Chemotherapy is harsh, which is good when it comes to killing cancer. What's not-so-good is that it can also cause hair loss, inflict nausea, and disable the proper functioning of all sorts of organs -- including the ovaries. Chemotherapy, therefore, can affect female fertility.

In some cases, doctors have extracted immature eggs from adult women about to receive chemotherapy, matured them in a laboratory, and then implanted them when the women are ready to have children. Until now, no one had ever tried this with eggs from young girls -- girls who have not yet undergone puberty. But it's just recently happened.

Doctors have removed eggs from young female cancer patients and for the first time, have brought the eggs to maturity before freezing them.

Today I offer you not so much a Thought for the Day but a Question for the Day. Before I ask my pressing question, though, I want you to consider this story.

Diagnosed with a rare malignant melanoma on her retina in 2001, Ann Guthrie, a South Carolina wife and mother of two grown sons, endured radiation and chemotherapy. The treatments shrunk Guthrie's tumor, but another mass appeared two years later, forcing the removal of her right eye.

At about the same time Guthrie lost her eye, cancer was discovered in her lungs. It was inoperable. Then cancer landed in her brain. And now, without any approved treatment avenues, Guthrie is out of options.

Like many people with terminal illnesses, this woman is willing to try just about anything -- a clinical trial, experimental drugs, risky treatments -- to extend her life. If she's going to die anyway, why not? She just might live longer. And if she doesn't, she could at least help advance science by offering herself up as a sort of guinea pig.

While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed changes that would make it easier for patients to access options like these, it's just not that simple right now.

There are ethical issues -- like weighing the needs of people who think anything is better than death against the need of society to prove drugs and treatments work safely. The only way to ensure a sort of balance is through clinical trials -- and letting anyone participate in clinical trials, for example, would make the results harder to interpret.

And there are medical and legal risks. What if terminally ill patients end up in worse shape after a treatment with an experimental drug, for example? What if the FDA or a physician is considered responsible for adverse drug reactions?

Denying terminal patients their last bits of hope is difficult. "It's a hard discussion to have with a patient and his family," says one doctor. "There's a lot of tears. We all would love to be able to get them access to some form of therapy."

And now for my question:

What do you think about terminally ill cancer patients and their access to anything that might extend -- or save -- their lives?

Chloe is a little girl conceived through in vitro fertilization -- not because her parents could not conceive in the traditional manner but because they wanted to make sure Chloe had no predisposition to cancer in her genetic makeup. And in vitro fertilization is one method of almost ensuring this. There is still a three percent chance of failure but Chloe's parents felt confident in the elective process that would mostly prevent her from inheriting a genetic mutation for colon cancer that has devastated her family -- Chloe's father carries this mutation, and his mother, grandfather, and two uncles have all died from colon cancer.

A growing number of couples are using preimplantation genetic makeup to detect a predisposition to cancers that may or may not develop later in life. Using this procedure, parents subject their tiny embryos to genetic tests to determine whether or not they harbor defective genes. Essentially, parents get to pick and choose from embryos in a petri dish which one they want. Since the embryo that became Chloe did not test positive for any defective genes, she was the chosen one. And she is now a healthy two-year-old girl.

It's an ethical minefield -- this scientific creation of human life and the picking and choosing of which embryos will survive and which ones will not. One expert says the issue centers around what is considered serious enough to warrant such testing -- and who gets to make this decision. Ethical dilemmas surrounding this issue will only continue to grow as more and more options become available. Already embryos are tested for predisposition for obesity and deafness and a mild skin condition. Some clinics even screen for gender. Some fear this practice may lead to a genetic class divide where the wealthy will become more genetically pure than the poor -- because this process is difficult and expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars without insurance coverage.

Chloe's parents are happy they made the choice they did. Her father says he doesn't know if he could handle being told his daughter has cancer -- especially with the knowledge that he could have prevented it.