Category Archives: Human Reproduction

Struggling to make ends meet as a university English major, Elizabeth could not help but notice the online classified ad, offering healthy young women the potential to earn $5,000.

She jumped at the opportunity, even after discovering the work involved donating eggs for use in fertility treatment. The 22-year-old was told the money was to reimburse her for expenses and lost time at work or school, as stipulated by criminal law that bans paying egg or sperm donors commercial fees.

As it turns out, Elizabeth said she had no expenses to speak of and took off no time from school, yet the money came like clockwork the first $1,000 after she underwent various tests, the last $4,000 when the eggs were retrieved.

I was a broke student and the $5,000 price tag was very desirable, said the Vancouver Island resident, who asked that her last name be withheld. [But] I felt like one part on the production line to eventually create this child, which this family is paying thousands of dollars to essentially produce by artificial means.

The ad was placed by one of a handful of unusual brokers that recruit surrogate mothers and egg donors for the growing ranks of people longing to be parents, but unable themselves to give birth.

A rare RCMP investigation of the Ontario agency Ms. Sager worked with Canadian Fertility Consultants have put the spotlight on the surrogate-consultant market, commercial enterprises at the heart of a process that, officially at least, is not supposed to treat the ingredients of human reproduction as commodities.

The work can mean bringing together clients and wombs-for-loan located continents apart; the demand for surrogates is so strong, agencies offer gift certificates and cash incentives to those who recruit new mothers.

Some reportedly handle as many as 50 pregnant surrogates at a time.

Brokers charge thousands for the service, yet Canadian law prohibits payment beyond reimbursing expenses for the carriers and donors themselves, part of the legal grey zone that envelops the industry.

In fact, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act also says it is also illegal to accept consideration for arranging for the services of a surrogate mother or to offer or advertise to make such an arrangement.

Go here to read the rest:
Canada’s murky legal world of surrogate-consultants and human-egg buyers

In his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), Pope Paul VI prophesied dire effects if contraceptives proliferated. He predicted:

-- Conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.

-- Men coming to regard a woman as a mere instrument of sexual enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.

-- Abuses by public authorities, promoting contraception for their own ends.

-- People deciding they had unlimited dominion over their own bodies, without consideration of Gods plan or moral restrictions.

All these predictions have come true. Today, many enter adulthood with half a dozen years of sexual experience, a sexually transmitted disease or the trauma of abortion. Angst seems reflected in girls dressing like prostitutes, youth self-mutilating, or sporting grotesque tattoos and extreme body piercings. Where is the reflective earnestness of a young woman preparing for life as a wife and mother? Where is the consideration a male shows a female, knowing she is a beloved daughter, someones sister, and possibly a future bride? As vulgarity, coarseness, and promiscuity intensifies, the culture becomes hostile to developing healthy relationships, forming life-long bonds, and nurturing children. Many nations today face underpopulation, as citizens choose not to marry, or to contain family size to just one child or two. Even committed couples face stresses when one partner, closed to life, pressures a mate to use birth control.

Jesus came so all people may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 16:21) America exists, planted on Christian bedrock, so citizens may have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I thank God my parents gave me the right to life by welcoming my conception. I flourished within the embrace of family. I learned from my mother and father what sacramental love required, by watching them grow deeper in love through both joyful times and adversity. My parents strove to live and convey Church teachings about chastity offering a vision of purity that once upheld mainstream America.

Fertility and sexuality are God-given gifts to be used rightly. True sexual liberation exists only in marriage, when a man and woman share a deep, healing embrace, open to life and free of artificial barriers. When serious reasons compel a couple to avoid or postpone pregnancy, however, working naturally with the womans monthly cycles proves highly effective. Practising the symptothermal method of charting temperatures and cervical secretions leads to just a 0.4 - 0.6 per cent rate of unplanned pregnancy, according to Human Reproduction Today. I can add my own and others anecdotal evidence that, as a woman learns her bodys signals for ovulation and fertility, she develops a keen self-awareness, identifying other health issues as they arise.

