being destroyed to create a sperm cell. One doctor calls this procedure "double-damned," but ? what did you think? ? he (she?) doesn't mean that it will provoke God:

... Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell and sex determination expert at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, doubts it will work: ?The presence of two X chromosomes is incompatible with this. Moreover they need genes from the Y chromosome to go through meiosis. So they are at least double-damned.?

In Brazil, a team led by Dr Irina Kerkis of the Butantan Institute in Saõ Paulo claims to have made both sperm and eggs from cultures of male mouse embryonic stem cells in the journal Cloning and Stem Cells.

The researchers have not yet shown that their male eggs can be fertilised to produce viable offspring, but they are thinking about possibilities for same-sex human reproduction.

If all these experiments pan out, then the stage would also be set for a gay man to donate skin cells that could be used to make eggs, which could then be fertilised by his partner?s sperm and placed into the uterus of a surrogate mother.

?I think it is possible,? says Kerkis, ?but I don?t know how people will look at this ethically.?

I don?t know how people will look at this ethically. You might want to think about it. You know, yourself. Whether it actually is ethical. It's not just a matter of how "people" "look at" it.

Full post as published by Althouse on January 31, 2008 (boomark / email).