infertility

Fertility Drugs and Cancer (Part 3)

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Recently, on our podcast Venus Rising, I had the opportunity to interview Maggie Eastman and her family about her experience with egg donation and the nightmare that occurred afterwards. Maggie was a young, bright-eyed college student when she was first recruited as an egg donor. What started as a desire to help families while earning […]

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I Sold My Eggs to Save My Mom from Eviction

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In the early 2000s, Liz Scheier’s mom was facing eviction, so Liz, like many young women, turned to egg donation to raise funds to escape financial crisis. Over the next several years, Liz underwent a total of three rounds of egg retrieval.  In the years since, Liz has spent a significant amount of time analyzing […]

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Life Beyond Failed Fertility

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You will not want to miss this week’s episode of Venus Rising, as Kallie sits down with award winning author and writer Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos for a frank discussion on a painful topic: infertility.  Pamela’s book  Silent Sorority, became the first account of reconciling infertility that was not written by a mother. With raw honesty Pamela drew from her […]

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My Journey With Infertility

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Today Jennifer brings her dear friend, Karen Hoffman, on Venus Rising to talk about her very personal journey with infertility. Karen has an international background, having lived and worked on three continents. She was born and raised in South Africa, where she earned her Bachelor’s degree University of Pretoria. Subsequently, Karen moved to London, where […]

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“Stop Telling Couples All Roads Lead to IVF”

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Are you struggling with infertility or gynecological issues such as PCOS or endometriosis? Do you feel like typical infertility treatments are failing women and couples? Are you interested in freezing your eggs? Are you in the medical field or just interested in women’s reproductive health? If so, today’s episode is especially for you! Today we […]

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This Week in Bioethics #113

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***Watch our live discussion of This Week in Bioethics on Facebook or on YouTube*** 1. Nightmare Surrogacy Experience Toni, a surrogate mother from Iowa, says of her experience: “It’s been a nightmare. It has almost destroyed my family.” Toni first reached out to us about this time last year. This week, she and Jennifer recorded […]

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This Week in Bioethics #103

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1. Pregnancy Outcomes for Surrogate Pregnancies are Significantly Different A recent journal article highlights a number of crucial differences between surrogate pregnancies and non-surrogate pregnancies.  2. Storage Issues at Fertility Clinics Two fertility clinics suffered failures in their frozen storage tanks last week. Reports by NBC, the Washington Post, and People magazine.   3. Romanticizing Double […]

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A War on Young Women and Children

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I remember years ago being on The Montel Williams Show when the topic was “extreme baby-making.” I was pitted against women who had gone through many forms of assisted reproductive technologies in order to conceive. And, of course, there was the reproductive endocrinologist who offered her expert voice in favor of “advances in science and […]

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The Other Option: To Remain Childless?

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A common critique of our work in the area of reproductive technology is that we’re unsympathetic to the couples, particularly the women, who desperately want a child to call their own. In both our films and our writing, we aim to highlight the strong, natural desire to procreate, while also recognizing that it must be […]

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A Bad Week of Press for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART)

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If you are like me (you probably aren’t) and have your google alerts set for “egg donation,” “sperm donation,” and “surrogacy,” you will have seen that it was a bad press week for the field of reproductive medicine. Here are several stories that caught my eye. Risks to Mother and ChildThe Daily Mail reports on […]

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Jindal Vetoes Unconstitutional Surrogacy Bill

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A few days ago, I warned that Louisiana’s passed surrogacy bill was unconstitutional because it limited the procedure to infertile heterosexual married couples. Governor Bobby Jindal has vetoed. From the Times Picayune story: Surrogacy births — in which a couple’s embryo is implanted in another woman — are not illegal in Louisiana. The contracts between […]

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Fertility Industry Dehumanizes Surrogates

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As a paid consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture, I have become informed about issues to which I might otherwise have paid scant attention. This is particularly true with regard to the increasingly dark side of the fertility industry, about which the CBC has been doing splendidly illuminative work. It has really opened […]

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Who Cares About IVF Dangers?

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The British Medical Journal has published a cautionary article warning of the potential dangers of IVF. From “Are We Overusing IVF?” Extended use of IVF also increases the risk of harm. Multiple pregnancies are associated with maternal and perinatal complications such as gestational diabetes, fetal growth restriction, and pre-eclampsia as well as premature birth. And […]

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The Untold Stories: I Choose Not to Buy a Child

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The desire for a child of one’s own is hardly uncommon and certainly understandable. Yet all too often all we hear are accounts of endless IVF cycles and considerations of surrogacy or conception via anonymous sperm and egg donation. It’s easy to market a story of a couple that’s desperate to conceive and after years […]

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The Fertility Industry Superhighway

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Miriam Zoll, author of the recent book Cracked Open: Liberty, Fertility and the Pursuit of High-Tech Babies, has a terrific piece out in today’s New York Times on “Selling the Fantasy of Fertility” to those struggling with infertility. She’s co-written the piece with Pamela Tsigdinos, and their voices are important as they write from their […]

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Thinking about Selling Your Eggs?

Salon.com runs a lengthy, very frank, first-person account of a young woman considering selling her eggs. From “Selling my Eggs to Make Rent”: Egg donation, as an option, can be seen at once demeaning and empowering: A job that no one else but a woman can have — or rather, a racially pre-selected, usually white, […]

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Protect Your Fertility

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President I recently wrote about women who wait later into life to conceive and find they struggle with what they call “infertility.” In fact, there is no infertility as a result of aging; rather it is the biological reality of menopause. Menopause is a natural and normal event that occurs in […]

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Protect Your Fertility

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President I recently wrote about women who wait later into life to conceive and find they struggle with what they call “infertility.” In fact, there is no infertility as a result of aging; rather it is the biological reality of menopause. Menopause is a natural and normal event that occurs in […]

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