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Eating a half serving a day of soy-based foods could be enough to significantly lower a man's sperm count, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The study is the largest in humans to look at the relationship between semen quality and a plant form of the female sex hormone estrogen known as phytoestrogen, which is plentiful in soy-rich foods. "What we found was men that consume the highest amounts of soy foods in this study had a lower sperm concentration compared to those who did not consume soy foods," said Dr. Jorge Chavarro of the Harvard School of Public Health in...

NEW YORK: News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it’s a step toward creating "designer babies". But an author of the study says the work was focused on stem cells. He notes that the researchers used an abnormal embryo that could never have developed into a baby anyway. "None of us wants to make designer babies," said Zev Rosenwaks, director of Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The idea of designer babies is that someday, scientists may insert particular genes...

'Might our religion be killing us?' That's what a Baptist minister was asking recently in an editorial in USA Today. Rev. Oliver "Buzz" Thomas writes: Be fruitful and multiply," says the book of Genesis, and Lord knows we have. To the tune of more than 300 million at home and more than 6 billion abroad. But as we go about the heavenly task of multiplying, a poignant question arises: Might our religion be killing us? Insert the deep dark foreboding music. We all remember the Aztecs. Some say their religion, with its penchant for violence and human sacrifice, played a...

This could be reality, according to Bryan Sykes, an eminent professor of genetics at Oxford University and author of "Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men."

London, England (LifeNews.com) -- A new report indicates artificial reproduction could take place with a capsule inside a woman's body rather than using traditional treatment at a fertility clinic. Pro-life groups are concerned that the "progress" in fertility treatment continues to commodify human life. The Invocell technique involves the mixing of eggs and sperm in a pill-like container that is placed inside a woman's vagina for three days. Full Story at http://www.lifenews.com/bio2414.html

Over at the Corner, they’re quoting Bruce Thornton: [Europe is not reproducing because] “children are expensive. They require you to sacrifice your time and your interests and your own comfort. If your highest good is pleasure, if your highest good is a sophisticated life, then children get in the way. Why would you spend so much money and so much energy on children if your highest good is simply material well-being? That’s sort of the spiritual dimension of the problem.” Read Dr. Melissa Clouthier on the news that she was pregnant with twins at challenging time of her life H/T...

For procreation, it has always taken two to tango. But scientists from the UK's Newcastle University have taken reproductive biology where it has never gone before - creating a human embryo from three parents, two women and a man. The scientists believe the technique will help prevent women with diseases of the mitochondria - tiny batteries within each cell that provide energy - from passing on the defects to their children. Mitochodrial DNA is carried from mother to offspring and faults in it can cause about 50 known diseases, some of which lead to disability and death. Researchers from Newcastle...

ANAND, India - Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills. A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world. The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for...

SOMETIMES when the earth shudders it doesn’t make a sound. That’s what happened in Harrisburg, Pa., recently. On April 30, a state Superior Court panel ruled that a child can have three legal parents. The case, Jacob v. Shultz-Jacob, involved two lesbians who were the legal co-parents of two children conceived with sperm donated by a friend. The panel held that the sperm donor and both women were all liable for child support. Arthur S. Leonard, a professor at New York Law School, observed, “I’m unaware of any other state appellate court that has found that a child has, simultaneously,...

DUBLIN -- Female sharks can fertilize their own eggs and give birth without sperm from males, according to a new study of the asexual reproduction of a hammerhead in a US zoo. The joint Northern Ireland-US research, published today in the Royal Society's Biology Letter journal, analyzed the DNA of a shark born in 2001 in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha . The shark was born in a tank with three potential mothers, none of whom had had contact with a male hammerhead for at least three years. Analysis of the baby shark's DNA found no trace of any...

An article in The Wall Street Journal (April 12) breathlessly informs us of the latest fad on the Incredible Shrinking Continent -- "As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit: Islam's Rise Gives Boost To Militant Unbelievers; The Celebrity Hedonist," the headline teases. The "Celebrity Hedonist," isn't geriatric frat-boy Hugh Hefner, but Michel Onfray, a 48-year-old author dubbed "France's high-priest of atheism" in the Journal piece. Reporter Andrew Higgins describes the doyen of disbelief -- commander of the faith-less -- strutting onto the stage of Caen's 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium, dressed in black from head to toe, to deliver...

