Source The New Daily
Month: October 2018
Ireland – Should You Freeze Your Eggs – Or Is The £10,000 Procedure A Rip-Off?
Source Huffington Post
Sarah Bagg was 38 when she decided to freeze her eggs. “I’d kind of always thought, like a lot of women do, that I was going to have kids and it was all going to happen naturally,” she explains. Then, three years ago, after the breakdown of a longterm relationship, she decided she needed to take steps to preserve her fertility. “It was kind of part of my own healing process as well as being able to put a plan into action,” she says. “I went in for a consultation and when I came out, I just knew that I had to do it.”
The business development and marketing manager from Brighton, now 41, is one of a growing number of women freezing their eggs in the UK. The latest figures from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates fertility treatment in the UK, show that since 2010, egg freezing has risen every year; in 2016, there were 1,173 egg freezing cycles completed – a 10% increase from the year before.
IVF allows two women to carry the same baby: ‘It was like a relay race’
Source Yahoo
Going through the IVF process can be tricky for same-sex couples: Who will supply the egg and sperm? Who will carry the baby? One couple in Texas found a way for both to take part.
Ashleigh and Bliss Coulter, a couple in North Texas, welcomed their son, Stetson, five months ago via IVF. “I wanted to be pregnant for so long and so bad,” Ashleigh told NBC 5. “I always wanted to have a child, I just didn’t want to carry the child,” Bliss said. “Obviously, us being two women, we were like, ‘How can we make this happen?’” Ashleigh said. “We felt like there has to be a way.”
Ireland – ‘Hello, my beautiful donor baby’: The Irish people becoming parents with donor eggs and sperm
Source Her
Do you know a couple who have experienced fertility problems?
Lots of us would probably say yes – but do you know anyone who has conceived a baby via donor sperm or egg?
Chances are you do.
As a nation, we’re beginning to strip back the veil of secrecy that once hung over infertility and assisted reproduction – but the last taboo may be the thousands of Irish babies that have been born with the help of a donor.
There are no official figures for Ireland but according to Dr Florencia Steinvarcel of Dublin’s Sims Clinic, around 40 per cent of the people who have IVF treatment there use a donor sperm or egg.
Dr Simon Fishel, founder of Beacon CARE Fertility, meanwhile estimates that 5,000 to 7,000 people a year travel abroad from Ireland and the UK just for egg donations.
Canada – Ottawa proposes partial easing of sperm donation, new surrogacy regulations
Source The Globe and Mail
The Trudeau government proposed new regulations Friday that would lift a ban on men who have sex with other men from donating their sperm anonymously to Canadians struggling with infertility.
The proposed changes, up for review through public consultations, could also see surrogate mothers reimbursed for more of the expenses they face in trying to help people build their families, including loss of income.
Those new regulations under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, if enacted, will help protect the health and safety of women and children, says Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor.
“They will also offer couples dealing with infertility, single people, same-sex couples and other members of the LGBTQ2 community flexibility in building their families,” the minister said in a statement.
How Race Impacts Your Fertility
Source In Style
The dialogue around infertility is filled with assumptions related to privilege. Media depictions of difficulty getting or staying pregnant prioritize upper middle-class WASPy couples, or the actual one percent. Whether we’re following real-life stories of celebrities like Courteney Cox or Brooke Shields, or fictionalized ones, like Kate Pearson on This is Us, we see the same type of would-be mom: white, wealthy — this is what it looks like to struggle to conceive. Even a google image search for the word “infertility” brings up almost exclusively white women, or white hetero couples, making sad faces at staged doctors’ appointments.
There are few spaces for marginalized individuals to discuss their fertility experiences, and this could be impacting their success getting pregnant.
A recent study presented earlier this month at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Denver found that Black women have lower IVF success rates than white women — and researchers aren’t sure why.
20 Ways Becoming A Parent Via Surrogate Is Different From Natural Birth
Source Moms.com
Back in former times, there were only so many things a couple could do to have a baby. If the old fashioned way of procreating didn’t work due to issues with the male or woman, they were typically too shamed or embarrassed to even talk about it. Science wasn’t at its peak in terms of alternate ways to have a baby.
