The Overlooked Emotions of Sperm Donation

(Link): The Overlooked Emotions of Sperm Donation

by Ashley Fetters

July 9, 2018

“My hope is that people think about how this is more than a transaction,” says one family therapist.

Sperm donation offers a tidy solution to an aggravating problem: When a person or a couple wants a baby and needs a different ingredient than what they’ve currently got to make one, a man with viable sperm swoops in to help.

…As simple a transaction as sperm donation can seem to be, though, some find it to be stressful or isolating—and because assisted reproductive technology is a relatively new, rapidly developing field, the social and emotional challenges that can arise between the participants in a sperm donation are, for many, uncharted.

Why More Women Are Having Babies at 50 and Beyond

Why More Women Are Having Babies at 50 and Beyond

(Link):  Why More Women Are Having Babies at 50 and Beyond

Excerpts:

….Duckworth [Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill] is expected to deliver her second child a few weeks after she turns 50, a time when many woman expect the end of fertility and the beginning of menopause to be around the corner.

The Senator said she delayed having children to pursue her career and, by the time she was ready, she had to overcome infertility.”The early part of my career, which was also, [like] for most women, your twenties and early thirties, your prime fertility years,” she told ABC station WLS in Chicago, “were also my career-building years.”

She is not alone. Duckworth is among a growing number of women, including celebrities like Janet Jackson and Sophie B. Hawkins, tackling motherhood in their fifties.

Overall birthrates in the United States have been declining for years, reaching a record low in 2016, according to National Bureau of Health Statistics, and provisional data suggests a new low for 2017.

Womb Transplants Could Allow Men to Have Babies ‘Tomorrow’, Claims Expert

Womb Transplants Could Allow Men to Have Babies ‘Tomorrow’, Claims Expert

I wonder, do men get the annoying monthly menstrual period to go along with it, which can come with cramps and backaches? *fingers crossed*

What a strange world we’re living in.

(Link): Womb Transplants Could Allow Men to Have Babies ‘Tomorrow’, Claims Expert

by V Fletcher, November 2017

Blokes would not be able to deliver the baby naturally, but could give birth by cesarean

Raising Concerns About a Widely Used Test to Measure Fertility by C. Caron

Raising Concerns About a Widely Used Test to Measure Fertility by C. Caron

(Link): Raising Concerns About a Widely Used Test to Measure Fertility by C. Caron

Excerpts

Oct 16, 2017

[She was told her eggs were too old or not good enough, so she’d likely not be able to have a kid and the fertility treatment was very expensive and not covered by her insurance]

…Two years later, she remarried. Ms. Bourquin and her husband conceived naturally on the first try. Her doctor was “stunned,” Ms. Bourquin said.

…New research published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association underscores what Ms. Bourquin experienced, and what many fertility experts have already observed: AMH doesn’t dictate a woman’s reproductive potential.

And although AMH testing is one of the most common ways that doctors assess a woman’s fertility — it’s especially important for women struggling with infertility — an AMH value isn’t always telling.

Single, 54, and a New Dad: Why Some Start Families Late by A. Ellin

Single, 54, and a New Dad: Why Some Start Families Late

(Link):  Single, 54, and a New Dad: Why Some Start Families Late by A. Ellin

Excerpts:

August 5, 2016

SPARKY CAMPANELLA never heard the thrumming of a biological clock. But his “sociological clock” — his sense that he was missing out on something important in life — boomed mightily. At the age of 54, he decided to do something about it. He became a father.

He was single, but so what? “I decided I could either do it myself, or wait for the right partner to come along,” said Mr. Campanella, a Los Angeles fine arts photographer whose son, Rhys, is a little over 1 year old. Over the years he had dated women who had children of their own, but he realized that he didn’t want to be a stepdad.

….It’s a question many childless people over 50 are asking themselves. Of course, dealing with night feedings and rambunctious 2-year-olds are not for the faint of heart. But with their finances in order and their careers in place, with their life spans extended, some older people are concluding: Why not start — or continue — raising children in later life?

