Author: brigitte

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Embryo options needed – Australia

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IVF participants need more support and clearer options when deciding what to do with unused frozen embryos, a new national study has found.

Researchers from the Sydney University of Technology’s law faculty found states including Tasmania had limited legal structures in place to support people making decisions about frozen embryos.

Many IVF participants end up with a surplus of embryos and the report, officially released today, makes 57 recommendations for changes to laws, policy and practices covering storage limits, the use of embryos after the death of a partner and donation of embryos.

Professor Jenni Millbank, an author of the report, said the five-year storage limit should be doubled to give people more time to expand their families or consider other alternatives.

“Law should not set blanket storage periods that enforce destruction of embryos after a set period, nor should they prevent donation (to other infertile people) if that is desired,” she said.

The findings were based on interviews with 54 people across Australia including two Tasmanians, who had either donated or received donor embryos, or gone through a separation since freezing embryos. Read full article.

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Health: Body and soul

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Psychological side of infertility has been ignored compared to physiological factors that prevent couples from having a baby.

Biomedical treatments to help infertile couples become parents have advanced greatly in recent years, but psychological treatment to help them cope has lagged way behind. And sometimes, the emotional distress from depression and anxiety alone is a key factor that actually holds back the hoped-for pregnancy.

Fortunately, awareness of this mind-body connection to infertility is growing and the appearance of a Hebrew volume on the subject will certainly give it a push. Called Lehavi Yeladim La’olam (To Bear a Child), released by Aryeh Nir Publishers in Tel Aviv, the book is an important example.

The 256-page, NIS 89 softcover volume was written by Dr. Zvia Birman and Prof.

Eliezer Witztum. Birman is a longtime fertility researcher who was head of the social workers unit in the pediatric, obstetrical and gynecological departments at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem and has provided individual and group therapy to many infertile couples over the last two decades.

Witztum is a leading psychiatrist at Beersheba’s Mental Health Center and Ben- Gurion University and specializes in the complex relationship between culture and society and mind-body. Read full article.

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Oklahoma City doctor says emergency contraception not abortion

brigitte

There’s a difference between the drugs that induce a medical abortion and those used in emergency contraception, or the morning-after pill, an Oklahoma City doctor said this past week.

“Emergency contraception, first and foremost, is not an abortifacient,” Dr. Andrea Palmer, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Lakeside Women’s Hospital, said. “It is not going to dislodge or disrupt an already implanted pregnancy. It’s not something that is going to cause an implanted pregnancy to no longer be implanted or to abort.”

Whether emergency contraceptive pills can cause abortions has been a contentious fight since the pills first came onto the market.

Emergency contraceptive pills have been around since the 1970s, according to a study published in the Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception journal. Plan B and ella are two examples of emergency contraceptive pills currently available in the U.S.  Read full article.

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‘Grayest Generation’: Older Parenthood In The U.S.

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In a December article for The New Republic, “The Grayest Generation: How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society,” the magazine’s science editor Judith Shulevitz points out how the growing trend toward later parenthood since 1970 coincides with a rise in neurocognitive and developmental disorders among children.

Drawing on research published in Nature, Shulevitz writes that, while the associations between parental age and birth defects were largely speculative until this year, “when researchers in Iceland, using radically more powerful ways of looking at genomes, established that men pass on more de novo — that is, noninherited and spontaneously occurring — genetic mutations to their children as they get older. … [T]hey concluded that the number of genetic mutations that can be acquired from a father increases by two every year of his life, and doubles every 16, so that a 36-year-old man is twice as likely as a 20-year-old to bequeathde novo mutations to his children.”

By proving that it’s not simply the mother’s age and health that affects the fetus, Shulevitz says the dynamic surrounding discussions of fertility will change. “No longer need women feel solely guilty,” she tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “They can point to their husbands — and perhaps that’s not really a nice way of putting it — but it means that the problem is shared by both sexes.” Read full article.

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First ‘personhood’ bill of session is filed

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Personhood BillOKLAHOMA CITY – One of last year’s most emotional issues for the Oklahoma Legislature apparently will be revisited this spring, with at least one “personhood” bill already filed for the session that begins Feb. 4.

“Personhood,” a concept popular among abortion-rights opponents, holds that individual rights and constitutional protections begin at conception.

State Rep. Mike Reynolds, R-Oklahoma City, is the author of House Bill 1029, the Personhood Act of 2013. As written, the bill appears to be virtually identical to one that led to a bitter fight in the House of Representatives before it failed to get a vote on the floor.

A resolution with the same language as the bill but without the force of law did pass in the House, with several personhood supporters condemning it as a sellout. Read full article.

