Medicine: A Legal, Moral, Social Nightmare

Society seeks to define the problems of the birth revolution

Alexander Morgan Capron, a sandy-haired professor of law at Georgetown University, stood at a blackboard in a hearing room of Congress's Rayburn Office Building and began writing formulas: the symbols represented ten different ways of making babies. The fourth formula that he chalked up read XM & YD by AΙ with Gestation M, meaning that a married woman is artificially inseminated by a male donor's sperm. The fifth formula, XD & YM by IVF with Gestation M, meant that the beginnings of life could...