Nowadays (thankfully), we have artificial insemination (mom and donor, dad and donor, or two unknown donors), in vitro fertilization (IVF), intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, adoption, and many other ways to help a couple become a family. Most notably, the art of surrogacy is gaining popularity.
Just as there are options for how a couple wants to get pregnant, there are also options in surrogacy. A surrogate can be used as a shell while the mom’s egg and the dad’s sperm are already combined and just implemented in the surrogate. Or perhaps a woman is impregnated by a male’s sperm, with her being the biological mother (but won’t physically raise the child).
Australia – Government toughens IVF laws to protect embryo donors and kids
Source The Sydney Morning Herald
The NSW government has moved to close a legislative loophole in a bid to allow children born through Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) to access details about their biological heritage.
The amendment bill was sparked by the case of Natalie Parker, who donated embryos to a Sydney woman and was led to believe the transfer had failed. Later, she found photos online of a baby boy she believes is her genetic son.
UK – The £100 fertility kit that spared a couple the misery of IVF: Woman with blocked fallopian tubes conceives naturally after three years of trying
Source Daily Mail
A couple who’d given up hope of ever conceiving naturally have spoken of their joy after a £100 fertility kit gave them the ‘miracle’ baby they’d been longing for.
Sarah Capps, 33, and her husband Rob, 36, from Bishop’s Itchington, Warwickshire, had spent almost three years trying, with no success.
The couple were told their best hope of having a child was through IVF after tests eventually revealed Mrs Capps had a blocked fallopian tube.
While they were eligible for treatment on the NHS, Mrs Capps was concerned about the invasiveness of the treatment and the side-effects of fertility drugs, which can include hot flushes, nausea and weight gain.
But in the end, there was no need for IVF.
Women could freeze their eggs for as little as $5 a day
Source Daily Telegraph
AN ASIAN fertility franchise setting up shop in Melbourne says it will “transform” the fertility management industry by providing “pay as you go” egg freezing to millennial women.
XY. Life clinics, owned by Borderless Healthcare Group, says women will be able to freeze their eggs for as little as $5 a day.
Surrogate mother, 26, who advertised her ‘womb for rent’ announces her pregnancy for a couple struggling to conceive
Source Daily Mail
A surrogate mother who playfully advertised her ‘womb for rent’ has fallen pregnant after she made the gracious decision to help a couple struggling to conceive.
Michelle Griffin, from Perth, turned to social media to find the perfect couple who were desperate to fulfil their dream of being a family.
The 26-year-old professional birthing coach already has two children – four-year-old daughter Leilani and son Issac, aged three.
But the doting mother-of-two said she enjoyed pregnancy so much, she wanted the childless couple to experience the joys of parenthood.
Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Michelle – who’s currently 15 weeks pregnant – opened up about her selfless decision to help those struggling with fertility.
Woman Wants to Meet All 44 of Her Half-Siblings, Fathered by the Same Sperm Donor
Source Life News
A recent story in the Washington Post described the story of Kianni Arroyo, who is on a three-year quest to meet all of her half-siblings. It’s not as idyllic as it sounds… So far she has found forty-four of them. They live in eight states and four different countries.
The “father” of these children was, of course, a sperm donor, known affectionately to Kianni as “Donor #2757.”
New Mom Sobs as Her Best Friend and Surrogate Delivers Her First Child
Source Pop Sugar
Erin Boelhower has had a difficult journey to achieving her dream of becoming a mother. After six years of infertility, IVF, and losses, the mom welcomed her rainbow baby girl thanks to her best friend of 10 years, Rachel Checolinski, who offered to be her surrogate. Following a 12-hour labor, Rachel finally delivered baby Scottie, and Erin sobbed through the whole thing.
However, they weren’t all exactly happy tears — some were out of Erin’s concern for her friend. “How could I do this to somebody?” Erin said to Inside Edition of her thoughts during Rachel’s labor. “She just looked miserable, and I know she wanted to do it and would do it again, but it was really hard seeing someone you love doing this for you in that kind of pain.”
The Rise of Egg Freezing as a Fertility Choice
Source Allure
Welcome to the business of egg freezing. It seems like everyone — fictional characters on Freeform’s The Bold Type; celebrities, like Olivia Munn, Whitney Cummings, and Rita Ora; friends and coworkers — is investing.
