Month: December 2012

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

50 Reasons HHS Should Reverse its Decision on Emergency Contraception

brigitte

Here is a $12 billion problem we really can actually go a long way towards eliminating.

There are 62 million American women of childbearing age, 43 million of whom are “at risk” for unintended pregnancy. Women manage their fertility for an average of 30 years. “At risk”—like an unplanned pregnancy is something that just happens to you, out of your control. NOT. These pregnancies have consequences for all of us. Someone needs to introduce the Purity Bear to the $12 billion dollars worth of consequences. And that’s a conservative estimate.

Most girls and women (some of whom are part of a couple…) don’t get pregnant if they don’t want to when they have access to safe, affordable birth control, including emergency contraception. There are no medical or scientific reasons why girls and women need prescriptions for methods relevant to their needs. Just religious, shame-based ones based on stereotypes, control and fear. We should be scheduling birth control biotechnologies the way we do vaccines and they should not require prescriptions. That or we should start requiring prescriptions for condoms. Exactly how long do you think that option would fly with the Pecker Patrol?

The most obvious and immediate issue is the fact that emergency contraception, Plan B, is not available without a prescription and should be. The longer term issue is why American women are ill-informed about and therefore not using long-acting forms of reversible contraception. Read full article.

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society

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OVER THE PAST HALF CENTURY, parenthood has undergone a change so simple yet so profound we are only beginning to grasp the enormity of its implications. It is that we have our children much later than we used to. This has come to seem perfectly unremarkable; indeed, we take note of it only when celebrities push it to extremes—when Tony Randall has his first child at 77; Larry King, his fifth child by his seventh wife at 66; Elizabeth Edwards, her last child at 50. This new gerontological voyeurism—I think of it as doddering-parent porn—was at its maximally gratifying in 2008, when, in almost simultaneous and near-Biblical acts of belated fertility, two 70-year-old women in India gave birth, thanks to donor eggs and disturbingly enthusiastic doctors. One woman’s husband was 72; the other’s was 77.

These, though, are the headlines. The real story is less titillating, but it tells us a great deal more about how we’ll be living in the coming years: what our families and our workforce will look like, how healthy we’ll be, and also—not to be too eugenicist about it—the future well-being of the human race. Read full article.

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

University Of Washington Researchers Develop Dissolving Condom

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A new, discreet condom has been developed that prevents pregnancy and protects against sexually transmitted diseases by dissolving inside of the body and releasing preventative drugs after use.

Researchers at the University of Washington developed the condom from tiny microfibers where strength, solubility and shape can all be adjusted for best personal use. Published in the Public Library of Science’s “PLoS One” journal, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave the researchers nearly $1 million to pursue the new “electrospinning” technology.

The “electrospinning” method uses an electric field to charge fluid through air to create the very fine, nanometer-sized fibers.

“Our dream is to create a product women can use to protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancy,” wrote corresponding author Kim Woodrow, a UW assistant professor of bioengineering. “We have the drugs to do that. It’s really about delivering them in a way that makes them more potent, and allows a woman to want to use it.” Read full article.

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Quigley: Who’s Your Mommy? New problems with surrogacy contracts

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If a married woman has a baby, her husband is automatically named father, even if she uses a sperm donor or her spouse has been in jail or Afghanistan for a year and she’s been fooling around with every guy in town. A suspicious husband can demand blood or DNA tests to disprove paternity, but if he doesn’t challenge, he is deemed the father, no matter what.

Disputed motherhood was never an issue. Until recently. It used to be simple: the woman who delivered a baby was its mother. Pretty obvious, right?

Then along came surrogacy contracts, when some women agreed to bear children for other women.

 Now stick with me here. This can get complicated. A surrogate may agree to become pregnant with her own egg and sperm from the intended father. Or she may use an egg from the intended mother who can ovulate but not carry a child to term. Or she can accept an egg from a third party. Sperm can be from either the intended father or a donor. Read full article.
Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

More women turn to frozen eggs for help with infertility

brigitte

Ellen Carpenter delayed marriage until she found Mr. Right, but by that time she was 38 years old, making it much more difficult to have children.

After getting pregnant with the help of hormone injections, the Frederick County resident lost the baby — a girl with severe body malformations — in the first trimester. She explored other options and chose to use frozen eggs from a donor. Today, Carpenter is the mother of a rambunctious 18-month-old named Zachary.

A growing number of women are turning to frozen eggs to solve their fertility problems as the controversial procedure that long raised safety concerns slowly gains acceptance. Fertility clinics around the country are working to make frozen donor eggs more available to women, and advances in medical technology such as flash freezing have helped improve the procedure’s success rate.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine added its stamp of approval in October to the use of frozen eggs on a limited basis by declaring that the procedure is no longer considered experimental. The group found that successful pregnancy rates were the same using frozen eggs as fresh eggs.

But frozen egg use still raises concerns and may not become mainstream any time soon. Read full article.

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Doctors And Women’s Groups Urge Feds To Relax Plan B Restrictions

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Dozens of medical, women’s health and reproductive health groups marked the first anniversary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ decision to maintain age restrictions on the sale of the morning-after birth control pill without a prescription by urging her to reconsider that decision.

“The unique dual-labeling of Plan B One Step has led to confusion among consumers and health care professionals alike, particularly regarding age restrictions and whether men and women can purchase non-prescription emergency contraception,” said a letter signed by more than three dozen women’s health, reproductive rights and individual providers of health care. Read full article.

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

The Sperm Whisperer

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Young whippersnappers tap iPads while old men work sudoku puzzles, shifting uneasily in their seats.Orthopedic footwear mingles with hipster skinny jeans as a battle of bifocals and vanity glasses unfolds in a Murray Hill waiting room.

The mood is anxious as men both vernal and venerable wait to see urologist and superstar sperm doc Joseph Alukal.

Until three months ago, things were status quo for the 37-year-old fertility phenom, who typically addresses issues like performance anxiety, cancer and sexual dysfunction.

But a recent landmark study in the science journal Nature, linking advanced paternal age with higher incidents of autism and other maladies in offspring, has sent young New York men into a tailspin. And their little swimmers straight to Alukal’s test tubes.

“People keep asking me, ‘Doc, should I freeze my sperm? What if I meet the right girl 10 or 15 years from now?'” says Dr. Alukal, director of male reproductive health at NYU Langone Medical Center.

“It’s absolutely something I’m seeing more of in my office.”

Nearly two dozen men have come in since the research came out, and “more than 50 percent of the guys who come to me actually do it,” he says. Read full article.