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Time flies! From Reuters (02/18/09): The grandmother of California's newborn octuplets faces the threat of foreclosure on the house she has shared with her daughter and six of her grandchildren, property records revealed on Wednesday. According to a mortgage default notice filed last week with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's Office, Angela Suleman is more than $23,000 behind in payments on her house in the Los Angeles suburb of Whittier, an agency spokesman said. The default notice was first made public when a copy of the document, giving Suleman three months to settle her debt in order to avoid foreclosure,...

The patient, who is in her late 40s, wanted one baby. Dr. Michael Kamrava transferred at least seven embryos to her. She is now hospitalized without insurance. A few months after Dr. Michael Kamrava helped Nadya Suleman become pregnant with octuplets, he transferred at least seven embryos to another patient. She was in her late 40s and wanted just one baby. Now she's five months pregnant with quadruplets and hospitalized at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, according to several sources familiar with the situation. The new case could add to concerns about Kamrava's practice and about whether the fertility industry...

Starting a family might be a little easier with a trip to Ripley's Believe It or Not museum in Myrtle Beach... opens a month long display of its fertility statues....and within months, 13 women became pregnant. around the world... more than 2,000 women have reported becoming pregnant after touching the statues. couples wanting to have a baby can touch the statues for free during business hours.

New research strengthens the link between water pollution and rising male fertility problems. The study, by Brunel University, the Universities of Exeter and Reading and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, shows for the first time how a group of testosterone-blocking chemicals is finding its way into UK rivers, affecting wildlife and potentially humans. The research was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council and is now published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The study identified a new group of chemicals that act as ‘anti-androgens.’ This means that they inhibit the function of the male hormone, testosterone, reducing male...

PARIS (AFP) France cemented its status as Europe's fertility champion on Tuesday when fresh statistics showed women are having on average more than two children each, an increase from last year's birth rate. The second most populous country in the European Union after Germany, France began 2009 with 64.3 million inhabitants, 366,500 more than in 2008, according to the national statistics agency INSEE. While there are fewer women of child-bearing age in France, the birth rate has continued to climb, with 2.02 children on average born to every woman in 2008, up from 1.98 in 2007. Last year, more than...

If a Martian were to look at a map of the Earth’s religions, what he might find most surprising is the fact that such a map can be drawn at all. How strange--he might say to himself--that so many of the world’s Hindus are to be found in one place, namely India. And how odd that Muslims are so very numerous in the Middle East. With the disconcerting curiosity that is so typical of Martians, he might wonder what explains this geographical clustering. Do people move countries in order to be close to others of the same faith? Or do...

Regarding the Instruction Dignitas PersonaeAim In recent years, biomedical research has made great strides, opening new possibilities for the treatment of disease, but also giving rise to serious questions which had not been directly treated in the Instruction Donum vitae (22 February 1987).  A new Instruction, which is dated 8 September 2008, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, seeks to provide some responses to these new bioethical questions, as these have been the focus of expectations and concerns in large sectors of society.  In this way, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seeks both...

Are males becoming an endangered species? That's the question scientists and researchers have been pondering since alarming trends in male fertility rates, birth defects and disorders began emerging around the world. More and more boys are being born with genital defects and are suffering from learning disabilities, autism and Tourette's syndrome, among other disorders. Male infertility rates are on the rise and the quality of an average man's sperm is declining, according to some studies. But perhaps the most disconcerting of all trends is the growing gender imbalance in many parts of heavily industrialized nations, where the births of baby...

A study recently published in Human Reproduction demonstrated that intake of soy foods significantly reduces sperm counts in men. The study is especially significant because it is the largest study in humans to examine the relationship between semen quality and phytoestrogens (plant compounds that can mimic the physiological effects of the endogenous hormone, estrogen). Dr. Jorge Chavarro of the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues found that men who ate the most soy food had 41 million sperm per milliliter less than men who did not consume soy products. The normal sperm concentrations for men ranges between 80...

A RACE of half-man, half-beast “humanzees” could be created under new fertility laws, MPs were warned last night. Loopholes would let scientists fertilise animals with human sperm, the Commons was told during a debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Tory MP Nadine Dorries claimed it would revive memories of Soviet tyrant Stalin’s attempt to create the “ultimate soldier” in the 1920s by cross-breeding humans and apes. Democratic Unionist MP Jeffrey Donaldson conjured up the spectre of a monster from Greek legend, saying: “The image that people find most abhorrent is of scientists producing GM babies or cloned adults...