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Planned Parenthood goes beyond “pro-choice”

brigitte

Planned-ParenthoodWith a new campaign released today, Planned Parenthood has quietly signaled a move away from the “pro-choice” label.

The women’s health provider has long been the target of conservative chest-pounding (and budget slashing), and their latest video “Not In Her Shoes” is their first effort to get past the divisive rhetoric:

Most things in life aren’t simple. And that includes abortion. It’s personal. It can be complicated. And for many people, it’s not a black and white issue. So why do people try to label it like it is? Pro-choice? Pro-life? The truth is these labels limit the conversation and simply don’t reflect how people actually feel about abortion.

A majority of Americans believe abortion should remain safe and legal. Many just don’t use the words pro-choice. They don’t necessarily identify as pro-life either. Truth is, they just don’t want to be labeled.

What they want is for a woman to have access to safe and legal abortion, if and when she needs it. Read full article.

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Court: Ind. man must support kids by sperm donor

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MUNCIE, Ind. — An appeals court ruled Tuesday that a man whose then-wife conceived two children using the sperm of a family friend must provide financial support for the youngsters.

The Indiana Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld an earlier ruling by Delaware Circuit Court 4 Judge John Feick that the children — born in 2004 and 2006, respectively — each qualify as a “child of marriage.”

When the husband filed for divorce in Feick’s court in October 2010, he acknowledged that “two children were born to (his spouse)” during their nine-year marriage, but said they were not his “biological children” and that he should not be held responsible for their financial support.

In its Tuesday ruling, the appeals court said after the couple married in 2001, they discussed having children, and were told by a physician that an effort to reverse the husband’s earlier vasectomy would likely be unsuccessful. Read full article.

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Court lifts cloud over embryonic stem cells

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embryonic stem cellsThe US Supreme Court’s decision last week to throw out a lawsuit that would have blocked federal funding of all research on human embryonic stem cells cleared the gloom that has hung over the field for more than three years. Yet the biggest boost from the decision might go not to work on embryonic stem (ES) cells, but to studies of their upstart cousins, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which are created by ‘reprogramming’ adult cells into a stem-cell-like state.

At first glance, iPS-cell research needs no help. Researchers flocked to the field soon after a recipe for deriving the cells from adult mouse cells was announced in 2006, partly because this offered a way to skirt the thorny ethical issues raised by extracting cells from human embryos. But the real allure of iPS cells was the promise of genetically matched tissues. Adult cells taken from a patient could be used to create stem cells that would, in turn, generate perfectly matched specialized tissues — replacement neurons, say — for cell therapy. Although the number of published papers from iPS-cell research has not yet caught up with that of ES-cell work (see ‘Inducing a juggernaut’), US funding for each approach is now roughly matched at about US$120 million a year. Read full article.

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IVF on Steroids: The Dangerous Off-Label Use of ‘Dex’ During Pregnancy

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diethylstilbestrolWhen Susan Manning, a 39-year-old woman just a few weeks into her first pregnancy, wrote to tell me she had been put on the steroid dexamethasone to prevent a miscarriage–and to ask whether she should be worried about taking this drug–at first I could not even process what she was saying. Dexamethasone is known to cross the placental barrier and impact fetal development, so the very idea of first trimester exposure sets off warning bells. Besides, dexamethasone is not known to help in preventing miscarriage. Susan’s story sounded too crazy to be true.

It also sounded too close to the history of DES (diethylstilbestrol). From the 1940s through the 1970s, some doctors gave pregnant women DES, a synthetic estrogen, to try to prevent miscarriage. In spite of clinical evidence that it didn’t work as intended, millions of fetuses were exposed in utero before doctors discovered that prenatal DES exposure could lead to infertility and deadly cancers. Just last week, Eli Lilly & Co. settled a suit brought by four sisters who believe their breast cancers were caused by prenatal DES exposure. Read full article.

 

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False-negative results found in HPV testing

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HPV TestPHOENIX — More than 12,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with cervical cancer this year. Hundreds more may go undiagnosed because of the widespread use of a screening test that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved for detecting the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes nearly all cervical cancers.

Some of the largest national labs have for a decade routinely used test kits that contain a preservative, BD SurePath, that is approved for Pap tests but not HPV testing. The labs continue to use the tests despite an FDA warning June 8 that HPV tests using SurePath can produce false negatives and national guidelines that call for using only FDA-approved tests, an Arizona Republic investigation has found.

The result: Women may be told they are free of HPV when, in fact, they aren’t. Such a misdiagnosis can allow the virus or cancer to become established and more difficult to treat. Read full article.