[Holy Hormones Honey! I guess the message here is loud and strong - don't mess with Mother Nature.  Sadly chronic stress, environmental toxins and lack of nutrition have raised infertility rates for women and men.  Can we really expect an artificial method to save our souls? I think we are beginning to understand they anything artificial, or synthetic actually causes more problems in the long run.  I read somewhere else that the egg and sperm become altered in a petri dish - out of their natural environment.  I would imagine that the stronger the health of the man and woman having IVF and their sperm and egg have a better chance of sustaining an artificial environment.  What does that go back to?  Nutrition.  Pure and simple.  Hmmm - also read somewhere else that nutrients increased fertility. double Hmmm.]

IVF treatment used by 23,000 women in turmoil as shock report reveals that birth abnormalities have DOUBLED

• Survey shows injections used by 20,000 British couples a year reveals one in ten babies born with abnormalities
• Findings show all other IVF procedures are safe
• Clinics accused of profiting from more expensive procedure

By Jo Mcfarlane

PUBLISHED: 16:57 EST, 5 May 2012

Read the complete article and related information at Shocking News Over IVF and Rise in Birth Abnormalities

[Leslie Carol Botha: Guess this is where the adage comes in: 'Don't mess with Mother Nature.' If a woman is not ovulating - there is a reason an imbalance - or the mother is not healthy enough..... Nature does have its own balance and check system.  And if a woman's health is threatened or she is under chronic stress - adrenally fatigued - the first system in the body to shut down is reproduction.]  Makes sense.  But once again, we plow ahead thinking we can outsmart Mother Nature. At what cost?  Cancer in our children? Synthetic drugs are very bad for our body.]

Fertility drugs linked to cancer in children

BioEdge – bioethic news from around the world
by Jared Yee | 28 Apr 2012 |

Fertility drugs could more than double the risk of offspring developing childhood leukaemia, academics cautioned this week. Each year, tens of thousands of women in Britain undergo fertility treatment, which usually demands they take drugs to stimulate their ovaries to produce more eggs. Over 13,000 babies per year are born through assisted fertility technology. While no convincing evidence has hitherto emerged that fertility treatment leads to cancer, French researchers told a conference in London they believe ovarian stimulation drugs are associated with 2 kinds of childhood leukaemia.

Dr Jéremié Rudant, of the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health, in Villejuif, France, who led the research, said: “Previous studies have suggested a link between infertility treatments and acute childhood leukaemia, but there haven’t been many studies, most of them have been small, and they focused either on IVF or hormonal treatment. Our study was much larger and it’s the first time that a specific increased risk linked to fertility drugs has been found.”

Read Full Article….

Read the complete article and related information at Cancer in Children Linked to Fertility Drugs

[Leslie Carol Botha: Outrage - why not sterilize the men? Cut off their penises.  The war on women continues to be waged against the innocent. Why is it that women are considered chattel in this day and age.]

Uzbekistan’s policy of secretly sterilising women

BBC
By Natalia Antelava
BBC World Service
April 18, 2012

The BBC has been told by doctors that Uzbekistan is running a secret programme to sterilise women – and has talked to women sterilised without their knowledge or consent.

Adolat has striking looks, a quiet voice and a secret that she finds deeply shameful.

She knows what happened is not her fault, but she cannot help feeling guilty about it.

Adolat comes from Uzbekistan, where life centres around children and a big family is the definition of personal success. Adolat thinks of herself as a failure.

“What am I after what happened to me?” she says as her hand strokes her daughter’s hair – the girl whose birth changed Adolat’s life.

“I always dreamed of having four – two daughters and two sons – but after my second daughter I couldn’t get pregnant,” she says.

She went to see a doctor and found out that she had been sterilised after giving birth to her daughter by Caesarean section.

“I was shocked. I cried and asked: ‘But why? How could they do this?’ The doctor said, ‘That’s the law in Uzbekistan.’”

Sterilisation is not, officially, the law in Uzbekistan.

But evidence gathered by the BBC suggests that the Uzbek authorities have run a programme over the last two years to sterilise women across the country, often without their knowledge.