With Menopause Reversal, Women Could Be Forever Fertile

With Menopause Reversal, Women Could Be Forever Fertile

(Link): With Menopause Reversal, Women Could Be Forever Fertile

The hot flashes, night sweats, and vaginal dryness characteristic of menopause may no longer also signal the end of a woman’s fertility thanks to a blood treatment used to heal wounds.

Presenting their findings at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting in Helsinki, Finland, this month, researchers in Greece said they were able to reverse menopause in roughly 30 women, including one who entered menopause at 40 but five years later menstruated again, reports (Link): New Scientist.

Why does society still view childless women like me with suspicion? by E. Day

Why does society still view childless women like me with suspicion?

(Link): Why does society still view childless women like me with suspicion? by E. Day

Excerpts:

• Remarks like Leadsom’s go far beyond the usual cut-and-thrust of the political arena and reveal how (Link): childless women are still viewed with innate suspicion. This, in spite of the fact that women in their mid-40s are now almost twice as likely to be childless as their parents’ generation. One in five women born in 1969 is childless today, compared with one in nine women born in 1942.
• But there remains a taboo, a retrograde belief that (Link): we are in some way unnatural for not fulfilling our biological destiny. How else to explain the fact that the first question many people ask when I meet them is whether I have children, followed by an uncomfortable pause when I say that I don’t. “But why?” I can see them thinking. “What’s wrong with her?”

Mothers Over 40 in Record Baby Boom: Number of Women Who Give Birth in Their Fifth Decade or Later Trebles

Mothers Over 40 in Record Baby Boom: Number of Women Who Give Birth in Their Fifth Decade or Later Trebles

This article is from 2010. I could have sworn I already did a blog post on this, but I looked around my blog a little bit and don’t see it.

(Link): Mothers over 40 in record baby boom: Number of women who give birth in their fifth decade or later trebles

• By Steve Doughty for the Daily Mail
   26 May 2010
• A baby boom among older women has trebled the number giving birth after their 40th birthday.
• Almost 27,000 babies were born to mothers over 40 last year, figures revealed yesterday.
• The unprecedented level is nearly three times the total of 20 years ago and up by 50 per cent over the past decade.
• Even during the post-war childbirth peak in the Sixties there were fewer children born to women in their fifth decade and beyond.
• Britain now has one of the highest birth rates for older women in the world, with 3.8 per cent of all babies born to mothers over 40. Only Italy has a higher level in Europe.

Woman in Her 70s May Be Oldest Ever to Give Birth

Woman in Her 70s May Be Oldest Ever to Give Birth

(Link): Woman in Her 70s May Be Oldest Ever to Give Birth

Excerpts:

• By ARSHAD R. ZARGAR & ASHLEY WELCH CBS NEWS
• May 12, 2016, 3:23 PM
• A woman in India could make the record books as one of the oldest ever to give birth.
• Daljinder Kaur, who’s believed to be at least 70 years old, gave birth to a son named Arman (meaning “wish” in Hindi) on April 19. The baby was the first for Kaur and her 79-year-old husband, Mohinder Singh Gill, after nearly five decades of marriage.
• “I feel blessed to be able to hold my own baby. I had lost hope of becoming a mother ever,” said Kaur, who underwent two years of (Link): IVF treatment and had two failed attempts earlier.

Stop Pressuring Women to Be Moms: It’s Insulting to Assume We All Want The Same Thing by R K Bussel

Stop Pressuring Women to Be Moms: It’s Insulting to Assume We All Want The Same Thing by R K Bussel

(Link): Stop Pressuring Women to Be Moms: It’s Insulting to Assume We All Want The Same Thing

Excerpts

• I used to wonder why my childfree friends were so adamant about what they didn’t want—but I get it now
• by RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
• We talk a lot about freedom of choice when it comes to reproduction, but there’s still one choice that women face an unconscionable amount of backlash over: the decision not to have kids. In an essay for (Link): Marie Claire, writer Starre Vartan details the opposition she’s faced in the dating and medical arenas over her choice to remain childfree, with a gynecologist telling her “That’s what we’re here for” and two boyfriends deliberately removing condoms during sex in a disgusting attempt to force her to change her mind:
• “I…explained how terrified I was, physically and mentally, to be pregnant, to care for needy small humans. Two different, otherwise wonderful, handsome, and brilliant men said they ‘understood’ after I opened up about my fears. And then they each promptly sabotaged the birth control that I was very strict about.”
• Assuming that all women automatically want kids is insulting—to everyone. It insults those who do plan to have kids or are parents already by diminishing the sheer amount of physical and emotional labor that goes into the undertaking. It insults those who don’t want kids, or aren’t sure, by elevating motherhood above every other option….
• …Nobody wins by coercing someone else into becoming a parent, or making someone feel guilty, damaged or ostracized for not wanting kids.

