Month: January 2013

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India Bars Same-Sex Couples From Using Surrogates

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Officials from India’s government announced that gay couples and single individuals from other countries who wish to start a family are prohibited from using the country’s popular surrogate program, New Delhi Television Limited reports.

India’s surrogacy program is a growing industry. Over the past few years, foreign couples, both gay and straight, have taken advantage of the country’s low-cost and legally simple way to access a surrogate. The new measure, however, not only bars same-sex couples from using the surrogates but also leaves gay couples who already started the process in limbo.

The new rules state that only straight couples who have been married for more than two years can use India’s surrogacy program. Notified by the change from a message on the Indian Home Ministry’s website, fertility clinics and LGBT rights activists termed the move “discriminatory”.

“It’s totally unfair – not only for gay people but for people who are not married who may have been living together for years and for singles,” Mumbai gay rights advocate Nitin Karani said.

“Parenting is everybody’s right and now we’re withdrawing that right,” Dr. Rita Bakshi, who is the head of the International Fertility Centre in New Delhi, said. “These rules are definitely not welcome, definitely restrictive and very discriminatory.” Read full article.

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Abusive partners can sabotage contraception

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While researchers don’t know exactly how common it is, the nation’s leading group of obstetricians and gynecologists says women should be screened for ‘reproductive coercion.’

When a husband hides a wife’s birth control pills or a boyfriend takes off a condom in the middle of sex in hopes of getting an unwilling girlfriend pregnant, that’s a form of abuse called reproductive coercion.

While researchers don’t know exactly how common such coercion is, it’s common enough – especially among women who are abused by their partners in other ways – that health care providers should screen women for signs at regular check-ups and pregnancy visits, says the nation’s leading group of obstetricians and gynecologists.

“We want to make sure that health care providers are aware that this is something that does go on and that it’s a form of abuse,” says Veronica Gillispie, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Ochsner Health System, New Orleans, and a member of the committee that wrote the opinion for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. It’s published in the February issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, out today. Read full article.

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BPA substitute could spell trouble for hormones

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A few years ago, manufacturers of water bottles, food containers, and baby products had a big problem.

A key ingredient of the plastics they used to make their merchandise, an organic compound called bisphenol A, had been linked by scientists to diabetes, asthma and cancer and altered prostate and neurological development. The FDA and state legislatures were considering action to restrict BPA’s use, and the public was pressuring retailers to remove BPA-containing items from their shelves.

The industry responded by creating “BPA-free” products, which were made from plastic containing a compound called bisphenol S. In addition to having similar names, BPA and BPS share a similar structure and versatility: BPS is now known to be used in everything from currency to thermal receipt paper, and widespread human exposure to BPS was confirmed in a 2012 analysis of urine samples taken in the U.S., Japan, China and five other Asian countries. Read full article.

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Women with migraine with aura advised of contraception risk

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Certain types of modern contraception could be risky for women who have migraines with aura, a new study has found.

According to research unveiled at this year’s meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, these females are more likely to experience deep vein thrombosis and other blood clot complications. Women have therefore been urged to bear this in mind when deciding how to proceed with family planning.

Dr Shivang Joshi, a specialist at Brigham and Women’s Falkner Hospital in Boston, commented: “Women who have migraine with aura should be sure to include this information in their medical history and talk to their doctors about the possible risks of newer contraceptives, given their condition.”

The study also showed that migraine with aura is second only to high blood pressure as the biggest cause of heart attacks and strokes. Read full article.

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Kan. case reveals risks with assisted reproduction

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The case of a Kansas sperm donor being sued by the state for child support underscores a confusing patchwork of aging laws that govern assisted reproduction in the United States and often lead to litigation and frustration among would-be parents.

Complex questions about parental responsibility resurfaced late last year, as Kansas officials went after a Topeka man who answered a Craigslist ad from a lesbian couple seeking a sperm donor. Because no doctor was involved in the artificial insemination, the state sought to hold William Marotta financially responsible for the child when the women split up and one of them sought public assistance. A hearing is set for April.

Many states haven’t updated their laws to address the evolution of family structures — such as same-sex families, single women conceiving with donated sperm or artificial inseminations performed without a doctor’s involvement. At-home insemination kits are inexpensive, and obtaining sperm from a friend, or even a donor met over the Internet, allows women to avoid medical costs that generally aren’t covered by insurance. Read full article.

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Should commercial surrogacy be made legal in Britain?

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More and more heterosexual and same-sex couples in Britain are turning to surrogate mothers to help them have a family.