Foreign journalists are not welcome in Uzbekistan, and in late February of this year the authorities deported me from the country. I met Adolat and many other Uzbek women in the relative safety of neighbouring Kazakhstan. I also gathered testimony by telephone and email, and in recordings brought out of the country by courier.

None of the women wanted to give their real names but they come from different parts of Uzbekistan and their stories are consistent with those of doctors and medical professionals inside the country.

“Every year we are presented with a plan. Every doctor is told how many women we are expected to give contraception to; how many women are to be sterilised,” says a gynaecologist from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.

Read Full Article…

To US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

We call on you to publicly condemn forced sterilisations and other human rights abuses inside Uzbekistan. We urge you to end the flood of cash and re-impose sanctions on the Uzbek regime until independent experts confirm these atrocities have ended. Finally, we call on you to ensure that military assistance to Uzbekistan is contingent on wide-ranging improvements in human rights.

Sign the Petition here…..

Read the complete article and related information at Secret Sterilization of Women in Uzbekistan for Population Control

[Leslie Carol Botha: How many women even consider what is like to come off hormonal contraceptives after years of use? For some the transition is very difficult. Someday we will truly understand this is the largest uncontrolled experiment in the history of medicine. Although the HPV vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix are running a close second.]

Coming off Depo Provera Can be a Woman’s Worst Nightmare

Society for Menstrual Cycle Research

April 4th, 2012 by Laura Wershler

Need proof that women are sometimes desperate for information and support when it comes to quitting hormonal contraception? You need look no further than the 100 plus comments in reply to an old blog posting at Our Bodies Ourselves: Questions About Side Effects of Stopping Contraceptive Injections.  The comment stream – a litany of woes concerning women’s discontinuation of Depo-Provera – has been active since Nov. 2, 2009.

On March 29, 2012, Rachel, author of the post, wrote a follow-up piece in which she laments: “Although a quick internet search finds many women complaining of or asking about post-Depo symptoms, there isn’t much published scientific evidence on the topic.” Beyond research about bone density and length of time to return to fertility, little is known about the withdrawal symptoms women have been commenting about.

Depo-Provera is the 4-times-a-year birth control injection that carries an FDA “black box” warning that long-term use is associated with significant bone mineral density loss.  Never a fan, I made a case against this contraceptive in a paper for Canadian Woman Studies, published in 2005. The comments on the OBOS post indicate that many women took Depo-Provera without full knowledge of the potential for serious side effects while taking it, or of what to expect while coming off the drug.

Considering that Depo-Provera completely suppresses normal reproductive endocrine function, it is not surprising that many women experience extreme or confusing symptoms once stopping it. Take Lissa’s comment for example, posted on February 21, 2011:

Omg I thought I was tripping. I have been on depo for a year and stopped in jan. My breasts constantly hurt, I put on weight, have hot flashes, and sleeping problems. I pray everyday my cycle returns and stops playing with me. I only spot lightly.

Two and a half years after publication, the original article continues to garner monthly comments. I’ve read most of them and have yet to see one that offers concrete advice or a referral to resources that provide information and support to women looking for both. One such resource is Coming Off The Pill, the Patch, the Shot and Other Hormonal Contraceptives, a comprehensive, clinical-based guide to assist women transition back to menstruation and fertility, written by Megan Lalonde and Geraldine Matus.

Read Full Article….

Read the complete article and related information at Depo Provera Withdrawal – A Woman’s Worst Nightmare

A must read for every woman. Atwood wrote about a generation of women going sterile 30 years ago.

Margaret Atwood’s Menstrual Dystopia

Society from Menstrual Cycle Research
re:Cycling

February 27, 2012
by David Linton

The menstrual cycle has been of interest to novelists from time to time and some of their work has received critical attention by scholars, most notably in Dana Medoro’s Bleeding in America, a seminal study that assesses the menstrual elements in the novels of Faulkner, Pynchon, and Morrison (previously reviewed here).  But perhaps the novel that is devoted most completely to the social, political, religious, cultural and economic impact of disruptions in the healthy functioning of the menstrual cycle is Margaret Atwood’s 1985 depiction of a menstrual dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Now, 27 years after its publication, the novel resonates with relevance to the current circumstances of our lives.  As such, it deserves recognition along with those other prescient novels of a dysfunctional future, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and 1984.