January 26 2007 The Times January 18, 2007 Mother wins a grandchild from tomb of soldier son David Sharrock in Ramat Gan Rachel Cohen was praying at her son’s grave when a call on her mobile phone brought news that she had been awaiting for four years. An Israeli court had cleared the way for her to become a grandmother. The legal decision is unprecedented because her son, Keivin, who was shot dead by a sniper in Gaza in 2002, never knew the woman who will become the mother of his child. She was selected by a family charity and...

In a remarkable op-ed appearing in the Washington Post, a young woman named Katrina Clark explains what it's like to know that you are the child of an anonymous sperm donor. It's not fun. The essay could be Exhibit A in any argument about the morality of artificially assisted human reproduction. The child of a loveless, sterile union between gametes speaks with authority when she reminds us that nobody asked for her opinion on the circumstances of her birth. Her mother (whom she still admires) got the baby she wanted. But the baby didn't get a father she could know....

Suppose for a moment that the birth in Bethlehem that Christians celebrate this week never happened --that it is, as the secularists would have it, mere mumbo jumbo, superstition, a myth. In other words, consider it not as an event but as a narrative. You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use? The birth of a child. If Christianity is just a myth, then it is, so to speak, an immaculately conceived one. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn...

Filming your neighbour having sex is legal As long as you are not caught in the act it is legal to film your neighbours naked, or even having sex. That is the conclusion reached by prosecutor Bo Birgersson, who has just dropped the charges against a 20 year old man accused of filming 20 of his neighbours in various states of undress. "It is not possible to be molested without one's knowledge. And even if you find out after the act that somebody has been peeping at you it is not enough to bring about a conviction," Birgersson told Sydsvenskan....

Prof: U.S. liberals on slope to extinction WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 (UPI) -- U.S. liberals face extinction if they don't start having enough babies to keep up with conservatives, a Syracuse University professor told ABC News. Professor Arthur Brooks said after studying numbers from the governmental General Social Survey, he found 100 unrelated liberal adults have 147 children, while 100 unrelated conservatives have 208 kids. Brooks said that makes a difference, as 80 percent of people with political opinions vote like their parents. In response, conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway told ABC liberals are creating their own fertility gap by their beliefs....

THE LAW of UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES You've probably heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It refers to the unanticipated later results of earlier decisions or actions. We saw a television report of an unintended consequence of "sperm banks"--organizations which sell male sperm to lesbians or other single women who want pregnancy "without a father," and couples who want to have children despite male infertility of the husband. You will be shocked, as we were, to discover an estimated 40,000 children are born each year using this repulsively modern means. Apparently, anonymous "profiles" of the sperm donor are used to market...

Over the past years, a new demographic crisis has emerged as a subject of intense debate: the most affluent, most advanced, freest societies of the world are not having enough children to sustain themselves. Recent books—including Phillip Longman’s The Empty Cradle (2004) and Ben J. Wattenberg’s Fewer (2004)—have described the potentially tragic consequences of this decline. Lamenting the collapse of modern birthrates, world leaders as diverse as Vladimir Putin and Pope Benedict XVI have advocated pro-natalist state policies. Popular magazines and newspapers that once worried about the horrors of a “population explosion”—mass starvation in developing countries, environmental catastrophe, the subjugation...

EuroStemCell scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have demonstrated one of the body's most sophisticated ways of regulating the genetic material of stem cells. Their findings, published in Nature Cell Biology, show for the first time the mechanism that adult muscle stem cells use to protect their DNA from mutations. Understanding this has important implications for cancer research, the study of gene regulation, and ultimately growing stem cells of therapeutic potential in the laboratory. When a cell divides, its DNA is duplicated and each resulting daughter cell inherits one copy of the DNA. Over time, errors arising during the...

