Two weeks ago Devon R, 33, a woman of color who lives with her husband in State X (in the USA) waited in the clinic for State Y of IVF Inc to have embryos placed in her uterus by Dr. Lucielle N. The embryos were produced in the clinic three days earlier by mixing Devon's eggs with her husband's sperm, a procedure called in vitro fertilization (IVF). Daisy F., a white woman from State Y, was also at the clinic for Dr. N to implant embryos produced in vitro from her eggs and her husband's sperm. In the waiting room, the husbands, Raymond R. and Ralph F. made small talk, while down the hall a new approach to their becoming fathers proceeded without them.
One week ago Dr. N's laboratory technician informed her of a slip upóthree of Rs' embryos has been placed in Daisy F's uterus along with several of the Fs' own embryos. Dr. N realized the potential seriousness of the situation and consulted her advisors on the board of IVF Inc. The board realized that they needed confidential guidanceóIVF Inc. were experts in the biomedical technique of IVF, but not in probability, law, ethics, counseling, public relations, intercultural mediation, and other issues that might need to be addressed. One of the board had heard that some professors in biology education at the State University of Z (far from States X and Y) used ill-defined problems to teach about biology in its social context. After some discrete inquiries, the IVF Inc board agreed to let me, your professor at SUZ, ask if you would produce a report for them in two weeks. At that time, the women will come to the clinic to confirm whether or not they were pregnant. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is not to recommend to IVF Inc how to (re)solve the problem. Instead, IVF Inc want a compilation of short briefings to help the board, the couples, and other parties who may come to be involved think about the issues and what they could do.
This case has been adapted by Peter Taylor from a real-life situation presented in "Whose embryo is it anyway?" by Deb Allen, Valerie Hans, Barbara Duch, and Steve Fifield (fifield@UDel.Edu) at the University of Delaware.
See Fieldbook entry by Nina Greenwald on how to run a PBL unit.