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A young mother is determined to carry her child, diagnosed with anencephaly, to term. They know that their baby is doomed, but they want to do the best with what they've been given. The parents are a couple in our community. They're trying to come up with the funds to manage a small funeral. If you just want to share their story, that's awesome. If you feel compelled to help them, you can do so at the link. Right now, my heart is just breaking for them. o go through all that and all their looking forward to is a...

A recent engineering graduate from Tulane University is attempting to make his millions by turning his senior project into a business.Ben Cappiello is seeking to “better” the lives of women around the world by improving the delivery system for the controversial contraceptive/abortifacient intrauterine device, commonly called the “IUD.” Unfortunately, like so many problems our world faces today, the medical flaws and dangers inherent to IUDs cannot be fixed a gun.Today, well-documented shortcomings and dangerous side effects of the IUD include device expulsion, pregnancy complications, ectopic (tubal) pregnancies, pelvic inflammatory disease, uterine perforations, migration of the device into the abdomen, becoming...

She was excited to be pregnant, excited enough that she brought the new sonogram of her unborn child to show coworkers. But hours later that day in late March, R.L. -- as she came to be known in the pile of criminal court documents that followed -- felt sick, with cramping and pain. R.L. went home and bled heavily the next day. She began to suspect the antibiotics her boyfriend had given her weren't really antibiotics at all. Then, on March 31, doctors in Tampa, Fla., confirmed the worst: Her unborn child was dead. Her boyfriend, James Andrew Welden, had...

FULL TITLE: To pee or not to pee: Women sell positive pregnancy tests on Craigslist for $25 each. . . and there is no shortage of motivated buyers A number of women across the country have listed their positive pregnancy tests for sale on Craigslist. One expectant mother in the Buffalo, New York area is selling her used sticks for $25 each, The Daily Dot reports. Another New Jersey mom writes: 'Wanna get your boyfriend to finally pop the question? Play a trick on mom, dad or one of your friends? Scrolling through the site, there appears to be no...

Featured Term (selected at random):ENDOMETRIOSISA gynecological illness caused by the abnormal presence of tissue that more or less perfectly resembles the lining of the uterus (endometrium) but growing outside of the uterus itself and distributed in other pelvic areas. Since this aberrant endometrial tissue responds to the hormone-induced changes of the woman's menstrual cycle but, unlike the true endometrial lining of the uterus, is entrapped in other tissue such as bone and muscle, its cyclic changes of menstruation, causes the problem to repress, and even after the pregnancy improvement is sometimes sustained for a period up to three or...

Recent high profile events—the Gosnell trial and the septicemia of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland—have again raised the question if abortion is ever acceptable, such as in attempts to save the life of the mother. There are at least two ways of thinking about such dilemmas in the Christian moral tradition. The first, which can be traced at least as far back as Thomas Aquinas, relies on the principle of double effect. The second, more familiar to the Lutheran communion, is the method of casuistry, the detailed study of all the factors and circumstances of a case in order to determine...

Any young woman or teen who gets pregnant out-of-wedlock faces three choices: abort her baby; keep her baby, or release her baby for adoption. How she decides will impact her and her baby and in many cases it will affect the man who fathered the child as well. Too often, he is left out of the decision process, and just as often the young woman will make her decision without fully exploring the option of adoption. Studies that compare birth mothers who keep their babies and become single parents with those who release their babies for adoption show that the...

Last week, Yale announced that its student health plan will cover sex-reassignment surgery for students, deeming it an important part of “equal-access” health care. This might shock anyone who doesn’t follow academia, but I wasn’t the least bit surprised. This is just the latest of seemingly endless efforts by colleges to accommodate the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) student community. “We hope that this represents a commitment to catch up to our peers in terms of offering transgender students an equitable student life and health care experience,” Gabriel Murchison, a member of Yale’s Resource Alliance for Gender Equity, told...

Four Palestinian women who had the sperm of their husbands smuggled out of Israeli jails reportedly are pregnant. Dr. Salim Abu Khaizaran, a fertlity doctor at the Razan Medical Center in the West Bank city of Nablus, said Thursday that other insemination attempts had failed, the Palestinian Maan news agency reported. "We don't intervene and ask how they smuggled sperm from prison and get it to Nablus," Khaizaran said at a news conference, according to Ma'an. "There are many failed attempts because the sperm die and so prisoners have to keep trying until it works."

With little discussion or fanfare, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the ban on women in combat that has been in effect for as long as there has been a U.S. military. Feminists and some women serving in the military are applauding the move as a victory for equal rights. They claim that justice requires nothing short of opening all positions to females, regardless of the consequences to combat effectiveness, unit cohesion, or military readiness, factors whose importance they minimize in any event. What is perhaps most striking about Secretary Panetta's action is that it reverses the combat exclusion policy that...