Why Being a Childless Woman is Rarely a Simple Case of Choice or Infertility – Childless by Circumstance by J. Day

Please note all you are getting here is a long excerpt. I did not paste in the whole article. The author discusses how she tried IVF at one time, or she considered using IVF, if I remember correctly.

(Link): Why being a childless woman is rarely a simple case of choice or infertility – by J Day

• An estimated 80% of women who don’t have children are ‘childless by circumstance’, rather than choice or medical reasons
• Feb 28, 2016
• Before I became a statistic, by reaching my mid-forties without having children, I thought, as many of us do, that there were two ways to become a childless woman: you either didn’t want them (“child-free”) or you were infertile.
• It has been estimated that 80 per cent of women who don’t have children are “childless by circumstance”, a phrase coined by the Australian academic Dr Leslie Cannold in her 2005 book, What, No Baby?
• The figure comes from the work of Dr Renske Keizer, a professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, who in a 2010 meta-analysis of data from the Netherlands and the US estimated that 10 per cent of women without children are childless by choice, 10 per cent for medical reasons, and 80 per cent by circumstance.
• Applied to statistics about UK women, it can be estimated that there are (or shortly will be) almost 1.5 million women in their forties and fifties here who won’t have children, with only 10 per cent of those being unambiguously by choice.
• ….Perhaps the most difficult-to-digest reason for childlessness is that of never having been in a suitable relationship.

Christian Publication Seems To Take Stance Against Uterus Transplants

Christian Publication Seems To Take Stance Against Uterus Transplants

This page appears on Christian news site, World.

(Link):  Will uterus transplants eventually violate all natural boundaries?

• The Cleveland Clinic this month (Link): announced it would begin a clinical trial of uterus transplants—taking uteri from dead women and transplanting them into healthy women in their twenties and thirties who have ovaries but lack a uterus (an uncommon problem accounting for 3 percent of female infertility).

I would take it that the publication is against the idea of women getting a uterus transplant. It is again, a Christian magazine.

I have no idea why Christians are so hypocritical on this matter, that they pressure and shame women into having children, yet, if a woman has problems conceiving, they condemn her for availing herself of medical technology to help.

I wrote of this topic more here, in an earlier blog post:

(Link):  Hypocrisy: Conservative Christians / Catholics Pressure Women To Feel Their Only Worth is in Becoming Mothers, But If Women Try to Use Medical Technology to Get Pregnant, the Women Are Condemned by The Same Groups

———————–

Related:

(Link):   Marriage, Parenthood, Judgment by Christians and Non Christians – You Can’t Win No Matter What Choice You Make

(Link): Praying for a Child – The Catholic Church makes life impossible for infertile women.

(Link):  A Woman’s Fertility is Her Own Business, not Everyone Else’s by L. Bates

(Link): Baby Making Fixation at Christianity Today Magazine Online – Shaming Women For Not Procreating, or For Delaying Motherhood, or For Limiting the Number of Children

(Link):  Hypocrisy in Christian Culture – Those who idolize parenting chide infertiles for trying to have kids

(Link):  “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” – one of the most excellent Christian rebuttals I have seen against the Christian idolatry of marriage and natalism, and in support of adult singleness and celibacy – from CBE’s site

(Link): Pro-Life, Yet Anti-Celibacy, Anti-Childless Christian Site Tweets Story about Mother Who Slit New Born Infant Son’s Throat to Save Her Sex Life (Christians equating single or childless / childfree women to women who murder their babies)

(Link): Pro-Life, Christian Sites that Flirt With Denigrating Singleness and Childlessness In Their Quest to Argue Against Abortion / Re Eric Metaxas etc