It’s only been six years since the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) lifted the “experimental” label from egg-freezing procedures (known formally as oocyte cryopreservation), which had been growing in number since the first live birth of a baby that had been an embryo on ice (also known as Zoe Leyland) in 1984. The New York Times has reported that more than 20,000 American women have elected to freeze their eggs — that number includes a 1,500 percent rise from 2009 to 2016, says the ASRM.
Nepal – No law on altruistic surrogacy despite Supreme Court directive
Source The Himalaya Times
The government has yet to do anything about the Supreme Court directive to the government two years ago ordering it to enact a new law to govern altruistic surrogacy.
Spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Population Mahendra Shrestha said the ministry was preparing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) policy, which was the first step to decide surrogacy issues.
“Surrogacy is not that bad but seems to have failed around the world. When a surrogate mother gives birth to a mentally retarded child or a child with congenital defects, nobody — neither the surrogate mother nor the intended parents — take custody of the child,” he said, adding that if surrogacy law was enacted, it would only be for Nepali nationals.
UK – Woman who suffered SIX miscarriages and had more than 600 IVF injections weeps with joy as she holds her baby for the first time, after her best friend stepped in to serve as a surrogate
Source Daily Mail
Erin Boelhower, 33, from Woodstock, Illinois, endured nine IVF transfers and more than 600 injections over the course of three years trying to get pregnant with husband Matthew, 33.
Erin and Matthew were left devastated after suffering a string of miscarriages, but never lost hope that they would one day become parents.
Their dream finally became a reality when Erin’s best friend Rachel Checolinski, 34, gave them the gift of a lifetime and offered to be their surrogate.
In January, two of Erin’s embryos were transferred to Rachel’s uterus. That same month, a test revealed she was pregnant.
The pals spent the next nine months side by side and Erin was at the hospital with Rachel, herself a mother of three, when she went into labor with baby Scottie on September 19.
NZ – Surrogacy: A roller coaster ride to parenthood
Source NZ Herald
Sometimes when Amira Mikhail is caught up in the chaos of everyday life, getting her two young sons ready and out the door, she has to pause and remind herself what it took to be where she is today.
For while Mikhail always longed to have a family, her body was never on-board with the plan.
Becoming a mother has involved years of medical procedures, setbacks and heartache and, through it all, she held on to her dream, fiercely determined to see it realised.
“Honestly I didn’t have a plan B,” admits the Christchurch vet. “I just could not imagine not having kids. There was nowhere in my mind where I grew old and had no children.”
How to Find a Surrogate Mother
Source Fatherly.com
A surrogate mother is a woman who carries and delivers a baby on behalf of a couple. That makes surrogacy a multifaceted arrangement with a number of medical and legal implications, both for the surrogate mother and the parents. And those implications don’t even include the tricky task of finding a surrogate mother to carry the baby.
“The surrogate can be a person that the couple knows and they recruited themselves, like a sister, or somebody from the family, or a childhood friend,” explains Elena Trukhacheva, MD, MSCI, who is the medical director of Reproductive Medicine Institute in Chicago. “Most of the time, a surrogate is recruited by the surrogacy agency. And the couple uses the surrogacy agency kind of as a middleman, to navigate the process and protect them, to some extent.”
China – Court Orders Mother To Return $1.4 Million in Surrogacy Money
Source Sixth Tone
A court in China’s central Hunan province has ordered a woman to return the money she received for her surrogacy — a controversial case that highlights the murky legalities in the country surrounding the practice.
In a verdict announced last month but only made public Friday, the Tianxin District People’s Court in Changsha demanded Zeng Meili return the 10 million yuan ($1.44 million) from Peng Shimin — both pseudonyms used by the court due to privacy concerns — for delivering twin boys in 2013. Peng’s wife had filed a lawsuit against Zeng and her husband in 2016 asking the court to retrieve the money Peng spent from their joint financial account. The wife said she was unaware of the surrogacy as well as the birth of the twins.
Sperm Counts Continue to Fall
Source The Atlantic
Scientists are coming to a consensus that men in America and Europe are experiencing a worsening decrease in fertility. They disagree, however, about why.