The NBC series "Parenthood"' has drawn raves from TV critics this season for a storyline about a 40-something mother fighting cancer. Then on Jan. 1, NBC asked viewers to tune in the following Tuesday for an "unforgettable" new episode. A teenager would get an abortion at Planned Parenthood. Such is NBC's definition of "parenthood." Drew, one of show's leading teenager characters, has an ex-girlfriend named Amy who comes back to tell him "I'm pregnant." The high school seniors go to the Planned Parenthood clinic, and the scene plays like a political commercial. The counselor says, "If you decide to continue...

The connection between mother and child is ever deeper than thought Scientists Discover Children’s Cells Living in Mothers’ Brains The connection between mother and child is ever deeper than thought By Robert Martone | Tuesday, December 4, 2012 | 37 A living connection Image: ock / Анастасия Попова ADVERTISEMENT The link between a mother and child is profound, and new research suggests a physical connection even deeper than anyone thought. The profound psychological and physical bonds shared by the mother and her child begin during gestation when the mother is everything for the developing fetus, supplying warmth and sustenance, while...

The link between a mother and child is profound, and new research suggests a physical connection even deeper than anyone thought. The profound psychological and physical bonds shared by the mother and her child begin during gestation when the mother is everything for the developing fetus, supplying warmth and sustenance, while her heartbeat provides a soothing constant rhythm. The physical connection between mother and fetus is provided by the placenta, an organ, built of cells from both the mother and fetus, which serves as a conduit for the exchange of nutrients, gasses, and wastes. Cells may migrate through the placenta...

The Obama Administration is planning to build multiple health-services facilities across the African nation of Mozambique, where up to sixteen facilities will be constructed in rural locations. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) this morning unveiled the Health Infrastructure Development Program (HIDP) via the FedBizOpps database, where it issued an announcement seeking to pre-qualify construction firms. The general goal of HIDP is to support the Mozambican Ministry of Health (MISAU) in the provision of improved health care services, according to the presolicitation notice. Each of the rural health centers will contain "a maternity unit, an attending or exam unit,...

Mumbai - It’s the last chance of the decade to have a unique, memorable birth date — 12/12/12. And expectant parents are lining up for that moment. Ahead of December 12, 2012, couples are preparing to fix this unique birth date for their newborns. This trend of having muhurat babies – or planned caesarean section on special dates – is getting fashionable among parents, say city gynaecologists who get requests from patients wanting babies on their ‘auspicious’ day. Over the last few years, dates with repetitive numbers all through the the ‘DD-MM-YY’ format are becoming a craze, says doctors. Last...

A 14-year-old girl is facing homicide charges after deputies said she gave birth to a baby in her Lakeland home, then strangled the baby and hid his body in her bedroom. Deputies arrested the Kathleen High student on Thursday, five days after the Polk County Sheriff's Office received a call that a baby had been found inside a shoebox in the girl's Lakeland home, authorities said. Investigators later determined that she had delivered the baby in the bathroom, then choked the baby to death. "Everybody's a loser here," Sheriff Grady Judd said in a press conference on Friday. "This 14-year-old...

"What about a woman who is pregnant due to rape or incest?" This is one of three hard cases often cited as "exceptions" that make abortion an appropriate alternative. (The other two are when the life of the mother is threatened or the child has a serious handicap or deformity.) 1. Pregnancy due to rape is extremely rare, and with proper treatment can be prevented. Studies conducted by Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute indicate that two consenting and fertile adults have only a 3 percent chance of pregnancy from an act of intercourse. They also indicate there are factors involved in...

First, let's define the term "rape." When pro-lifers speak of rape pregnancies, we should commonly use the phrase "forcible rape" or "assault rape," for that specifies what we're talking about. Rape can also be statutory. Depending upon your state law, statutory rape can be consensual, but we're not addressing that here. Assault rape pregnancies are extremely rare. Most pro-lifers have heard this comment, but too often cannot back it up with facts. A candidate for office in the State of Arkansas made this comment before the last elections. He was roundly criticized and ridiculed by the opposing candidate and the...

Pregnancy loss is a common and painful condition for gestational women, accounting for 25-40% of total pregnancy, having become a serious social-medical issue worldwide. Animal studies and clinical investigations have indicated that the cause of many mid-term miscarriage/abnormal pregnancy has been seeded very early during the onset of embryo implantation. Epidemiological study also showed that maternal stress at early pregnancy is strongly associated with various complications during ongoing gestation. However, whether and how the process of embryo implantation is affected by environmental factors such as stress induced sympathetic activation remained elusive. Considering the mammalian uterus is an organ with extensive...

Third-trimester microbiota resembles that of people at risk of diabetes. Women's gut microbe populations change as pregnancy advances, becoming more like those of people who might develop diabetes. These changes, which do not seem to damage maternal health, correspond with increases in blood glucose and fat deposition thought to help a mother nourish her child. Although scientists have profiled microbial communities around the world and throughout the human body, this is the first time they have tracked the gut microbiome during pregnancy, says Ruth Ley, a microbiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the work1. Ley had...