Researches used a mathematical model as well as data from 325 women to track their potential ovarian reserve. What makes this study news is that it suggests a faster rate of loss at earlier ages than were previously believed.

Of course, 325 women isn’t a huge number and mathematical models aren’t ironclad, but this certainly gives me pause. Essentially, while society has changed enormously in terms of lifespans and women’s ability to determine their own paths in life, our biology has not changed with it. The story includes this very telling quote: “While we may not be mature enough to conceive at a young age, nor should we, that is still when the body is most adept at conception and carrying a baby,” says Claire Whelan, program director of the American Fertility Association. “Our biological clock has not kept pace with our ability to prolong our life spans.”

Carolyn Butler,who wrote the Post article, pointed out that popular culture gives us a ton of mixed messages when it comes to fertility. When you see older celebrities like Jennifer Lopez and Julia Roberts having twins in their 40s and denying any sort of fertility help, it sends the message that getting pregnant in your 40s–or even beyond — is as easy as can be (and I get so irritated when these women just claim that miraculously they got pregnant with twins at 45 or whatever, and oh no, no no, they didn’t have to do fertility treatment. It’s dishonest and insulting, as if fertility treatment is a shameful thing).

What do you think? Would this information have changed your timetable at all? I don’t know that it would have, for me — and I think I’m like most people, who are more ruled by the way life works out than any specific deadline.

An Australian innovation, the test was described to ABC News as a means to “identify those younger women who may well be at serious risk of not having children easily when they’re older.”

In other words – it will tell you if it’s OK to wait… or not. There are no guarantees at any state, naturally. Some people still manage to get pregnant on one try (those lucky ducks), some take what feels like forever. Even with the test, the folks at IVF Australia say women may well need treatment for infertility – it’s not a test to MAKE you fertile.

But for women who are fairly set on having children but are still deciding how to prioritize her choices, this test could make a significant difference. If nothing else, it may push them to seek treatment earlier rather than later if they are struggling with infertility.

I chose to have my daughter on the young side, but I’m the opposite of the trend. The average age of first-time mums is getting older. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the mean age for a woman to have her first child is 30.7 This despite the fact that scientists surmise fertility peaks at twenty-two in the average mum.

With this test, you could find out if you’re that average – or if you beat it.  So Babble readers, if you could take this test to determine your timing, would you?

Image: hickr, flickr

Specifically, she wanted to know whether there is a link between eating bread and other foods containing wheat and an inability to get and stay pregnant.

Dr. Crowe’s answer, in short, is yes. For some people.

She explains that female sufferers of coeliac disease, which millions of people suffer from and most without even knowing it, frequently have menstrual disorders, causing an interruption in ovulation and thereby cutting down on the opportunities to conceive.

Women with male partners who suffer from coeliac disease also frequently have trouble getting pregnant, as males sufferers report a higher than average incidence of lowers sperm count and misshapen or poor functioning sperm.

Pregnant women with active coeliac disease also report higher than average miscarriage or smaller babies at birth.

Dr. Crowe recommends women who have repeated miscarriages with no explanation to consider undergoing coeliac screening. She said treating the disease betters the odds of conception and a healthy birth.

And the good news is that with proper treatment with a gluten-free diet and correction of nutritional deficiencies, the prognosis for future pregnancies is much improved.

Do you have coeliac disease? Did you experience miscarriage? What made you finally decide to get screened? As a bread-o-holic, I’m fascinated with this condition.

Photo: NY Times.com

PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, are flame retardants, and they’re commonly found in household items like TVs, carpets, and couches. In a previous small study done by the Environmental Working Group, abnormally high levels of PBDEs were also found in household dust.

To study the effects of PBDEs on fertility, researchers from centre for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas took blood samples from 233 pregnant women, then asked them how long it had taken them to get pregnant.

What they found was women with higher levels of PBDE in the blood took longer to get pregnant, from 30 to 50 percent longer, depending on their blood levels. “It’s a pretty strong effect,” lead researcher Kim Harley to the Los Angeles Times. They can all become pregnant, but they all had very different amounts of time it took them to become pregnant.”

According to HealthDay, 97 percent of Americans have PBDEs in their blood. The chemical is now being phased out, but because it’s found in so many household items and in the enivronment, people will be exposed for years.

To reduce your exposure to PBDEs, HealthDay recommends using a wet mop on your floors, using a vacuum with a quality filter, and keeping your hands clean. According to Harley, researchers suspect that household dust may be one of the major sources of exposure.

