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Should You Take an at-Home Fertility Test?

For women who know they want to have kids, that’s a pretty grim thought, but it turns out to be even worse than that: We lose hundreds or even a thousand eggs per month through a process that’s like programmed cell death, says Owen Davis, MD, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). And even if you’re preventing ovulation with the pill or an IUD, those unreleased eggs don’t stick around — they die.

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Are We Ready for Prenatal Children?

Let’s assume that Alabama voters pass a referendum approving the constitutional amendment that Rep. Ed Henry, R-Hartselle, perennially offers – the personhood amendment which decrees that life begins at “fertilization” and an embryo or fetus is a person. Supporters of the bill contemplate that “prenatal children” would receive the equal protection of all the same laws that others enjoy. This is an example of many of the bills sponsored by Republican legislators over the past five years. They are at best, ill-conceived, and at worst, absurd.

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Decoy Eggs Used to Provide Birth Control for Mice

Scientists have created a novel method of contraception, using polymer beads coated in a special protein as “decoy” eggs in mice. In experiments described in Science Translational Medicine, researchers deposited the beads in the uteruses of mice. When the mice mated, sperm cells bound themselves to the fake eggs, preventing the real eggs from being fertilized. The scientists from the National Institutes of Health say it’s extremely unlikely the beads would be used in their current form as human contraception, but that they do show promise as a better way to select sperm for use in fertility treatments.

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When You ‘Come Out’ About Infertility

Last year, seven months after the birth of the daughter we fought for, cried for, prayed for, I decided to open up and share my story. For years, we had hidden our infertility struggle, only letting my parents and sister, my best friend and a few of our closest friends know the journey we were on. I wrote a CNN iReport in honor of Infertility Awareness Week, hoping to inspire others and let other women know that they weren’t alone. I “came out.”

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Dead Man’s Sperm

The patient is dead. He has, in fact, been so for a while—over 30 hours, according to his chart—but some of him survives. What the doctor has extracted is a liquid that can create life. An incredible substance that is neither person nor property; simultaneously so abundant yet valuable that we still haven’t quite figured out how to treat it. It is the dead man’s sperm.

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Inside the Hidden Global Supply Chain for Frozen Sperm, Eggs, and Embryos

In a world with porous borders and wildly divergent surrogacy laws, making a baby can be a global affair: The eggs might come from a woman in South Africa, the sperm from a man in Canada, and the surrogate herself might be in Cambodia. What connects them, literally, is a cold chain.