  Infertility fear: Emma Smith, 37, with her son Oliver   Baby boy for woman in double transplantSophie Goodchild and Anna Davis 10.10.08 A woman who had a double organ transplant has defied the odds to become a mother, the Standard can reveal today.Emma Smith, 37, feared she may be infertile because of the side-effects of her anti-rejection drugs.But last week, the former secretary from Hitchin in Hertfordshire gave birth without complications to her first child 6lb baby Oliver.She is the first woman in Britain to deliver a child by Caesarean section after receiving donor kidneys and a pancreas.Her...

And here’s the fundamental reason underlying all the rage on one side and amusement on the other over Sarah Palin: it’s all about … female fertility. Human beings have extremely strong emotions on the topic of fertility. It’s an obsession — look at the celebrity gossip columns these days. ... Now, the Breeding Wars have moved into the political arena. Barack Obama launched his Presidential run at the 2004 Democratic convention by devoting the first 380 words of his speech to describing in great detail the two stocks from which he was crossbred. His message is that by uniting in...

Mad Cow Rules Hit Sperm Banks' Patrons By Rob Stein Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 13, 2008; Page A01 When Julie Peterson decided to have a baby on her own two years ago, she picked a tall, blond, blue-eyed Danish engineer as a sperm donor to match her own Scandinavian heritage. But when she went back to the sperm bank to use the same donor to have another child, she was stunned to discover that the federal government had made it impossible. "I just cried," said Peterson, 43, who lives in North Carolina. "I was in complete shock. I...

Too many fatty foods are dangerous not only to men's waistlines, but to their sperm production. In research presented Wednesday at a meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, scientists found that obese men have worse sperm than normal-weight men. "There is a very long list of health hazards from being overweight," said Ghiyath Shayeb, the study's lead researcher at the University of Aberdeen. "Now we can add poor semen quality to the list." But experts aren't sure if that necessarily means obese men face major difficulties having children. "If you have a man who isn't fantastically...

Children of older fathers have greater risk of early death Men, listen up. No longer can you comfort yourselves with the notion that you can father a child at any time...Children of older fathers more 'likely to die early': LONDON: When it comes to fertility and the prospect of having babies, it has always been assumed that men have no biological clock — unlike women, they can father a child late in their life. But a study has dispelled this myth. Researchers in Europe have found that children are almost twice as likely to die before adulthood if they have...

"TOKYO (AFP) -- The number of children in Japan has fallen for the 27th straight year to hit a new low, the government said Monday in a sign of the country's rapidly ageing population. Children aged 14 or younger numbered 17,250,000 as of April 1, down by 130,000 from a year earlier, the internal affairs ministry said in an annual survey released to coincide with the May 5 Children's Day national holiday. The figure is the lowest since 1950 when comparable data started. The ratio of children to the total population sank for 34 years in a row to 13.5...

What is the relationship between fertility and real estate? ... Is real estate destiny? “It’s something a bunch of us have been thinking about,” said Morris A. Davis, an assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics []. “If you reduce down-payment constraints, more people can buy homes, or buy bigger homes. Does that encourage them to have more kids? I would say nobody knows.” Social scientists have long traced a connection between housing and fertility. When homes are scarce or beyond the means of young couples, as in the 1930s, couples delay marriage or have fewer children. This...

For the first time in 35 years, the U.S. fertility rate has climbed high enough to sustain a stable population, solidifying the nation's unique status among industrialized countries. The overall fertility rate increased 2 percent between 2005 and 2006, nudging the average number of babies being born to each woman to 2.1, according to the latest federal statistics. That marks the first time since 1971 that the rate has reached a crucial benchmark of population growth: the ability of each generation to replace itself. "It's been quite a long time since we've had a rate this high," said Stephanie J....

AP Medical Writer Don't count on freezing eggs to offset a ticking biological clock just yet. So say new guidelines for fertility specialists that conclude the procedure remains highly experimental even though it is increasingly offered. The recommendations are a dash of cold water for a field that proponents believe is slowly coming of age. But with perhaps 500 births from frozen-and-thawed eggs worldwide, compared with more than 200,000 from frozen embryos, it is a nascent technology. Now scientists are tweaking techniques to try to improve the odds that a woman who has her eggs removed and frozen will bear...

Regular sex boosts a man's fertility, say doctors. In a contradiction of conventional wisdom on the subject, research has shown those who do not have sex often produce sperm of lower quality than those who do so daily. This is thought to be because sperms' DNA becomes more damaged the longer it remains in the body, cutting the chances of fertilisation and raising the risk of a miscarriage in the first weeks of pregnancy. The findings, presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's annual conference, will be of particular significance to couples undergoing fertility treatment. Men are currently advised...