The IVF Embryo Test That Can Detect 15,000 Genetic Diseases
A ‘genetic’ ‘MoT’ that can spot almost all inherited diseases in an IVF-created embryo could be available within a year. Mail Online

Children’s Falls Are More Easily Broken
Tales are legion of the “miraculous” survival of children in plane crashes. The Independent

Our Mummies’ Boys, Young Men Stay In The Family Home Longer
Australia is breeding a generation of mummies’ boys – and young men in Sydney are among the hardest in the country to get out of the family home. The Daily Telegraph

Avoid Swine Flu Parties, Parents Urged
Parents were warned today not to take their children to “swine flu parties” in the hope they will catch the disease now and build up immunity. The Independent

Daily Sex Keeps Sperm Healthy And Improves Chance Of Pregnancy
Daily sex keeps a man’s sperm spry and is recommended for couples wanting a baby, according to new research. The Independent

Mother, Children And Charity: How The Jackson Will Is Split
A 2002 will by Michael Jackson divides his estate between his mother, his three children and one or more charities, The Wall Street Journal has reported. But it apparently does not feature his father, Joseph Jackson. SMH

It Is Possible To Look Stylish While Pregnant
Back away from the tent dress: there’s no need to abandon your personal style just because you’re dressing for two. Times Online

Since most of my relationships had basically been reruns of my Mum and Dad’s, my Aunt and Uncle’s, my Grandmother and Grandfather’s, I figured, quite logically, that I’d turn out much the same. Even in high school I was attracted to the perfect-on-the-outside boy (class president) who ended up being a sinister creep. This guy not only stalked me after I broke up with him, he cornered me in an empty classroom and literally threw a room full of chairs at me.

Understandably, I didn’t want to bring a kid into this depressing life picture and figured it was forever out of the question.

But something weird happened in my late twenties. I met a wonderful, sweet man who was as awesome inside as he seemed outside, and I fell totally in love with him. And after four years together I started to fantasise (often!) about building my dreamhouse.

I started carrying around a book called Building Your Own Dreamhouse. For someone who’d had long-term relationships end in tear-filled admissions like “I had sex with my sister Linda the whole time you were overseas” or the lovely “I can’t hide it any longer: I’ve been prostituting myself to buy meth for the past six months,” the level of positivity and forethought necessary for dreamhouse planning was a remarkable leap for me. “Dream” implied a future that was fantastic rather than nightmarish. “House” implied actual stability! In my world, that was just crazy talk.

Regardless, I started carrying around a book called Building Your Own Dreamhouse. Chapters like “How to Pour a Foundation” and “How to Chose a Contractor” welcomed me into the world of people who believed that life could be good. I actually began to imagine the idea of a love not fraught with lies or denial or underground tension. If I just found the right piece of stable land, I could build that: a safe place where the bad stuff didn’t keep happening to me.

Planning my dreamhouse as a place for both my boyfriend and me was too much for me at first. I started hyperventilating the first time we went to buy curtains together. I guess the thought that I could believe in something as ultimately doomed as I assumed our relationship was overwhelmed me.

So I took it slow with my dreamhouse. At first it was just for me.

After ripping pages out of magazines and filling several notebooks with sketches, I came up with my design. The lower floor would be a kitchen, bath and living room and the top floor would be my bedroom suite. There would be a spiral staircase leading to it and a hatch at the top like on a submarine that I could close at night. I would also have fire safety ladders hidden in the window seats, so if I ever needed to escape in a hurry I could. It took me about a year to imagine my boyfriend at my dreamhouse, but eventually I did. I even added an imaginary office for him.

Shortly after that I began picturing kids hanging around outside. At first they were just neighbourhood kids riding bikes that I would wave to from my dreamhouse garden. But one day I saw myself on my hands and knees digging, and there was a little girl next to me. We were making holes and I was showing her how to put the plants into them.

It is now ten years later. My boyfriend has become my husband. He held my hand as we picked out curtains and doorknobs and even chairs for the beautiful home we moved into together. And while it took some time for me to warm up to the idea of setting up house together, once I did, I became as obsessed with it as I had once been with my dreamhouse.

But instead of using ideas from magazines to design our place, I ended up using the few happy memories of domesticity I did have. I’d always loved my best friend’s house. Her mum decorated it in the ’60s and then just left it the same for twenty years. By the ’80s, the once-bright colors had all faded to sun-washed pastels that spoke more of a busy happiness than neglect. That’s what I decided to do too: decorate once and then marvel as things aged.

And of course, I planted a garden, just like the one my mum and I used to work in together.