Atwood envisions a world in which, due to a combination of environmental disasters, most women have become incapable of conceiving, leading to the creation of a cadre of “handmaids” who still have normal menstrual cycles and who are assigned to the leaders (“Commanders”) of the nation to bear them children who are immediately turned over to their infertile wives.  They enact a weird form of surrogacy patterned after the story in Genesis of Rachel’s handmaid having sex with Jacob so that Rachel can have a child.  The handmaids (who do not have names of their own but instead are referred to as possessions of their Commanders with the prefix “of,” as in OfFred) have sex by lying between the legs of the Commander’s wife so as to pretend that the congress is “normal.”  The fiction is continued when a birth occurs with the wife simulating labor surrounded by other wives while the handmaid delivers the child elsewhere.

The novel is prescient on many levels.  Our own concerns with the potential effects of environmental contamination on reproduction are strikingly anticipated:

“The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your body, camp out in your fatty cells. . . . Women took medicines, pills, men sprayed trees, cows ate grass, all that souped-up piss flowed into the rivers.  Not to mention the exploding atomic power plants. . . and the mutant strain of syphilis no mold could touch.” (143-144)

As a result, the birth rate plummets far below replacement level, schools are closed for lack of children and fertility becomes a rare commodity that is carefully controlled as women still capable of conceiving are doled out as special benefits to the rulers of the state.  All of this occurs in the context of a culture of religious fanaticism with a full complement of hypocrisy and brutality common to extremes of any stripe.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Menstrual Dystopia – Margaret Atwood’s Prophecy in the Handmaids Tale

Science fiction does portray the future of women’s wombs….. Margaret Atwood’s book, Handmaids Tale caught my attention in the 1980′s.  Although she portrayed a generation of women gone sterile from nuclear fallout…. it could be depicted that we will have a generation of sterile women from environmental toxins, extended use of hormone suppressants in birth control and Bill Gates favorite for population control – vaccinations.

What does science fiction tell us about the future of reproductive rights?

109 – Welcome from the future
February 22, 2012

If everything from technology to politics will be different in the future, then so will human reproduction. That’s why so much science fiction deals with the question of how humans make babies — or don’t make them — in alternate worlds that are often quite close to our own. It’s also why reproduction is a political issue. After all, a political campaign represents the promise of a new kind of future. What will happen if the state takes control of human reproduction? The answers could be weirder than you think — and might terrify pro-life politicians as much as pro-choice advocates. Here are some of the scenarios supplied by science fiction.

State-controlled reproduction is a nightmare

Perhaps the best known work of science fiction about state-controlled reproduction is Margaret Atwood’s Christian fundamentalist nightmare, The Handmaid’s Tale. Written in the 1980s (and adapted into a film in the 1990s), it’s about what would happen if right wing Christian politicians took control of North America in the wake of a nuclear disaster that’s left most of the population sterile. Women who are fertile become “handmaids” in the homes of wealthy patriarchs whose wives cannot bear children. Handmaids undergo a humiliating ritual where the patriarch tries to get them pregnant while their barren wives watch – the idea is that God will approve of this because it emulates an Old Testament scenario and the wives are participating “willingly.” In reality, the system turns women into property and also sets them against each other. Atwood imagines state-regulated reproduction as a horrific combination of authoritarianism in the public sphere, and spousal abuse and rape in the domestic one.

