The Greatest Story Never Told
Above a cheap mobile phone shop in a chaotic street in north Delhi, there is a grimy apartment whose peeling walls are decorated with photographs of adoring mothers nursing their babies.
The woman cooing at her child in the biggest portrait is beautiful, white and affluent-looking — in stark contrast to the flat’s five residents, four of whom are pregnant, while the other is being pumped full of hormones in the hope she will soon conceive.
Fertility clinics are facing demands to restrict the most popular form of IVF after a shocking new report linked it to an increased risk of birth defects.
The study created a major alert after revealing the ICSI treatment, used by 23,000 women in the UK every year, creates a ‘sky high’ chance of having a baby with serious abnormalities.
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.
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.
A young woman raised her hand at the end of a seminar for young cancer survivors.
It was last spring, during an I[2]Y (or “I’m Too Young for This!”) meeting, and the seminar was on post-cancer family planning.
She said she received radiation to her abdomen during treatment for cancer in her teens and, as a result, was being told that her eggs were most likely not viable, though she is well within child-bearing age. She was upset that fertility issues were not discussed with her and her family at the time of her treatment.
Until recently, standard cancer treatments have not included female fertility preservation as a joint concern.
If cancer was discovered, regardless of the patient’s age, it was treated as quickly and as aggressively as deemed necessary (chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation being the primary tools), and that was that; fertility was not generally a part of the conversation.
But as awareness grows about the potential effects of treatments on female fertility, and as fertility-preservation techniques become more sophisticated, these discussions are changing.
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.
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 Continue Reading …
Hey guys – this buds’ is for you…welcome to our world… Natural News Wednesday, February 01, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer Mass vaccination is apparently not the only depopulation strategy being employed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as new research funded by the organization has developed a way to deliberately destroy Continue Reading …
National Public Radio INDIANAPOLIS February 1, 2012, 06:20 pm ET INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Birth control pills are known to be nearly 100 percent effective when taken properly, but a recall of the drugs could send a shudder through women of childbearing age. A manufacturing mix-up by Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug maker, led to Continue Reading …
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 Continue Reading …
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