Seattle, Jun. 12, 2006 (CNA) - A relatively new method of regulating fertility is catching on around the world.  CycleBeads are 95 percent effective and, in themselves, do not conflict with Catholic teachings related to reproduction and fertility. The CycleBeads, which consist of 32 beads in three colors, is a fertility awareness-based method that helps plan or prevent pregnancy naturally. Victoria Jennings, an anthropologist and director of Georgetown's Institute for Reproductive Health, believes women are looking for non-hormonal, non-invasive ways to control their fertility. She and other researchers at Georgetown University conducted a scientific trial of the beads they call...

"So, now you are finished, right"? The politely asked question came after my wife told a woman co-worker the ultrasound results. Our next baby is a girl. We just found out. This co-worker knew we had a boy last summer. So, I guess she has figured we have done our reproductive quota, and she wanted to know if we'd play by the rules, and not welcome any more children. Now needless to say, I am thrilled about this miracle, as is Mrs. Gb. But even within the culture wars, we were not expecting, so soon, such a question. We don't...

Summer 2006 issue - Three years out of graduate school, Julia Derek has twelve kids. Or so she thinks. As a penniless senior at George Mason University, she spotted an ad in The Washington Post from a couple looking to buy a young woman’s eggs. Ten years, 12 donations, $50,000, and one successfully financed postgraduate degree later, Derek, now the author of “Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor,” explains the appeal of egg donation: “You’re doing a good thing, it feels good that people want you, it’s cool to spread your genes…It seems like a great thing to make money...

Madrid, Feb. 17, 2006 (CNA) - Reacting to passage of a new law on assisted reproduction by Spain’s House of Representatives, which would allow genetic selection, cloning and the selling of human embryos, the spokesman for the Bishops’ Conference of Spain, Father Juan Antonio Martinez Camino, said the measure was “very troubling” in its consequences for respect for human life.Speaking to Europa Press, Father Martinez said the new law “opens the door to human cloning, as it only prohibits reproductive cloning and therefore allows therapeutic cloning.”  According to the Spanish priest, the law would also authorize eugenics, that is, “the...

ROME, January 31, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The UK Ambassador to the Vatican got an earful from a Vatican Cardinal at a Rome conference ten days ago for refusing to acknowledge facts about fertility decline and its serious implications.Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the President of the Pontifical Council on the Family was the keynote speaker at the conference titled "The Family in the New Economy: Reflections on the Margins on Centesimus Annus".  The conference, sponsored by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, was also addressed by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, a Senior Fellow in Economics at the...

PROVINCETOWN-- Its year-round population declining and its economy sagging like a wet beach bag, Provincetown has a new worry: It's getting old. With its colorful art galleries and Bohemian personalities, Provincetown has long been a mecca for gay travelers. But town officials worry that its population is graying and that it needs younger visitors and their disposable incomes to pump up the local economy. In the last year, the Provincetown tourism office has begun running flashy ads in gay and lesbian magazines that cater to readers under 40, such as Instinct, Genre, Curve, 411 Magazine, and Out Traveler. It has...

Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday praised large families and called for countries to approve legislation and other incentives to help them. "Without children there is no future," Benedict said.The pope addressed his remarks to Italian pilgrims present at his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, including more than 2,000 members of the Italian Numerous Families Association."It is my hope that further adequate social and legislative interventions be promoted to protect and support the more numerous families, which constitute a richness and a hope for the entire nation," the pope said.Recent European Union statistics put the average number of children...

Every once in a while, a case comes along that makes me truly grateful to be a Catholic. Our Holy Mother Church has been looking out for us and trying to keep us out of trouble, even when we chafe at her constraints. But when I see the trouble people get themselves into, I am grateful for our Holy Mother’s foresight. That is how I felt when I read the California Supreme Court’s ruling on the April 22 case, K.M v. E.G. Perhaps you don’t remember a case by that name, but surely you remember the headlines: “California Establishes Lesbian...