(Link): Renting a Womb – Women Reduced to Baby Breeders (editorial from CP)

(Link):  Remaining childless can be wise and meaningful. The pope should know Gaby Hinsliff

(Link): Christians Advise Singles To Follow Certain Dating Advice But Then Shame, Criticize, or Punish Singles When That Advice Does Not Work

(Link):  Why do we still have to justify the choice to be child-free? by H. Freeman

(Link):  Are Marriage and Family A Woman’s Highest Calling? by Marcia Wolf – and other links that address the Christian fallacy that a woman’s most godly or only proper role is as wife and mother

Hypocrisy: Conservative Christians / Catholics Pressure Women To Feel Their Only Worth is in Becoming Mothers, But If Women Try to Use Medical Technology to Get Pregnant, the Women Are Condemned by The Same Groups

Hypocrisy: Conservative Christians / Catholics Pressure Women To Feel Their Only Worth is in Becoming Mothers, But If Women Try to Use Medical Technology to Get Pregnant, the Women Are Condemned by The Same Groups

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LANGUAGE ALERT. I blow up a few places in this blog post and use dirty words, including dropping the “F” bomb once or twice.

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Thank God I never felt a strong tug or urge to have children. I never cared if I had one or not. I’ve never measured my value or womanhood by if I had a kid or not. THANK GOD.

I feel sorry for women who really, really wanted a kid but were unable to have one, whatever the reason. Women are under a lot of pressure, even from secular culture, to have children. Women who don’t have kids are either viewed with suspicion or with pity.

I have blogged on this topic two or three times before. The editorial I link to below is focused on Roman Catholics, but I have seen a small number of Protestants write editorials condemning IVF and the like as well.

This makes my blood boil.

These Catholic and conservative Protestant (and Baptists) shame women into having children, conveying the notion that a woman’s only value resides in things like getting pregnant and having babies.

If a woman therefore buys into this propaganda and desperately tries to have a baby (or even if she just wants to have a baby, Christian propaganda aside), these same Christian groups criticize these ladies (and their husbands, if their husbands are on board) for using medical technology to conceive.

These Christians tell women they must have babies, that they are obligated to have babies. Christians pressure and nag women to have babies.

But when or if women then have to turn to medical science to conceive because they or their spouse have fertility issues, these natalistic- obsessed Christians condemn them for it.

I cannot begin to communicate how angry this makes me. These groups are putting people into no-win situations, then blaming them for a system, or for failing to meet a set of values, that they themselves created!

It rather reminds me of Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees, when he said to them something like,

• “How dare you put burdens on to people’s shoulders but then refuse to do so much as lend a finger to lift those same burdens.”

It’s the same exact phenomenon.

It also reminds me a tad of Christians who shame and pressure adult singles to marry, but if we singles try to actually get married, take action to make it happen – by flirting, by going to bars to meet other singles, or by using dating sites, or asking church members to fix us up on dates – we gets scolded for trying to do what they tell us we should be doing!

We singles are supposed to just sit with our hands neatly folded on our laps, wait, and pray and hope that God happens to send a spouse across our paths, with no action on our part to make it come to pass. This has been a losing strategy – which is taught by a lot of Christians – for a lot of singles, including me.

For the love of Frank, if you do not approve of IVF (or whatever fertility programs), or, if you do not approve of Christians using dating sites or visiting bars to meet potential mates in an attempt to make marriage come about, stop lecturing or pressuring people to have children or to marry in the first place! Stop treating the childless, child free, or the singles as though they are failures or second class citizens!

You cannot dictate both the what and the how. Pick one or the other.

Or better yet, stop telling people how they should live their lives, and stop telling them that “X” is the only appropriate way or age to make something (marriage, having kids, whatever) happen.

The Bible actually does NOT command anyone to marry or have children and does not specify an age by which it “should” happen – Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, never married nor had kids, and Paul said in 1 Cor. 7 it is better to stay single (and hence celibate and child free).

One portion of the article reads:

• …Not all Catholic bio-ethicists even believe every couple deserves to be parents. “If a couple decides they have the right to a child, the child has become a commodity,” Marie Hilliard, director of bioethics and public policy at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, (Link): told Religion News Service last year. “And if they haven’t been given the gift of a child, it doesn’t mean they have the right to a child as commodity.”