Our house is a beautiful, safe place full of happiness and possibilities rather than the fear and dread I felt as a kid. Sure, my husband and I fight sometimes and sometimes I get depressed despite the pastels everywhere, but it really has become the home I always wanted. More importantly, after fourteen years I am finally convinced that I am not going to come home to find my husband shooting up with an underage hooker in our kitchen.

And that’s how I, at age forty, found myself in the waiting room of a fertility clinic. The dreamhouse is built; the only thing missing now is the girl in the garden.

An article in the Sun Herald over the weekend claims that increasing numbers of women in their 30s are seeking out egg-freezing services for “social” reasons, such as advancing age and lack of a willing baby-daddy.

Traditionally, egg freezing has mainly been undertaken by cancer patients left infertile by chemotherapy. But improvements in the process (vitrification is now used), with better success rates, have seen more women seek out the service.

In Brisbane each year, more than 100 women in their 30s are having their eggs frozen by the Queensland Fertility Group, while 14 women have arranged for “social egg-freezing” at Melbourne IVF over the past 18 months. A further 20 women have recently inquired about the procedure, which is not advertised.

It’s not cheap – it costs a woman about $12,000 to have unfertilised eggs extracted from her ovaries and then frozen and stored, but it seems many women view it as an insurance policy. However, babies aren’t guaranteed either.

A 2007 clinical study of 120 volunteers (463 vitrified eggs) apparently found that,while 99.4% vitrified eggs survived the warming procedure, and 92.9% of warmed eggs were fertilised, there was only 13.2% implantation rate per embryo, resulting in a 32.5% pregnancy rate. (which is about the same rate as using fresh eggs).

Indeed, while ethicists seem to not know what to make of the phenomenon (most Australian IVF clinics do not advertise the service and The British Fertility Society says that it lacks a firm policy on egg freezing), some fertility experts claim the main reason for caution is that they fear the procedure could offer false hope.

It’s interesting there are a few clichés thrown around in the reports about egg freezing – that it is a service for career women, that women should still understand that they should be thinking about motherhood earlier.

But without a willing partner, what is a woman supposed to do? She’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

Just as the contraceptive pill gave women the option not to get pregnant, perhaps fertility technology will give them control over the process when they do want to conceive too.

“For me the fundamental issue is one of what, for lack of a better word, I’d call planetary responsibility. I don’t care if it’s a poor single mum or Melinda Gates: I don’t think anyone has the right to make reproductive choices that result in overpopulation,” says Peaco Todd, a cartoonist, who lives in Boston. “There are too many people already and the planet just can’t support more of us. The result will be dwindling resources, vanishing habitat, all of which will cause unimaginable harm and suffering.”

Suleman is not the only woman whose reproductive choices are inciting eco-anxiety. Last November, Alex Kuczynski wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine about hiring a surrogate after multiple miscarriages and the failure of many rounds of in vitro fertilisation. The article reeked of class privilege, and not only because the author noted that she and her successful investor husband spent $25,000 to rent the womb of a less economically advantaged woman, who hoped the money would help pay for her children’s education. But it wasn’t just the references to her holiday homes or her twice-daily Bikram yoga sessions that hundreds of commenters on the Times’s website castigated Kuczynski for.

“You’d think with nearly seven billion people on this planet, a couple might think of it as a blessing that they can not add any more ‘consumers’ to our Earth’s already overstretched resources,” said one.

Of course, Kuczynski, like Suleman, is an anomaly. (Women who make use of fertility treatments may have some means, but most don’t own a Steinway piano.) But the reactions to both of their stories illuminates a conversation that is happening about the relationship between women’s childbearing choices and the environment. It’s certainly not uncommon to hear women in their twenties and thirties say that they are not sure they want to have children partly because they’re worried about being earth-friendly.

In February, a group of eco-activists and concerned scholars joined together for a Global Population Speak Out. The Global Footprint Network is one of many environmental organizations that tracks the overpopulation issue. Last year, in the best-selling The World Without Us, Alan Weisman suggested that we cut the birth rate to one child per couple for at least a few generations. And though these discussions have happened in the past, the current targets are not always the usual suspects — women of colour and poor women — but also middle-class and white women.

At the heart of these debates are a number of questions: What is the relationship between individual women’s reproductive decisions and environmental degradation? Can we really help save the planet by having less children? Or is this just a modern form of green-washed eugenics? And in what ways does the rhetoric and ideology of population control affect women?