Last Updated: Thursday, 8 September 2005, 16:30 GMT 17:30 UK Embryo with two mothers approved Image of cloning The aim is to get healthy offspring free of inherited genetic disorders. UK scientists have won permission to create a human embryo that will have genetic material from two mothers. The Newcastle University team will transfer genetic material created when an egg and sperm fuse into another woman's egg. The groundbreaking work aims to prevent mothers from passing certain genetic diseases on to their unborn babies. Such diseases arise from DNA found outside the nucleus, and thus inherited separately from DNA in...

By Clive Cookson, Science Editor Published: August 31 2005 18:46 | Last updated: August 31 2005 18:46 The first detailed genetic comparison between humans and chimpanzees shows that 96 per cent of the DNA sequence is identical in the two species. But there are significant differences, particularly in genes relating to sexual reproduction, brain development, immunity and the sense of smell. An international scientific consortium publishes the genome of the chimpanzee, the animal most closely related to homo sapiens on Thursday in the journal Nature. It is the fourth mammal to have its full genome sequenced, after the mouse, rat...

JEFFERSON CITY - Some Republican legislators want to charge unwed fathers thousands of dollars for hospital birth costs incurred by low-income mothers on Medicaid. "But the last time I checked, it takes two people to make a baby. And there is some responsibility, not just for child support, but for the cost of bringing that child successfully into the world," said Shields, R-St. Joseph. Medicaid pays for 43 percent of the births in Missouri. At an average cost of $3,286 a birth, the tab hit $120.6 million last year. Nearly two-thirds of the moms on Medicaid are unmarried. Critics say...

MADRID, July 14, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Critics of the movement of the new Spanish government to liberalize the country might be forgiven for thinking that the real goal is to radically de-Catholicize the country. The list of initiatives taken by the Zapatero socialists could have been lifted straight from the Catholic Catechism’s list of the most popular modern sins. With over 80% of the country still claiming to belong to the Catholic Church, and with Spain’s recent history of anti-Catholic Marxist pogroms before the Franco regime, the impression becomes even stronger. Last month the world was awed by the millions...

NEW YORK, February 3, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - At the United Nations, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is pushing the government of Samoa to legalize abortion and force more women out of their traditional family roles and into work and political life. CEDAW issued a press release January 24, in which it complained that, despite having set up a Ministry for Women’s Affairs, the role of married women in Samoan society was too traditional and mostly oriented towards family life. It said not enough women run for political office, and that abortion is still illegal despite...

How do these people reproduce? Do they have the capacity for love? Why doesn't logic pertain to their philosophy?

SCIENTISTS last night claimed to have made a major breakthrough in overcoming opposition to stem cell research by creating human embryos which cannot develop into babies. The so-called "ethical" embryos have been created by using an enzyme dubbed the "spark of life" which tricks human eggs into believing they have been fertilised even without the presence of sperm. Stem cells from the embryos can turn into different kinds of tissue and scientists believe that with the right chemical cues they could produce replacement tissue for patients suffering degenerative brain illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease as well as heart damage. Dr...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Nov. 19 - With its sleek horizontal form hovering at the edge of the Arkansas River, the new William J. Clinton Presidential Center has been called by promoters a "bridge to the 21st century," a trite allusion to one of the former president's favorite themes. Locals snicker that it looks like an enormous double-wide trailer. Actually, its best elements fall somewhere between those two extremes. Designed by James Polshek and Richard Olcott of the New York-based firm Polshek Partnership, the library has moments of genuine architectural power. Its sleek cantilevered form thrusts out aggressively toward the river,...

A 32-year-old woman in Belgium has become the first woman ever to give birth after having ovarian tissue removed, frozen and then implanted back in her body, doctors are reporting. The patient had the tissue removed in 1997 in hopes of preserving her fertility because she had Hodgkin's lymphoma, a type of cancer, and was about to undergo chemotherapy with drugs likely to damage her ovaries and cause infertility. She and her doctors hoped that once she was cured, the ovarian tissue could be thawed and returned to her abdomen to produce eggs. The strategy apparently worked. The woman, Ouarda...

