When girls come in for their physical exams, one of the questions I routinely ask is “Do you get your period?” I try to ask before I expect the answer to be yes, so that if a girl doesn’t seem to know about the changes of puberty that lie ahead, I can encourage her to talk about them with her mother, and offer to help answer questions. And I often point out that even those who have not yet embarked on puberty themselves are likely to have classmates who are going through these changes, so, again, it’s important to let kids know that their questions are welcome, and will be answered accurately.
Month: June 2016
B.C. Families Sue U.S. Sperm Bank After ‘Genius’ Donor Turns Out to be Felon with Mental Health Issues
A sperm donor billed as a genius turned out to be a convicted felon with serious mental health problems, according to lawsuits filed in B.C. Supreme Court.The man who donated sperm to two Vancouver families so that they could have children through artificial insemination was falsely characterized and improperly screened.
Olympic Gold Medalist , Wary of Zika, Will Freeze His Sperm Before Rio Games
For months, the question bugging Olympic athletes hasn’t been about what they’re doing on the field or track, or in the pool or gym, in preparation of this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. It’s whether they’re going to attend the Brazil-hosted Games at all. There is good reason, too. With the mosquito-spread Zika sweeping across the Americas, spending two weeks near the epicenter of the virus probably doesn’t sound too appealing. But, hey, it is the Olympics. Which is why athletes are doing what they must to ensure their health and the health of their family members — current and future, apparently. Worried about the potential effects of the virus, Britain’s Greg Rutherford is taking an unorthodox measure in that regard. He will be freezing a sample of his sperm before traveling to Brazil.
The Ethics Of Posthumous Sperm Retrieval
After an initial refusal, a French court recently granted Mariana Gomez-Turri’s request to use her dead husband’s sperm, which he’d frozen while the two lived in Paris, just before he started chemotherapy.
Inside the ‘Black Box’ of Human Development
More recently, the IVF revolution has enabled early human embryos to be studied in unprecedented detail outside the body, but still gastrulation has remained a mystery. Technical limitations have meant that no one has been able to keep them alive much beyond nine days, about halfway to the key developmental stage when the simple ball of embryonic cells begins to take on the identity of a proper body plan, with a top and a bottom, and the first signs of the distinctive triple layer of tissues that form the disc‑shaped “gastrula”.
After Contact from 2 Offspring, Sperm Donor Wants to Say ‘No More
Twenty years ago, I was a sperm donor. My motivation then was entirely financial — I was paid the kingly sum of $50/donation. Since then, I’ve rarely given it a thought. A year ago, I received word that one of my offspring, a woman of 19, wanted to get in touch with me. My wife gave me her blessing. So I did, and it turned out to be a wonderful thing.
The Donor Talk: When Kids Have a Sperm Donor
All three of our kids were conceived using sperm from the same anonymous open donor. We had a lot of reasons for choosing our donor, ranging from the frivolous (like me, his favorite sports team is the Red Sox and he loves mint chocolate chip ice cream), to the more practical, such as traits we hoped would make way into our kids (intelligent, artistic, and athletic). Ultimately, we chose our particular donor because he sounded a lot like me, physically and in terms of personality. Even though I knew my kids would not be genetically related to me, I was hoping I might see myself in their eyes if I chose a donor similar to me.
How Silicon Valley Will Replace Condoms
Male birth control, like death, is always just around the corner. In 2014, the hope was that Vasalgel, a non-hormonal polymer gel that can be injected into the vas deferens, would hit the market by 2017. But the Parsemus Foundation, the non-profit organization funding Vasalgel, has since revised that projection to 2018, pending successful human trials and “public support.”
Missouri State Appeals Court to Decide Fate of Divorced Couple’s Frozen Embryos
The Missouri State Court of Appeals will decide whether a divorced woman has the right to implant two embryos she and her ex-husband had frozen nine years ago.
It Turns Out It’s Really Tough to ‘Disrupt’ Childbirth
Cutting the high cost and heartache of in-vitro fertilization isn’t as easy as Silicon Valley thought. Progyny, a startup that bills itself as “the Uber of fertility” as it touts new tactics and technologies to democratize the $10 billion-a-year IVF industry, has been forced to flip its strategy over the past six months in a bid to keep itself alive — and on the right side of health regulators, according to an investigation by The Post.