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Link only due to copyright issues: https://qz.com/1275754/a-new-capital-built-from-scratch-is-an-unlikely-utopia-for-korean-families/

Oonagh Dalgliesh is the first to admit she feels broody. She is enchanted by the idea of watching a baby grow up, of marvelling at that first crooked smile, those tentative first steps and the fledgling attempts at independence that melt most mothers’ hearts. Even so, she has decided she will never experience the joy of discovering she is pregnant. At 32, Oonagh is certainly of child-bearing age. With a well-paid job as an events manager, she is financially solvent. And for the past year, she has been in a serious relationship with a man who is longing to become...

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. birth rates declined last year for women in their teens, 20s and — surprisingly — their 30s, leading to the fewest babies in 30 years, according to a government report released Thursday. Experts said several factors may be combining to drive the declines, including shifting attitudes about motherhood and changing immigration patterns. The provisional report, based on a review of more than 99 percent of the birth certificates filed nationwide, counted 3.853 million births last year. That's the lowest tally since 1987. Births have been declining since 2014, but 2017 saw the greatest year-to-year drop...

Flame retardant chemicals used in products like yoga mats, sofas, car seats, and even phone cases are being linked to infertility, according to a new study. Researchers at Harvard University say organophosphate flame retardants (PFRs) found in a patient’s body lowered their chances of a successful pregnancy. PFRs are used in polyurethane foam found in many products used by both adults and children. “These findings suggest that exposure to PFRs may be one of many risk factors for lower reproductive success,” lead author Courtney Carignan said. The researchers looked at 211 women undergoing in-vitro fertilization treatment and discovered over 80...

Reasons for the ‘shocking’ drop are unclear, say researchers, and represent a huge and neglected area of public health __ Nicola Davis @NicolaKSDavis Tuesday 25 July 2017 13.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 25 July 2017 20.10 EDT Sperm counts among men have more than halved in the last 40 years, research suggests, although the drivers behind the decline remain unclear. The latest findings reveal that between 1973 and 2011, the concentration of sperm in the ejaculate of men in western countries has fallen by an average of 1.4% a year, leading to an overall drop of just over 52%....

Single women worried about finding Mr Right before getting too old should freeze their eggs as they dive into dating, a prominent sexologist has said. Dr Nikki Goldstein, 30, froze her eggs nearly a year ago and said the procedure had given a new lease on her love life. With an admitted preference for older men, Dr Goldstein said being frank with her dates about having her eggs frozen took a lot of pressure off budding romances.

A man who paid a surrogate to have his baby became overwhelmed when he learned she was having triplets ~ and demanded the woman abort one of the fetuses while threatening her with financial ruin, she claims. *They are human beings. I bonded with these kids. This is just not right,* mom-to-be Melissa Cook told The Post on Tuesday.

Women in Okinawa have more babies and live longer than women from almost anywhere else in Japan. If data from the statistics bureau and labor ministry are any guide, it has as much to do with work-life balance as the prefecture’s sun-drenched beaches and crystal-clear waters. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare statistics on average number of children per woman, of which the most recent data is from 2013, women in Okinawa give birth to an average 1.94 children over their lifetime, the highest rate in Japan. Tokyo comes in last, with women in the capital on...

There’s a widening gap between the baby-having of married women, who tend to be more educated and more affluent, and their less-educated, less-financially-secure, unmarried peers. A growing body of research, including work by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, raises the possibility that because people like to feel financially secure before taking the marriage plunge, the rise of income inequality has divided Americans into those who marry and those who don’t. Now this could be playing out with childbearing, too. America’s recessionary “baby bust” has clearly leveled off now, but we’ve yet to see the birth recovery one would expect...

Egg freezing is being marketed as the new and hip thing to do among New York and Silicon Valley socialites. Freezing one’s eggs is touted as a means of delaying motherhood for the sake of one’s career. Yet this is anything but empowering to the modern woman. The Washington Post tells of women who freeze their eggs after painful divorces so they can bear children at a later date. Then there’s Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a self-proclaimed “egg whisperer,” whose mission it is to promote and host high-end "egg-freezing parties" at expensive bars. Some companies are even providing egg-freezing “benefits” to encourage...