Westerners have been debating overpopulation in earnest since Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb exploded on the scene in 1968; that best-selling book claimed that humans were far outpacing the earth’s natural resources, and that unless population was massively curtailed, hundreds of millions would soon die of starvation. At the time, population growth was the highest it had ever been in human history. Today, population growth has slowed and some countries, like Japan, now have below replacement-level fertility; plus, better agricultural technologies have made Ehrlich’s worry about mass famine moot. Still, the statistics sound dire: About 6.7 billion people live on the earth today and that number is expected to go up by three billion by 2050.

“There is a lot of research showing a connection between population and a variety of environmental problems,” including greenhouse gas emissions (especially carbon dixoide), deforestation, depletion of fisheries, and loss of biodiversity, says Richard York, a sociology professor at the University of Oregon who researches these issues. “The consumption of energy and materials is fairly closely linked to population — although there are many factors, especially economic growth, that are also important — and thus in general population plays an important role in resource depletion and waste generation.”

York doesn’t use the term “population control” because “it sounds of something coercive and nefarious”; nor does he advocate the kind of coercive measures that have given that phrase such a bad name. Indeed, global attempts to control population have a sordid history that includes forced abortion, sterilisation, and infanticide. The most well-known example of population control’s unintended consequences is in the case of China, where many families have aborted female foetuses in order to comply with the nation’s one-child policy and the culture’s preference for males; the country now has a deeply skewed gender ratio. Still, York, like many other scientists and eco-activists, believes that the relationship between overpopulation and environmental degradation needs to be discussed.

But Matthew Connelly, a professor of history at Columbia University, and the author of Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, disagrees with the fundamental premise of population control — or whatever you want to call it — not to mention its rhetoric. The issue, he says, is not influencing how many people there are in the world, but how those people are living. “It’s not a population crisis, it’s a consumption crisis,” he says.

According to the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College, industrialised countries, with only twenty percent of the world’s population, are responsible for eighty percent of the accumulated carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere. The U.S. is the worst offender; in 2002, it was responsible for twenty tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per person, compared to only 0.2 tons in Bangladesh, 0.3 in Kenya and 3.9 in Mexico.

Connelly notes a study that found that large households generally consume less than small households. “That is the thing we should be worried about,” says Connelly. “Instead of launching a campaign telling people to try to have fewer kids, we should point to fact that we now insist on having more bathrooms per household than people.”

It certainly made sense for readers of Kuczynski’s Times article to assume that her offspring would be a participant in this flagrant culture of consumption that celebrates ten-room mansions and thirteenth birthday parties more ostentatious than most weddings. In that sense, the commenters who lambasted the author as an environmental menace were correct. And, in fact, the consumption issue explains why discussions about population control are focusing more and more on Americans, including those that are white and middle-class.

York adds that we should think about the global consequences of reproductive technology in terms of consumption. How we prioritise resources “is a legitimate issue to be concerned about,” he says. He wonders about “all the research and money that go into increasing fertility for a handful of rich people. It’s a question of whether this is a good use of the world’s resources.”

A question that many of the country’s singles and gays who want to have families, or the 7.3 million people in the U.S. who are struggling with infertility, would probably rather not think about.

It’s easy to see how the moral condemnation lobbed at the uber-privileged Kuczynski or the mentally unhinged Suleman could quickly translate into a more general critique of many women’s reproductive choices — and it has. Certainly, the rhetoric of personal responsibility that many proponents of environmentalism use to make their point sounds eerily familiar. The idea that women who have not followed the laws of biology — that have dared to put off childbearing while in pursuit of a PhD, a corner office, the right mate, a nest egg — are selfish has been around at least since the backlash to the second wave of the women’s movement. The ideology of population control is “a way of blaming women,” says Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College.

And this time, some of the same race, class, and gender-sensitive Americans who enthusiastically voted Obama into office are among those doing the finger-pointing. After eight years of an environmentally tone-deaf president and a runaway big business culture that has our country’s finances in ruin, they now see an opportunity for change. But this new frugality isn’t just directed at Wall Street minions or banks, but is being projected onto the bodies of individual women — those who have more than one child; have many children; or want their own genetic children, whether via reproductive technology or not. (“The vanity of having a baby who is genetically attached to the parents who raise it escapes me,” said one Times commenter, typical of the many who seemed to think that all families who want children should adopt.) They are looked upon by some as not all that different from overpaid executives looking to use taxpayers’ stimulus money for a joyride on a private jet, embodiments of a bloated age of conspicuous consumption we would rather forget.

