Procreation has been assumed to be a normality for all mortals to continue with the genealogies of various organisms.
It is of utmost importance for procreation to continue or life may cease to exist.
However, some individuals may experience difficulties in normal reproduction.
The latter has led to the development of new methods which have proven to succeed according to statistics.
Robert Edward of Britain was in 2010 awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in physiology and medicine for the development of in vitro fertilisation, a process that involves the fusion of a sperm and an ovum in a glass vessel externally from the uterus.
He was named the father of test tube babies.
In Kenya, this technology has become popular and the Nairobi IVF Centre alone has recorded a 30.2 per cent rate of success.
Though a tedious and technical process, it has become a ray of hope.
In the US about 1.8 per cent of the population is from IVF and assisted reproduction.
In as much as test tube babies is a success globally, it is a very expensive process.
In Kenya, the National Health Insurance Fund covers IVF services for police, prison officers and their dependents.
During the process, many difficulties may occur. Therefore, women over 42 years should not undergo the exercise because they have low chances of a successful viable embryo.
This technology has led to the development of other projects in the science realm, the popular one being the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats project.
This project has favoured the odds of gene editing of test-tube babies to be done.
The first experiment to edit a human embryo was done in 2015 and soon, the choice of the baby's eye colour will be for the parents to decide.
This automation may also cause serious side effects the most fatal being cancer, birth defects, ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, premature birth and also low birth weight.
For parents, it causes alarm because the process is emotionally challenging and the success rate may also be null.
The government should however make such technology accessible to every citizen.
Edited by Kiilu Damaris