Spouses faithfully practising natural family planning (NFP) face only a 0.2 per cent risk of divorce, cites the Family of the Americas Foundation. NFP-users often find intimacies improve with age. Love deepens, becomes more generous-hearted. Periods of abstinence lead to mini-honeymoons. Gods vision for humanity is happiness, and the type of love that refuses to use the other, enriches. Members of stable, loving marriages and families, become their best selves.

No, Mr President, as a devout Catholic, I do not want to pay for contraception. I do not want to pay higher premiums because my insurance company is forced to provide free contraception.

The rest is here:
Read in

Young women may also be affected by a number of infertility problems, such as diminished ovarian reserve and high FSH.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 07, 2012

Detecting DOR is not difficult, says Dr. Gleicher, Medical Director and Chief Scientist of CHR. He continues: Ovarian reserve can be easily measured by simple blood tests, like follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and anti-Mllerian hormone (AMH). High FSH and/or low AMH suggest a diagnosis of DOR but both need to be assessed in an age-specific way.

However, many fertility centers, unused to treating younger women with premature ovarian aging (POA; a term coined by CHR to describe younger women with DOR), often overlook this condition. They overlook the diagnosis, explains Dr. Gleicher, because they do not utilize age-specific cut off values for FSH and AMH.

Normal FSH ranges increase and normal AMH ranges decrease as women age. If all women of all ages are assessed with universal cutoff values, younger women will never be diagnosed in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, says Dr. Gleicher, this is what is still done in many fertility centers.

Once diagnosed with POA, like older women, women with POA have little time to lose since there is no telling how quickly their POA will progress. Though very rapid progression is rare, according to Dr. Gleicher, CHR physicians have seen women go into full menopause in a few short months after diagnosis.

Dr. Gleicher continues: There isnt a day when we dont hear our patients say doctor, I wish Id known about your center months ago, when I was doing such and such... The earlier we can start treatment, the better, of course, our chances of helping our patients with POA!

CHRs tips for younger women with POA to receive timely diagnosis and treatment include the following:

About Center for Human Reproduction

Center for Human Reproduction, or CHR (http://www.centerforhumanreprod.com), is a leading fertility center in the United States with a worldwide reputation as a "fertility center of last resort," specializing in treatment of infertility in women with diminished ovarian reserve, including younger women with premature ovarian aging (POA) and older women with physiological ovarian aging. Dr. Gleicher is available for additional comments.

See original here:
Diminished Ovarian Reserve Expert Releases Tip Sheet for Timely Infertility Diagnosis for Young Women

Maybe the 2012 election season should be renamed "Biology 2012: Reintroduction to Basic Human Reproduction," with mandatory, nationwide enrollment. As we scuffle our way into Super Tuesday, with 419 Republican delegates at stake, it seems the political focus is on women, and not in the typically scandal-ridden way. The question is how it will affect GOP voters, particularly women.

Though Rush Limbaugh kind of apologized for calling Sandra Fluke a "slut," unclear is whether he included in his apology his very revealing and misinformed request that if the public was going to pay for her contraception, she should be required to post video of herself having sex online. Regardless, sponsor AOL joined seven other former sponsors in pulling advertising. As none of the candidates has condemned Limbaugh's spewage, will female Republicans still show up for them? More important, will they show up for them in November?

Of course the hullabaloo over access to contraception amid the seeming lack of understanding of how it works is not the only attack on women being waged by the right. A Wisconsin legislator has introduced a bill that would include "nonmarital parenthood" as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.

Start cutting out your scarlet letters, we'll need plenty. While the wording of the statute reads gender-neutralish, the aim is clear from the last line of the proposed language mandating: "Educational and public awareness materials and programming that emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect and the role of fathers in the primary prevention of child abuse and neglect."

So if the children resulting from "nonmartial parenthood" live with their fathers, is nonmartial parenthood no longer abusive? Even if the mother is not in the picture? What do you say about this one, GOP candidates? What's that I hear? Sounds a lot like crickets.

Back to our Biology 2012 course materials. If we decrease access to contraception, rates of "nonmarital parenthood" will increase. It's simple. And the GOP policy has laid the blame squarely on the doorstep of women, making conception a one-woman show.