Other works imagine the state regulating reproduction using the carrot rather than the stick. Brave New World, published in the early 1930s during the height of the eugenics craze in the United States, imagines a future where the government breeds humans for specialized tasks. Some are designed to be strong but stupid low-caste workers, while others (the Alphas) are given perfect minds and physiques in order to take their places as societal leaders. Every child is also put through years of behavioral conditioning to reinforce their genetic predilections. The result is a society where everybody is content with their positions and sex is purely recreational. Similarly, the movie GATTACA imagines a future where everyone is genetically engineered for various class positions. Both stories include “wild type” characters, non-GMO people whose perspectives cast doubt on the justice of a system where the state determines who you are from conception onward.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Science Fiction Eerily Depicts the Future of Reproductive Rights

If the body is a wondrous organism… then it would make sense that it would protect its progeny from chemical exposure that would threaten the ‘survival of the fittest’ theory.

In other words….. it the brain/body senses that it is being threatened by a chemical onslaught it will trigger the reproductive system to shut down.

Reduce Chemicals to Increase Fertility

Healthy Child – Healthy World

February 14, 2102

by Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff, Executive Director, Healthy Child Healthy World

On Valentine’s Day, the last thing you want to think about is whether toxic chemicals will prevent you from starting a family. But with rates of infertility on the rise and testosterone levels in decline, we may need to factor in chemical exposures to the future of our love lives. Infertility affects one in eight couples in the United States—that’s 7.3 million people who have trouble with pregnancy, according to the CDC. And although it was once thought that infertility was a “female problem,” medical evidence shows that infertility is an equal opportunity problem: One-third of infertility is attributed to the female, one-third to the male and one-third to combined factors from both male and female.

This post is for the guys.

Last week, drugstore chains Walgreens and CVS announced they would begin stocking a male infertility test as of April, marking the first time men can get an over-the-counter test of their sperm production. Rising rates of male infertility has created a $440 million market for male fertility tests, according to Bloomberg News.

Scientists such as Dr. Shanna Swan, Professor and Vice-Chair of Preventive Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, have found chemicals play a role in the increase of male infertility in the population. “There is no question that pesticides reduce sperm count,” Swan recently told Global News Canada. “The question is how much do you need to do the damage?”
Because we now know that chemicals in every day products can lead to low sperm counts, there are simple steps that men can take to avoid them. These include:

1. Using safer pans: Teflon, the most common non-stick coating, is made from perfluorinated compounds (PFCs). Research shows that men with higher levels of PFCs had fewer normal sperm and lower sperm concentrations. (PFCs are also used in fast food packaging and microwave popcorn bags, so avoid those as well.)

2. Avoid contaminated fish: Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) were banned in the US in 1979, but they are so persistent, they are still contaminating our food today. Among other things, they have been linked to decreased sperm quality, sperm DNA damage, and lowered testosterone levels. The highest concentrations are found in animal fats, some farmed fish, and freshwater fish from contaminated waters. Use the Environmental Defense Fund’s Seafood Selector to help you choose safer fish.

3. Cut the fat: Because PCBs are also found in animal fats, reducing meat consumption can help lower your exposure. If you do eat meat, opt for low-fat cuts, and cut off visible fat before cooking. Use lower-fat cooking methods such as broiling, grilling, roasting or pressure-cooking.

Read More…

Read the complete article and related information at Increase Your Fertility by Decreasing Your Exposure to Chemicals

INFERTILITY CONCERN WITH GARDASIL HPV VACCINE

Off the Radar

Does the HPV Vaccine LITERALLY Mean “One Less”?

Marketing geniuses are known to play on words and create slogans with quirky double meanings, and if you’ve been tracking the concerns raised about the potential hazards of Gardasil and Cervarix, the potential for these HPV vaccines to cause infertility – whether purposely or inadvertently – is being heard with ever increasing frequency.

The federal government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has received over 9,000 reports of problems since the vaccine’s introduction in 2006, which include at least 28 spontaneous abortions, and 27 deaths.

Is it possible that Gardasil’s cry to fame, ‘One Less’, is turning out to be nothing but a sick, ironic play on words?

Anti-Fertility Vaccines

The World Health Organization (WHO) and its subsidiaries have been actively researching and funding the development of contraceptive / anti-fertility vaccines that prevent full-term pregnancies to take place, for over 20 years. There’s even a Task Force on Birth Control Vaccines of the WHO!

