The Greatest Story Never Told
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.
Is it good to have children? Most people would think so, but there is a range of views amongst utilitarian bioethicists. Rebecca Bennett, from the University of Manchester, believes that having children is just another irrational experience like taking recreational drugs or dancing. “In most cases we choose to bring to birth children on the basis of unquantifiable and unpredictable ideas of what they will bring to our lives,” she says.
Bioethicists argue that parents should be accountable for the health of their baby. Agreed…. but to be obligated or to be told it is their ‘duty’ to use IVF to increase the child’s well-being, expand his or her self-determination, and reduce inequalities – has too much of a Eugenics overtone.
Blasting a man’s testicles with sound waves could cut his sperm production and may be used in the future as a male contraceptive treatment, a new study has found.
Scientists at the University of North Carolina tested doses of ultrasound waves on rats and found they “significantly reduced” the number of sperm-producing cells and sperm levels.
Teen girls are getting pregnant, in part, because they don’t understand their menstrual cycles. It’s time for sexual health educators to step up and teach girls the primary sign of fertility.
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.
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.
We Have To Know Where We’ve Been For more than 25,000 years, the Global Goddess presided over thousands of peaceful, cooperative, civilizations. In these many and diverse cultures older woman were revered as “Wise Women” – reflections of the Universal Feminine. That ended with the rise of the phallus. For the past 6000 years Continue Reading …
The Guardian
Pressure increases on ministers to provide genital warts inoculation to girls from age 12
Denis Campbell
Saturday 8 October 2011 15.40 EDT
[Doctor-preparing-a-vaccin-007] Doctors are pressing the Department of Health to switch from using Cervarix to using Gardasil to immunise teenage girls against cervical cancer because Gardasil protects against more strains of the cancer causing virus HPV. Photograph: Alamy
Doctors are urging ministers to mount a sustained attack on the UK’s most common sexually-transmitted infection by immunising 12- and 13-year-old schoolgirls against genital warts.
Irish Health
August 27, 2011
by Deborah Condon www.irishhealth.com]
Chemotherapy may have a greater effect on a woman’s fertility than first estimated, a new study indicates.
According to US researchers, previous studies have tended to focus on whether a woman’s periods come back after treatment. The absence of menstruation is known as amenorrhoea and until now, it has been viewed as one of the main reproductive side-effects associated with chemotherapy.
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