Just three weeks ago, on Memorial Day, we honored our service members who gave the ultimate sacrifice while serving our country. Soon we will celebrate our National Day of Independence. Americans will take time to enjoy their families on this federal holiday.
Category: Fertility Headlines
Human Cloning Fear Could Stymie Effort to Provide Wounded Vets with Fertility Care
A prominent conservative group hopes to derail a congressional effort to give wounded veterans access to fertility services through the VA, saying it could lead to human cloning and three-parent embryos.
DIY Sperm Test to Hit the Market this Fall
A semen centrifuge is the newest direct-to-consumer fertility device on the market. The Trak, a desktop gadget that measures a man’s sperm count, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration earlier this month for consumer use.
These Feminine Smells Get Sperm Moving
Sperm are the cheetahs of the microscopic world: Made of little more than molecular muscle and batteries, tipped with a payload of genetic information, they are optimized for speed. But to orient themselves before their epic, seven-inch sprint (it’s more impressive if you’re less than one three-thousandth that size), they first need to sniff out the location of the egg—and, it turns out, the analogy to the sense of smell may be particularly apt.
Do Women Who Donate Their Eggs Run a Health Risk?
Maggie Eastman considers it the worst decision she ever made. In 2003, beset by $30,000 in tuition debt and imbued with a burst of altruism, Eastman, a college senior, decided to donate her eggs to help an infertile couple have a baby. Over the next decade she donated nine more times, earning a total of about $20,000 — money that helped Eastman and her then-husband buy a house.
Vermont Insurers Must Now Cover Vasectomies
Vermont has become one of several states working to make sure vasectomies are among the birth control options couples can afford.
5 Surprising Facts About Egg Freezing
A city in Japan has announced that it will pay a large part of the cost of egg freezing for women who live there, as part of a program aimed at raising the country’s low birth rate. Egg freezing is the process of extracting egg cells from a woman’s ovaries and storing them for later use.
Zika Vaccine Approved for First Human Testing
Two companies announced Monday that they have received the first approval to test a Zika vaccine on humans. While the approval from the Food and Drug Administration is early in the long process of approving a vaccine for widespread use, it is a step forward in finding a vaccine for the virus, which has become a global health emergency.
How a Transgender Woman Could Get Pregnant
When Mats Brännström first dreamed of performing uterus transplants, he envisioned helping women who were born without the organ or had to have hysterectomies. He wanted to give them a chance at birthing their own children, especially in countries like his native Sweden where surrogacy is illegal. He auditioned the procedure in female rodents. Then he moved on to sheep and baboons. Two years ago, in a medical first, he managed to help a human womb–transplant patient deliver her own baby boy. In other patients, four more babies followed.
How a Transgender Woman Could Get Pregnant
When Mats Brännström first dreamed of performing uterus transplants, he envisioned helping women who were born without the organ or had to have hysterectomies. He wanted to give them a chance at birthing their own children, especially in countries like his native Sweden where surrogacy is illegal. He auditioned the procedure in female rodents. Then he moved on to sheep and baboons. Two years ago, in a medical first, he managed to help a human womb–transplant patient deliver her own baby boy. In other patients, four more babies followed.