This ticks me off very much.

Who are these douche bags to say some people don’t “deserve”  to be parents? Unless we are talking about people who would abuse any kids they have, these bio-ethicists are wrong.

Who are they to say who “deserves to have kids” or not? The ego here is amazing.

Just because a couple wants to have a kid does not mean they view children as “commodities,” give me a fucking break, Hilliard.

This reminds me of Christians who hound adult singles to get married, and if we say yes, we’d like to get married and are using dating sites to pursue that course of action, they then say, “You must stop, for you have made marriage into an idol.”

These groups set up something that they say everyone should have or do, but if that something is out of reach and would require a person to take additional steps (using IVF, or using dating sites, what have you), they then condemn these people.

For fuck’s sake. Stop, stop, stop pressuring people to think they have to do “X” in life, but if they cannot do “X” on their own, but have to get outside help to achieve “X,” don’t sit there and chide them for getting that outside help to do something you say they should be doing to start with.

What a bunch of double-standard holding, hypocritical ASSHOLES – they put unrealistic standards and burdens on people and tell them they cannot do anything to change or improve whatever the situation is. This kind of thing just drives me nuts, I swear.

Here is the article:

(Link): Begotten Not Made: The Vatican Doesn’t Want IVF Babies by B L Nadeau

• The logic of the Catholic Church rules out many techniques used to help infertile couples.
• … Catholic dogma may be “pro-life” and certainly pro-creation (and anti-contraception), but only for the fertile.

Advent of the Virgin Births: Women who Have Never Been in a Relationship Paying £5,000 to Get Pregnant

Advent of the Virgin Births: Women who Have Never Been in a Relationship Paying £5,000 to Get Pregnant

This article says that this practice has critics. Oh good lord. My fellow conservatives, and a lot of Christians, whine and moan about women such as myself, who never married or who never had kids.

One staple of Christian gender complementarianism is to teach men and women (but especially women) that their “highest calling in life” is to become a parent (mother).

So, you get really marginalized in their world if you don’t have a kid – whether due to choice, infertility, or what some term situational infertility (ie, the women never met the right guy).

But here you have women who are virgins who are getting pregnant via IVF or by whatever method, and they are still getting criticized.

Like I said in an earlier post, (Link): no matter how you slice it, no matter what you do – if you have kids or don’t have kids, or if you say, have kids at age 35 or 45, or, say, only have one kid or have 15 kids, Christians and conservatives will criticize you for it.

If you use birth control, they will criticize you for that, or for what type of birth control you use.

There is no winning, no matter what life choices you make, or no matter what circumstances you find yourself in.

Conservatives and Christians practically demand that all women become mothers, but becoming a mother is not good enough – no no no. You must only become a mother in a manner in which THEY APPROVE.

Some religious guy is quoted in this article as saying IVF turns women into nothing more than breeding machines – but Islam and conservative Christianity already treat women as though they are nothing more than breeding machines. Conservative Christians certainly have no respect for virgin (childless) women who are over the age of 25 / 30.

Conservative religious types also penalize women who have a child outside of marriage – I have blogged a few times before about Jewish or Christian employers who have FIRED women from their jobs who had sex prior to marriage, who became pregnant (like (Link): this story, for example).

Religious types punish women coming and going for having kids, for not having kids, or, if they do have a kid, for WHEN they have a kid, and if they do it with a man or alone  (ie, IVF).

Concerning marital status and child bearing, there is NO WINNING with these people, outside a very narrow set of parameters that are not possible for every woman to meet (i.e, getting married to a great guy by one’s mid 20s and then having a kid before the age of 30 with said husband).

Notice that someone in this article, Daws, associates having sex with being a full adult. She assumes, quite condescendingly, that virgins are incapable of knowing or having maturity or are capable of forming close bonds with another human being. Daws is incorrect. A person does not have to have sex with another person to be mature or capable of bonding. To suggest otherwise is deeply insulting.

