 Thanks everybody for coming. This is a great crowd and I know we've got a lot more people watching the live stream as well. This is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart. I am a journalist and was at the Washington Post Magazine for a long time and I have this vivid recollection, speaking of technology, when we first got email accounts at the paper and started getting press releases and various things sent to us through our email, which was sort of novel, not that long ago. I remember sitting at my desk and getting an email from someone I didn't know, a woman, a deaf woman, who was writing and sending out a query as to whether any reporter might be interested in her situation. She and her female partner were in the process of getting pregnant using a sperm donor from a deaf donor because they were specifically interested in having a deaf child. Both were graduates of Gallaudet or graduates of Gallaudet and very much part of deaf identity and deaf culture, wonderful women who I actually ended up spending a lot of time with as one of them went through her second pregnancy. They already had a daughter who had been conceived the same way, who is deaf, and we explored together obviously the many bioethical issues having to do with their desire. They desired a baby under any circumstances, but said that they felt it would be a particular blessing to have a deaf baby. They had actually been to a number of sperm banks in the D.C. area. When they asked if they might have a deaf donor, they were told that was considered a disability and that was exactly the kind of thing, any sort of congenital deafness that would have a donor eliminated from their base. They were not able to get a donor through the assisted reproduction industry, but sought out a colleague, a friend who would end up knowing the children and being involved in their lives. The article ultimately was extremely controversial. There were many people who had very strong feelings about their decision. I just found the issues so interesting to explore and what's so interesting just thinking about technology and its unexpected consequences. Many people thought, well, this is a terrible thing because these moms want to sort of engineer in a disability, but in fact, they were interested in doing what I think many, many parents who use assisted reproduction and particularly use what they call collaborative reproduction, a sperm donor, an egg donor, are interested in, which is a child who's like them, a child who looks like you or has the same background you do or the same, many people when they seek an egg or a sperm donor really are looking for someone who has their same ethnic background or their same academic background. A child who they feel that they'll be close to, that they'll have that kind of relationship with where you understand each other, you can communicate easily and you sort of come from the same place. In one sense, it looked like they were doing something different from what many people are doing when they try to select a donor who has super aspects, but in some ways what they were doing was exactly like what I think often would be parents are doing when they selected donor. What's interesting and lovely to me is their daughter, their first child just started at Gallaudet this year and she follows me on Twitter and I follow her on Twitter. Only making has progressed and technology has progressed to the point where it was just the beginning of email when I heard from them and now we're tweeting at each other. It's been a lovely progression to see, but I've found this issue to be so engaging ever since then because when you think about IVF in particular, IVF was created with the idea in mind that it would help women who were under 35 who were married, who had some sort of problem with their fallopian tubes. That was the really narrow set of patients who it was anticipated would avail themselves of assisted reproduction and instead we've seen just this explosion in single moms or same sex parents or this really sort of unanticipated but much larger group of people who want to become parents and are delighted to have a technology that will enable them to make a family. There was a lot of attention to when a couple of the companies in Silicon Valley began offering egg freezing to their employees and again a controversial question, are they making family life easier for their female employees or are they actually sort of creating a culture in which women are encouraged to postpone childbearing because it's inconvenient for the companies. When IVF was first invented we never envisioned that we would be having these conversations and I think that the conversation continues to progress and continues to be richly interesting. Another completely unanticipated aspect of these technologies, I don't think it's been in the news for a while although it sort of creeps into the news in unanticipated ways. Way back in 2001 before national security became the overwhelming concern of Americans one of the first things that President Bush had to make a decision on was whether to allow federal funding for stem cell research on leftover embryos and again frozen embryos are an unanticipated consequence of the assisted reproduction revolution and when I was further reporting on these issues one of the most interesting areas to look at were the many many families who have children as a result of IVF obviously cherish their children but also have frozen embryos that they don't know what to do with so this was an issue for the president and it got a lot of discussion but it's also an issue for every individual person or family who goes through the IVF process ends up as many people do with frozen embryos and cannot decide afterwards what's the right thing to do with these embryos so you know it used to be that if you were pro-choice or pro-life that or whatever terms you want to call it you know that you were always just talking really about one thing which was abortion but I talked to so many individuals who came into the assisted reproduction process thinking okay well I'm on this side of that issue or this side of that issue but say even if they thought of themselves as pro-choice they would look at their children and they would think about these frozen embryos and they would think you know my child was a frozen was an embryo maybe not frozen and and and so what is the right thing to do and and people would feel parental toward their frozen embryos they would feel that it was the wrong thing to thaw them they would I mean people you know who went online to try to find people who would adopt their their frozen embryos and then one woman who even after she'd found one person who adopted and thought and had a couple children there were still some left over and like she still wanted to be involved even though she had sort of ceded these embryos to the next person she still wanted to be involved in what happened to the remaining embryos but then you have to ask yourself well my children will have full siblings being raised in another family and how do I feel about that and what does family mean you know is it genetic is it is it is it not how important will it be to my children to know that they have full siblings like all of these repercussions I think are are happening and they're they're sort of happening on the front pages and and you know when we talk about personhood amendments I think there are ways in which the state of frozen embryos is still creeping into the conversation about abortion in ways that may not even be obvious but but when I when I was writing about this it was almost 10 years ago and there were half million frozen embryos in storage there were companies that had that had started just to provide storage to people who didn't know what to do and I can only imagine how many there are now so anyway I I just think that it's a rich and interesting conversation that gets to the heart of of of what families are and and and when to have families and what is the nature of our relationships with each other and our children that it's really important to keep talking about because lots and lots of people go through this process every day and what I found is they often don't have anybody to talk to you about it so I look forward to the conversations and and and the panelists thank you