However, no anti-fertility vaccine has ever been placed on the market and promoted as such as of yet.

Instead, as described in a 1993 journal paper published in The British Medical Bulletin, anti-fertility vaccines were being engineered “incorporating tetanus or diphtheria toxoid linked to a variety of hCG-based peptides.”

The authors of this article state,

“The fundamental principle behind this approach to contraceptive vaccine development is to prevent the maternal recognition of pregnancy by inducing a state of immunity against hGC, the hormone that signals the presence of the embryo to the maternal endocrine system.”

Free tetanus vaccines that were offered to young women of childbearing age for years in countries such as Tanzania, Nigeria, Mexico, and the Philippines, were found to contain human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hCG), which causes spontaneous abortions if the woman becomes pregnant.

While the woman is not technically sterilized, once injected with hCG, she may never be able to carry a child full term thereafter.

HCG-containing anti-fertility vaccines have also been pursued for more than two decades by the Indian National Institute of Immunology, and The Population Council of the Rockefeller University, among others.

In fact, there are no less than 50 research papers detailing research on “contraceptive vaccines” in the PubMed database.

One disturbing paper published in the FASEB Journal in 1993 states:

“… we initiated studies relating to possible mechanisms of action and potential side effects of this vaccine, which should be relevant to world-wide regulation of population growth.”

So again, why the frantic push for the HPV vaccine, created for young, fertile women, when there’s NO solid, rational basis for its use?

Massive Brazilian Vaccination Program Raises Suspicions of Covert Sterilization Plans

A much more recent case of illogical mass vaccinations against a minor health problem is that of the massive, mandatory vaccination program in Brazil, which has raised suspicions among international pro-life activists, who note that the program is similar to other vaccination programs in recent years that have included a hidden sterilizing agent in the vaccines.

The campaign to “annihilate rubella” began in early August this year, mandating rubella vaccinations for all women ages 12 to 49, and 12 to 39 for men; a total of 70 million people, despite the fact that only 17 Brazilian children per year suffer birth defects from the disease.

Adolfo Castañeda of Human Life International notes that just two years ago, researchers found that the rubella vaccine used in a similar campaign in Argentina was laced with human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hCG).

“The suspicion that brought about the investigation [into the rubella vaccine] was caused by the fact that there were very few cases of the disease in Argentina, which didn’t merit a large-scale campaign,” Castañeda said, adding, “The ages for women are the same as those who received the vaccines in Nicaragua, where they included a hormone that sterilizes the woman who receives it, and similar to the age of those who received another sterilizing hormone in the Philippines.”

Polysorbate-80 – One Less Mouse, Researchers Found

Now, let me state clearly that there’s no proof of hCG being present in any of the current HPV vaccines.

I am merely playing devil’s advocate as I examine the similarities between these other irrational vaccination programs in other countries for relatively minor public health concerns — that turn out to have far more sinister agendas than mere greed – compared to the fervent, irrational push behind the HPV vaccine here in the U.S.

However, Gardasil does contain Polysorbate-80 – a surfactant used in pharmacology to deliver certain drugs or chemical agents across the blood-brain barrier — which has been linked to infertility in mice.

Researchers Gajdova et.al. found that administration of Polysorbate-80 decreased the weight of the uterus and ovaries, and caused chronic estrogenic stimulation. The ovaries of the mice were also without corpora lutea (a mass of progesterone-secreting endocrine tissue that forms immediately after ovulation) and had degenerative follicles.

So what might the estrogenic effects of Polysorbate-80 be on pre-adolescent girls and pregnant women?

Anti-Fertility Vaccine Ingredient Also Has Clinical Application in Cancer Vaccines…

A potential coincidence I find most disturbing is some of the more recent research detailing the use of hCG, and other molecules, in vaccines against hCG-producing cancers, such as – certain cervical cancers.

One 2005 paper titled, Recent advances in contraceptive vaccine development: a mini-review published in the journal Human Reproduction concludes:

“At the present time, studies are focused on increasing the immunogenicity and efficacy of the birth control vaccine, and examining its clinical applications in various HCG-producing cancers.”