There has been no name calling of the presumed sexual partners of the Georgetown women Limbaugh lambasted; they have not been mentioned in the discussion. So all these "immoral" women are having all this imagined sex seemingly considered in relishing detail, for which they shouldn't have contraception, and then therefore are having these "nonmarital" children with whom?

I suppose boys will be boys. If that wasn't the case, perhaps one of you might have raised this issue. Their silence only further demonstrates the need for Biology 2012, Lesson 1: It Takes Two to Form a Zygote.

The policies and viewpoints being espoused by Republicans are calculatedly, derogatorily and vehemently punitive of women for the mere basis of biology. Will Republican women care? Perhaps we'll find out Tuesday.

Link:
Will GOP View on Women Matter?

New Yorks Center for Human Reproduction releases special advice for women over 40 interested in becoming pregnant.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 01, 2012

Its important to recognize the urgency of aggressive fertility treatment when you are above age 40, says Dr. Gleicher, Medical Director of CHR, which released the tip sheet. As women get older, their ovarian reserve (a measure of ovaries ability to produce good-quality eggs) declines. Because this process of ovarian aging speeds up significantly after age 40, timely diagnosis of infertility becomes crucial especially after age 40. Every fertility treatment loses efficacy rapidly with declining ovarian reserve.

As a fertility center of last resort for patients with diminished ovarian reserve, CHR sees a large number of women over 40 with premature ovarian aging. Dr. Gleicher continues: There isnt a day when we dont hear our patients say doctor, I wish Id known about your center years ago, when I was doing such and such... The earlier we can start treatment, the better, of course, our chances of helping our patients! This is why we are issuing this fertility tip sheet.

CHRs fertility tips for women trying to get pregnant after 40 include:

About Center for Human Reproduction

Center for Human Reproduction, or CHR (http://www.centerforhumanreprod.com), is a leading fertility center in the United States with a worldwide reputation as a "fertility center of last resort," specializing in treatment of infertility in women with diminished ovarian reserve, including younger women with premature ovarian aging (POA) and older women with physiological ovarian aging. Dr. Gleicher is available for additional comments.

###

Communications Manager Center for Human Reproduction (212) 994-4400 4491 Email Information

See more here:
Premature Ovarian Aging Expert Issues Fertility Tip Sheet for Women Interested in Pregnancy Over 40

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital say they have extracted stem cells from human ovaries and made them generate egg cells. The advance, if confirmed, might provide a new source of eggs for treating infertility, though scientists say it is far too early to tell if the work holds such promise.

Women are born with a complement of egg cells that must last throughout life. The ability to isolate stem cells from which eggs could be cultivated would help not only with fertility but also with biologists' understanding of how drugs and nutrition affect the egg cells.

The new research, by a team led by the biologist Jonathan L. Tilly, depends on a special protein found to mark the surface of reproductive cells like eggs and sperm. Using a cell-sorting machine that can separate out the marked cells, the team obtained reproductive cells from mouse ovaries and showed that the cells would generate viable egg cells that could be fertilized and produce embryos.

They then applied the same method to human ovaries donated by women at the Saitama Medical Center in Japan who were undergoing sex reassignment. The team was able to retrieve reproductive cells that produced immature egg cells when grown in the laboratory. The egg cells, when injected into mice, generated follicles, the ovarian structure in which eggs are formed, as well as mature eggs.

The results were published online Sunday by the journal Nature Medicine.

Tilly and

colleagues wrote that their work opens up "a new field in human reproductive biology that was inconceivable less than 10 years ago."

David Albertini, an expert on female reproduction at the Kansas University Medical Center, called the report "a real technological tour de force," but added that it was not yet clear whether the procedure yielded real egg cells that could be used in human fertility.

"None of the criteria that we in the field use to establish that a cell is a high-quality oocyte are satisfied here," he said, using the scientific term for an unfertilized egg.

Even if the research is validated, the immediate use of the cells in question would be to generate egg cells for research use, like testing the effects of drugs. Use in fertility treatments would be far off, Albertini said, because cells grown in the laboratory often develop abnormalities, a problem that would need correction before any egg could be accepted for fertilization.

Original post:
Study finds stem cells can create human eggs