This month, singer Sir Elton John and his civil partner, film producer David Furnish, welcomed their second son into the world.

Both children were born to the same surrogate mother through an agency in California, where commercial surrogacy is legal and surrogates can be paid.

While surrogacy is legal in Britain, it is a criminal offence to pay a surrogate mother more than ‘reasonable expenses’ and it is also illegal to advertise that you are seeking a surrogate mother or willing to act as one.

Couples here wanting to have a baby through surrogacy can travel to somewhere like the US where they can use a professional agency, or they can find a willing surrogate here, often through the help of non-profit organisations which host social events and online forums where surrogates and intended parents can meet. Read full article.

 

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Embryo options needed – Australia

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IVF participants need more support and clearer options when deciding what to do with unused frozen embryos, a new national study has found.

Researchers from the Sydney University of Technology’s law faculty found states including Tasmania had limited legal structures in place to support people making decisions about frozen embryos.

Many IVF participants end up with a surplus of embryos and the report, officially released today, makes 57 recommendations for changes to laws, policy and practices covering storage limits, the use of embryos after the death of a partner and donation of embryos.

Professor Jenni Millbank, an author of the report, said the five-year storage limit should be doubled to give people more time to expand their families or consider other alternatives.

“Law should not set blanket storage periods that enforce destruction of embryos after a set period, nor should they prevent donation (to other infertile people) if that is desired,” she said.

The findings were based on interviews with 54 people across Australia including two Tasmanians, who had either donated or received donor embryos, or gone through a separation since freezing embryos. Read full article.

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Health: Body and soul

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Psychological side of infertility has been ignored compared to physiological factors that prevent couples from having a baby.

Biomedical treatments to help infertile couples become parents have advanced greatly in recent years, but psychological treatment to help them cope has lagged way behind. And sometimes, the emotional distress from depression and anxiety alone is a key factor that actually holds back the hoped-for pregnancy.

Fortunately, awareness of this mind-body connection to infertility is growing and the appearance of a Hebrew volume on the subject will certainly give it a push. Called Lehavi Yeladim La’olam (To Bear a Child), released by Aryeh Nir Publishers in Tel Aviv, the book is an important example.

The 256-page, NIS 89 softcover volume was written by Dr. Zvia Birman and Prof.

Eliezer Witztum. Birman is a longtime fertility researcher who was head of the social workers unit in the pediatric, obstetrical and gynecological departments at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem and has provided individual and group therapy to many infertile couples over the last two decades.

Witztum is a leading psychiatrist at Beersheba’s Mental Health Center and Ben- Gurion University and specializes in the complex relationship between culture and society and mind-body. Read full article.

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Oklahoma City doctor says emergency contraception not abortion

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There’s a difference between the drugs that induce a medical abortion and those used in emergency contraception, or the morning-after pill, an Oklahoma City doctor said this past week.

“Emergency contraception, first and foremost, is not an abortifacient,” Dr. Andrea Palmer, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Lakeside Women’s Hospital, said. “It is not going to dislodge or disrupt an already implanted pregnancy. It’s not something that is going to cause an implanted pregnancy to no longer be implanted or to abort.”

Whether emergency contraceptive pills can cause abortions has been a contentious fight since the pills first came onto the market.

Emergency contraceptive pills have been around since the 1970s, according to a study published in the Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception journal. Plan B and ella are two examples of emergency contraceptive pills currently available in the U.S.  Read full article.

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‘Grayest Generation’: Older Parenthood In The U.S.

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In a December article for The New Republic, “The Grayest Generation: How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society,” the magazine’s science editor Judith Shulevitz points out how the growing trend toward later parenthood since 1970 coincides with a rise in neurocognitive and developmental disorders among children.

Drawing on research published in Nature, Shulevitz writes that, while the associations between parental age and birth defects were largely speculative until this year, “when researchers in Iceland, using radically more powerful ways of looking at genomes, established that men pass on more de novo — that is, noninherited and spontaneously occurring — genetic mutations to their children as they get older. … [T]hey concluded that the number of genetic mutations that can be acquired from a father increases by two every year of his life, and doubles every 16, so that a 36-year-old man is twice as likely as a 20-year-old to bequeathde novo mutations to his children.”

By proving that it’s not simply the mother’s age and health that affects the fetus, Shulevitz says the dynamic surrounding discussions of fertility will change. “No longer need women feel solely guilty,” she tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “They can point to their husbands — and perhaps that’s not really a nice way of putting it — but it means that the problem is shared by both sexes.” Read full article.