But research published just a few months ago in the journal Molecular Cancer states that the free ?-subunit of hCG (hCG?) – which was originally considered biologically non-functional — has recently been shown to stimulate tumor growth, and lead to more aggressive tumors that are more resistant to therapy.

Again, I’m mentioning all of this because it just goes to show that pharmaceutical companies have little or no clue of the extent of harm these vaccines might cause, especially long-term. Something believed to be completely non-functional or harmless can turn out to be a MAJOR cause for concern after more thorough investigation.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Is Gardasil Causing Infertility?

Consultation on the controversial procedure begins amid outcry against ‘macabre’ practice

The Independent

Click on graphic to view 'How the technique can ensure a healthy baby' graphic

The controversial technique known as “three-parent IVF” came a step closer yesterday after the Department of Health asked the fertility regulator to conduct a public consultation into its acceptability.

At the same time the Wellcome Trust announced extra funds to expand research into the technique, which involves using genetic material from three parents – two women and a man – to create a baby.

The procedure, currently banned in the UK, is aimed at helping the estimated 12,000 people who are living with mitochondrial disease – defects in the small structures called mitochondria that surround the cell nucleus.

The disease is inherited but is only passed down the maternal line. About 100 babies are born each year with a severe form of the disease, for which there is no cure, with many dying in infancy.

The proposed procedure involves removing the nucleus from an affected woman’s egg, transferring it to the shell of an egg provided by a female donor who has healthy mitochondria, and then fertilising it with the sperm of the affected woman’s partner. The resulting baby would have genetic characteristics chiefly from its mother and father plus some from the mitochondria of its third parent, who provided the donor egg.

An alternative method involves fertilising the woman’s egg with her partner’s sperm before transfer into the donor egg.

Announcing the consultation, Public Health Minister Anne Milton said: “Mitochondrial disease… can have a devastating impact on the people who inherit it. Scientists have developed a new procedure to stop these diseases being passed on. But such a procedure would not be allowed… under current law, so we are consulting the public as to whether we should change the law.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at ‘Three-parent IVF’ may be made legal in UK, says minister

Gender Across Borders

January 23, 2012

This post is by Aphra Behn of Guerilla Girls On Tour!

While on tour this year, I felt an uncomfortable cramping near my crotch. It was somewhere between Arkansas and Oklahoma that I realized what it was.  The government was tightening its grip on my uterus.

In Kansas, my uterus signed up for a sex education class but the only subject taught was abstinence.  In West Virginia, my uterus got tired of abstinence and got a prescription for birth control, but my health insurance company wouldn’t pay for it. As a result, by Texas my uterus was pregnant and sought pre-natal care, but there wasn’t any because state legislators decimated Planned Parenthood’s funds.

Conservatives proclaim to detest government interference in one’s life. Republicans make careers out of repealing regulations.  Yet, both groups seem obsessed with restricting what goes on inside my uterus. It got so bad this year that at one point, I think Congress believed that controlling my uterus would create more jobs.

Now, my uterus may not see ovary to ovary with other uteruses across the land. But no matter where we reside, we are all American uteri and as such are guaranteed a fundamental human right, the right to privacy.  But without much outcry, my uterine rights are shriveling away.

In the first half of last year, 80 abortion restrictions were enacted in male-dominated legislatures across my country,  more than tripling the 23 enacted in 2010.  The last half of the year was gloomier yet, marked by Mississippi voters pondering an initiative that would have declared a fertilized egg a legal person and Health and Human Services Secretary Katheleen Sebelius overruling the FDA’s decision to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter for all women.

In Missouri and eight other states, my uterus is required to receive counseling in person before waiting 24 hours for an abortion, necessitating two separate trips to any clinic.   In Georgia and ten other states, my body must receive verbal information about the ability of a fetus to feel pain. In North Carolina and four other states, it has to be given written materials that show medically inaccurate connections between abortion and infertility and between abortion and the possibility of developing breast cancer.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at The State of My Union is the State of My Uterus