Of course, not everyone thinks that a thriftier approach to childbearing is the answer. “Why do so many people remain convinced that it is the job of infertile couples to ’save the world’? The only thing that’s smug is someone with biological children insisting that others adopt orphans or not add to the population problem,” said one Times commenter. Hartmann agrees that there is a pernicious effect to shifting a social issue like environmental degradation onto individual women or couples. In fact, focusing on controlling births “is diverting attention” from enacting other policies to improve the environment, she says.

And though they may use different language to talk about it, many population control advocates and adversaries agree on some of those measures. Like many other concerned scholars, York thinks that the best ways to reduce population on an international level are to improve the status of women and give them more access to education and to paid work; to improve health care, which would help reduce the infant mortality rate so that families didn’t feel they need to have so many children; and to ensure that everyone in the world has access to safe, effective, affordable birth control. All of these measures have been shown to lower fertility rates without state coercion.

Connelly agrees that, globally, we need comprehensive reproductive healthcare. He also notes that infertility is a huge problem in the developing world and believes that treatments should be government subsidised and more available globally, so that people in all societies have equal access to choosing when to have families. And he notes that the Byzantine rules governing adoption here and abroad put off many of those who might want to otherwise; making adoption easier is an issue he thinks could bring people on the left and right together.

Hartmann suggests enacting a sane environmental policy, which would include putting caps on carbon emissions, shifting from private automobiles to public transport, bringing back local agriculture, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and making investments in alternative energy. “People concerned with the environment need to get involved in pressuring the administration to enact good policies. There’s a real political opening with the new EPA director and the administration’s decision to get involved again in international climate policy.”

She also suggests that we focus not on limiting how many children individual women have, but on raising those children in a green way. “We should try to have a more positive attitude: yes, have children, but have a more healthy environment, a more sane lifestyle.” That’s a solution that sounds down to earth.

Hi. We don’t call them test-tube babies here in the 21st century anymore, FYI.

I thought this might mean that a doctor was lowering his price for in-vitro fertilisation because of the recession. It’s not commonly covered by insurance and can cost $US10,000 to $US15,000 a pop.

But what Dr. Joel Batzofin is doing is starting what he calls a long-term clinical trial of a new technique he believes he is the first to perfect. Called in-vitro maturation, the procedure harvests immature eggs, bathes them in hormones until they are ready, then (according to the story) transfers fertilised embryos.

What the story skips, of course, is that the eggs have to be fertilised by sperm somewhere along the line to become embryos, unless he’s doing something incredibly groundbreaking. But it sounds like essentially what he is doing is what fertility drugs do inside the body — coax reluctant ovaries to produce a mature egg.

This is less expensive than traditional IVF at about $US8,000 per cycle. It can also avoid ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome where the ovaries produce way too many eggs. At best that hurts like crazy, at worst you could develop trouble breathing and other serious problems.

So far no pregnancies have resulted, although several women are waiting to see if the healthy embryos they transferred will take. Batzofin says he’ll only try 20 times before ending the trial.

I don’t know that I’d stake my hopes, dreams, and $US8,000 which is still a pretty penny in any event on an unproven theory, but I also love that at least one doctor is trying to find something that works that is less invasive and expensive.

Rule of thumb has always been that women were born with a set number of eggs and that was it. As she ages, so do her eggs. So when she gets pregnant at age 36, she’s doing it with a 36 year old egg. Now that’s some pretty good shelf life but still there are concerns that the quality of the eggs may diminish and the odds of getting pregnant in the first place becomes harder.

But now, scientists have discovered that women of adult age have stem cells inside their ovaries that can create more, newer and younger eggs. Throwing the whole, ‘you have this many eggs in your basket and that’s it’ theory out the window.

The study was published in the scientific journal Nature Cell Biology and describes the results of a team of Chinese researchers who found, via a study in mice, that an adult mammal can make new eggs and have healthy children…or baby mice in this case. There have been several studies recently with hints that adult women may be making more eggs, but this is the first research study to obtain the actual cells that make the magic happen.

“If you are looking to disprove that females cannot make new eggs, this paper proves it. It’s a really significant paper,” said Harvard Medical School professor Jonathan L. Tilly, “This is the smoking gun.”

But not all are as optimistic. “The aging process of the human egg differs fundamentally from that of the mouse egg,” said David L. Keefe, a University of South Florida professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “Except at Disney World, humans are not large mice.”

There will undoubtedly be much interest in this study since it could address many an infertility issue. Doctors in the fertility field are undoubtedly hoping this new study will lead to productive and lucrative procedures in the future.

Via Jezebel
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