(Link): Advent of the virgin births: Women who have never been in a relationship paying £5,000 to get pregnant

• by Rachel Ellis

• At least 25 straight women who’ve never had sex have given birth via IVF
• Four British firms known to have helped the women with £5,000 treatment
• Doctors say women often don’t want to wait for their ideal man
• Critics have said the practice undermines process of motherhood 
• Dozens of young heterosexual women have had virgin births after undergoing IVF in Britain, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
• Some are using the £5,000 fertility treatment to bypass the need to involve a man, and others so that they can save themselves for a ‘special relationship’.
• Doctors said last night at least 25 straight women had given birth in the past five years despite being virgins. But campaigners for the traditional family said the ‘distorted’ move turned babies into little more than ‘teddy bears’ to be ‘picked off the shelf’.
• Religious groups said it undermined the importance of bringing up children in a stable marriage, while a leading psychotherapist warned that having a mother who had never been in a relationship could harm a child’s development.

270 Reasons Women Choose Not To Have Children

270 Reasons Women Choose Not To Have Children

I first Tweeted a link to the following article a couple of weeks ago.

(Link): 270 Reasons Women Choose Not To Have Children

That same story was later ReTweeted by LifeSite News, which is a pro-life Twitter account. Which is fine, to a point; I myself am pro-life.

However. What bothers me about Life Site News (and other similar groups) is that they share such stories on social media not to validate childfree women, but to demonize them and scold them for their choice.

Nowhere does the Bible teach that women MUST get pregnant and have babies – the “be fruitful” line from Genesis was for the first people on earth, not something intended for everyone on every continent straight down to the year 2015 and beyond. Jesus Christ and Apostle Paul instead teach in the New Testament that remaining single and celibate, and hence, childless or childfree, are godly options.

The New Testament also does not teach that having children is mandatory for married couples.

I’m afraid Roman Catholics are in error on this point – I believe they, like a few very fringe Protestant groups – teach that sex is only permissible or morally okay if it results in the possibility of pregnancy, something that is not taught in the Bible at all.

The Bible does not demonize childless or childfree people, but certain Christian groups or pro-life groups keep doing so.

As a childless woman myself, I find this attitude deeply insulting. I have not failed God, nor have I failed at life, nor am I sinning, simply because I’ve never married and cranked out children.

The Bible simply does not teach that being single, celibate, and/or childfree are sins. I place no authority in anything any Roman Catholic council or Pope or Catholic Tradition has to say on these topics – only with what the Bible says, and the Bible, in the New Testament, removes any burdens on to people to marry and/or have children.

I have written of this troubling trend by Christian pro-life groups here:

• (Link):  Pro-Life, Yet Anti-Celibacy, Anti-Childless Christian Site Tweets Story about Mother Who Slit New Born Infant Son’s Throat to Save Her Sex Life

Recall again that I am right of center – I am a conservative as well as pro-life – but the Bible does not shame or scold women who are childless or childfree. Choosing to abstain from sex and/or from having children are NOT sins.

But some of these pro-life sites continue to equate childless or childfree women to women who do give birth but murder their infants! It is absolutely vile and disgusting to equate the avoidance of getting pregnant in the first place to women (or men) who murder babies (but these Christian pro-life sites keep doing it anyway)!

Here again is the link (the page has this interactive chart thing at the bottom that I cannot reproduce here on my blog; you will have to visit their site to see it):

(Link): 270 Reasons Women Choose Not To Have Children

Excerpts

• By Rebecca Adams, Hilary Fung, Alissa Scheller and Shane Shifflett
•  JULY 1, 2015, 9:00 AM EDT
• Far too often, women who choose to be childfree are asked to defend their (Link): “immature,” (Link): “selfish” lifestyles. They’re told that motherhood is the (Link): “most important job in the world” and face accusations of living (Link): “meaningless” lives.

• The number of childfree women is at a record high: 48 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 44 don’t have kids, (Link): according to 2014 Census numbers.

  The Huffington Post and YouGov asked 124 women why they choose to be childfree. Their motivations ranged from preferring their current lifestyles (64 percent) to prioritizing their careers (9 percent) — a.k.a. fairly universal things that have motivated men not to have children for centuries. To give insight into the complex, layered decisions women make, HuffPost (Link): asked childfree readers to discuss the reasons they have chosen not to have kids and gathered 270 responses here.