Author: brigitte

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Utah Court: No Benefits for Sperm Donor’s Offspring

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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The Utah Supreme Court ruled Friday that a Utah boy who was conceived with the frozen sperm of his dead father does not qualify for Social Security survivor’s benefits.

Gayle Burns had been trying to get survivor’s benefits for a son who was conceived with her husband’s sperm two years after the husband died of infection caused by a stem-cell transplant.

Michael Burns had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, or cancer of lymphoid tissue. He signed a contract to leave the preserved, frozen sperm to his wife if he died.

Gayle Burns has said her husband didn’t expect to die, because he had been cancer free, or to have to make legal arrangements to preserve Social Security benefits for his future son. Michael Burns died in 2001. Read full article.

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Young Women Often Don’t Resume Condom Use After Stopping Contraception

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Adolescent girls who use hormonal contraceptive birth control, stop using condoms as often as they would have before, a finding seen in an alarming new study, conducted by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. Researchers claim that when these young women stop taking their pills, they do not resume the use of condoms, which can result in the sexually transmitted infections, (STIs) and unwanted pregnancy.

The trial involved 1,194 young, sexually active girls between the ages of 15 and 24 who were going to Planned Parenthood clinics to start with contraceptive pills, injections, patches, or vaginal rings. All of these women were not planning to get pregnant within a year’s time. Read full article.

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Breast cancer quadruples in 15 years

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The number of Korean women diagnosed with breast cancer quadrupled over the last 15 years due to a more westernized lifestyle and lower birth and breastfeeding rates, health experts said.

According to a report by the Korea Breast Cancer Society, the number of patients with the disease surged to 16,398 in 2010 from 3,801 in 1996. The number of breast cancer patients in the population per 100,000 people also jumped to 67.2 in 2010 from 16.7 in 1996, it added. Read full article.

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Oklahoma Lawmakers File Brief in Support of Regulating Emergency Contraception

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OKLAHOMA CITY — Fifty-seven Oklahoma legislators filed a brief Wednesday in the Oklahoma Supreme Court defending a state law regulating emergency contraception.

In 2011, the legislature approved House bill 1970, which required Oklahoma physicians to administer such drugs in accordance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines. At least eight women have died following the use of “abortion-inducing drugs” in an off-label, unapproved manner, according to a written statement by the Oklahoma State Senate. Read full article.

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Child Free Women Feel Little Distress Study Finds

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Women who choose to be childfree feel more pressure to reproduce than other women without children, but they’re less distressed about their childfree lifestyle than other non-moms, new research finds.

Unsurprisingly, women who wanted children but did not have them because of fertility or medical issues were the most distressed, according to the study published in the October issue of The Journal of Marriage and Family. Read full article.

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Moodiness, Hot Flashes, Sleep Problems? It May Be Peri-Menopause

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At this stage in my life — moving into my late 30s, with many friends rounding the corner into their 40s — I’m starting to hear rumblings, rumors and some early ranting about peri-menopause, and I don’t particularly like it.

Although it means a winding up of your reproductive years and seems to signal getting, um, old, there’s no real reason for dread or alarm, says gynecologist Margery Gass, executive director of the nonprofit North American Menopause Society. “Peri-menopause is a normal and natural phase of a woman’s life — it’s not a deficiency state and it’s not a disease,” she says, noting that peri-menopause ends — and menopause begins — when a woman hasn’t had a period in a full year. Read full article.

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BPA May Worsen Women’s Fertility Problems

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Exposure to the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) may reduce fertility among women who already have fertility problems, a new study suggests.

The study involved women trying to conceive children through in vitro fertilization (IVF), a fertility treatment that includes taking hormones to stimulate egg production. These eggs are then collected, and researchers attempt to fertilize them in a laboratory.

In the study, doctors collected 24 percent fewer eggs from women with high levels of BPA in their bodies, compared with women who had low levels of the industrial chemical.

Women with high BPA levels also had fewer eggs that were successfully fertilized. Read full article.

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Supermice Invade Europe with Extra Strength Sperm

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The male chromosome of an Eastern European house mouse has infiltrated Western Europe, creating a hybrid strain of “supermice” with extra-high sperm counts.

Normally, hybridization, when two subspecies mate to produce offspring, results in decreased  sperm strength in the offspring. But when the western mouse Mus musculus domesticus picks up a male, or Y, chromosome from the eastern mouse Mus musculus musculus, the result is a strain of mice with higher-than-normal sperm counts that now thrives in the Czech Republic and the Bavarian region of Germany. Read full article.

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Sperm Black Market in China

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Huang, a professional black-market sperm donor, vowed for a third time to Yu Hua and her husband, “I swear that I will never meet this child for my whole life under any circumstances!”

The couple from Shanxi Province nodded. They had been longing for a child, and Huang was tall and intelligent. Although not classically handsome, he bore a striking resemblance to Yu Hua’s husband, and shared his blood type, ensuring no one would ever have to know their secret.

They signed the agreement to let Huang donate his sperm to the wife, joining the ranks of a growing number of Chinese couples who resort to the Internet-based black market, despite the lack of safeguards to protect women from giving birth to an unhealthy baby. There are only 11 sperm banks in China, and they suffer from a shortage of sperm donors, explains Jiang Xiang-long, director of the Jiangxi Province Human Sperm Bank. Read full article.

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Misinformation, Stigma Plague Emergency Contraception in Hamilton

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Misinformation, lack of awareness about accessibility and stigma may be a barrier to the use of emergency contraception in Hamilton, which has a higher rate of teenage pregnancies than the provincial average.

“Even in this day and age obviously there are a large number of unplanned pregnancies,” said Dr. Nicholas Leyland, Chairman of the Department of Gynaecology and Obstetrics at McMaster University.

“When a woman finds herself in a situation where it’s necessary—whether the condom or something else—there is a need for post-coital birth control,” he added.

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) said that more than half of Canadian women are unfamiliar with emergency birth control. To encourage greater awareness about emergency contraception–sometimes known as the “morning after pill”– the SOGC made a public appeal on World Conception Day (Sept. 26) to dispel some of the myths and misinformation surrounding its use and accessibility. Read full article.