Remember the sci-fi thriller GATTACA? For those who never saw the film and/or eschewed all pop culture in the late 90's for some reason, it was a popular movie that came out in 1997 about genetically modified human beings. Now some literally genetically modified human babies born that same year are entering their senior year of high school.

My Latin is not what it once was and it was never much. So lately I have been making amends for schoolboy sloth by reading a few of the classics. I have just finished (in translation) and highly recommend The Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus, which chronicles the years of Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula and Nero, (an) analysis of palace politics. Whoa! Excuse me: just where is all this going? Is this relevant to anything at all or is it just self-indulgent bloviation? Well, sort of. Be patient. Let me press on. It was a bit dismaying to read how...

~snip~ “There are fewer risks than people think, and that makes sense to me,” Pacey said. “The single thing that affects fertility is how big your testicles are. If you’re blessed with big testicles, you’ll produce more sperm.”

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna has long been a vocal supporter of Humanae Vitae’s teaching on the morally appropriate means of family planning. So it was noteworthy that Cardinal Caffarra recently conceded that, while Humanae Vitae’s conclusions were true, its presentation of those truths left something to be desired. As the cardinal put it, “No one today would dispute that, at the time it was published, Humanae Vitae rested on the foundations of a fragile anthropology, and that there was a certain ‘biologism’ in its argumentation.” Which put me in mind of a document I discovered in 1997 in a...

Q: If God established marriage for the procreation of children, does it affect the validity of a marriage if one spouse is infertile? What if you know for sure that you can’t have children, can you get married in the Church anyway? How does that work? –Donna A: As we’ve seen before in this space, the Church holds that marriage is, by its very nature, ordered to the well-being of the spouses and the procreation and upbringing of children (c. 1055.1). As Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World stated nearly 50 years ago, “By its very...

Jill Knapp begs us to “Please Stop Asking Me When I’m Going to Have Children.” Being that I am still a newly-wed and have just moved to a new city, I am in no rush to have a kid. This is an unacceptable answer to a lot of people. The constant reminders that your clock is ticking and that you don’t want to be confused for your child’s grandparents when they grow up are not making us move any faster. Having children is a big responsibility. What Jill doesn’t understand is that her fertility is not subject to whim...

Frustrated by their inability to have a baby, Roger and Jasmine Hill of Canastota are going public in their effort to conceive a child. The young couple is asking for donations from the public to help pay for the costly IVF, or In-vitro fertilization, procedure they are hoping to try. There are incentives for those who help: $100 gets you a copy of the sonogram and a photo of the newborn, $500 gets you in the baby book and $1,000 gets you a T-shirt plus all the other rewards. Roger, who works at Walmart in Oneida and Jasmine, an accountant...

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The University of Utah is investigating a complaint that a convicted felon working at a fertility clinic replaced a customer's sperm with his own, fathering a girl 21 years ago. The mother of the girl, Pamela Branum, says she and her husband discovered a genetic mismatch in their daughter, and were able to trace her lineage with help from relatives of the now-deceased fertility clinic worker, Thomas Ray Lippert. "I don't think we're the only ones," Branum told CBS affiliate KUTV in Salt Lake City. "We think we're one of many" victims who used a...

Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Calif., believes that if her Assembly Bill 926 passes, researchers will be able to pay egg donors as they develop medical advances that can help all women. To her, the bill is an issue of simple fairness -- gender equity, really. Since a well-intended 2006 bill banned researchers from paying egg donors more than expense reimbursement, researchers have been at a competitive disadvantage, while affluent couples can offer fertile women top dollar. UCSF Professor Marcelle Cedars lamented at a hearing of the state Senate Health Committee on Wednesday that the status quo robs potential egg donors of...

Eleven people have been arrested following a joint investigation by the police and Financial Crimes Squad (SDOE) that revealed a clinic in Thessaloniki was paying foreign women 1,000 euros each for their ovaries, which it then sold to patients in Greece and abroad who were seeking assisted pregnancies. The head of the Athens security police, Dimitris Georgatzis, said the clinic, which had a branch in Athens, had a number of clients from Northern Europe. A similar case was uncovered in 2010, when a clinic in northern Athens was accused of using ovaries from Bulgarian and Romanian women. The clinics in...