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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.

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GOP Objection kills Senate Funding for Military Fertility Program

In January the Pentagon launched a pilot program that allowed U.S. troops to freeze their sperm and eggs before deployment. Defense Secretary Ash Carter lauded it as a way that service members could preserve their reproductive cells in case they suffered catastrophic wounds or merely wanted to put off having children. Now the program might be heading for a quick demise: On Tuesday, the Republican-led Senate voted 85-13 to approve a $602 billion military spending bill for 2017 that stripped funding for the program.

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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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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.