A state appellate court pondered the claims of two women to be mothers of the same children -- one donated the eggs, the other carried them to term, and both raised the twins together -- and decided the birth mother was the only intended legal parent. In a ruling made public Tuesday, the Court of Appeal panel in San Francisco applied principles from a decade-old surrogate-motherhood case and said the deciding factor was the couple's intent before birth. Despite acting as a co-parent for most of the children's lives, the egg donor had agreed, both orally and in writing, that...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version April 05, 2004, 8:33 a.m. The Doctor Is InThe head of the president&#8217;s bioethics commission on assisted reproduction, cloning, council critics & more. Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez On Thursday, the President's Council on Bioethics issued a its latest report, "Reproduction and Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies." Dr. Leon Kass, head of the commission — who is a medical doctor, a professor on leave from the University of Chicago, and currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of books including Life,...

Twenty-five years after the birth of the first test-tube baby, an advisory panel to President Bush is leading an effort to increase government scrutiny of the hugely popular and minimally regulated branch of medicine known as assisted reproduction. The 18-member panel, the President's Council on Bioethics, plans to release a report on Thursday that recommends regulations that affect the research and practice of in vitro fertilization, according to several people familiar with the final version. Surprisingly, the report includes recommendations for legislation to govern embryo research that could, if adopted, break the impasse over human cloning and stem cell research,...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. As the world's reserves of oil and gas run out over the coming decades, the birth-rates of societies are likely to fall considerably, a US scientist says. According to some estimates, the global population may rise from its current 6.3 billion today to almost 9bn by 2050. But Virginia Abernethy told a Seattle meeting that the loss of fossil fuels would hit world economies very hard. "Economic hardship discourages people from marrying young and from having closely spaced children," she said. The anthropologist and professor emerita of psychiatry from Vanderbilt University...

LONDON (AFP) - Male sperm counts have fallen by almost a third since 1989, with factors such as drinking and obesity possibly to blame, according to a British study. A survey of 7,500 men who attended the Aberdeen Fertility Centre in northern Scotland between 1989 and 2002 brought alarming findings, researchers said Monday. Analysis of sperm samples showed that in men with what is considered a "normal" concentration of sperm -- defined as over 20 million sperm per millilitre of semen -- the average sperm count fell by 29 percent. This "must cause some concern and needs to be explained",...

LifeSite Daily News Thursday December 18, 2003 Over 200,000 U.S. Embryonic Children Killed in IVF Attempts in 2002 WASHINGTON, December 18, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has released the seventh annual assisted reproductive technology (ART) report detailing the 2002 success rates for 384 fertility clinics around the country. A LifeSiteNews.com analysis of the figures reveals that over 220,000 human embryos created through the process died and only 40,687 survived to birth. The report did not detail how many embryos died without being transferred into their mothers' wombs, nor did it detail the number of embryos...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Male sex really is important to the survival of the species - at least for the nematode, a lowly worm that can reproduce without masculine help but adapts better if males get into the act. In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, researchers say they have found that nematodes resulting from the union of a male and female worm are able to switch gender in response to changes in the environment. But worms born through a parent's self-fertilization are unable to make this gender change. This, said Elizabeth B. Goodwin, a University of Wisconsin researcher,...

An attempt to cure infertility by creating babies with three genetic parents was halted when twins died in the womb, it emerged yesterday. The experiment, in which researchers combined elements from two newly-conceived eggs to create a single viable embryo, was designed to help women whose eggs are not good enough to reactivate a pregnancy. But while two of the "reconstructed" embryos developed into foetuses in the womb, one died at 24 weeks and the other at 29 weeks. American researchers who handed the work over to colleagues in China, after the experiment was effectively banned in the United States,...

Scientists have created the first pregnancy that would have produced babies with three genetic parents. But after triplets formed in a woman's womb, one foetus was aborted and two later miscarried. Now work on the process, called human nuclear transfer, has been called off after the authorities realised how close scientists in China were to achieving the birth of a three-parent child. Experts at the Sun Yat-Sen university of medical science in Guangzhou treated a 34-year-old woman who had undergone two IVF cycles, which had failed because of problems with her eggs. A donor egg was taken and all genetic...

An international group of scientists is calling for a world ban on human reproductive cloning, saying it poses a health threat to both the cloned child and the mother. Experience of cloned animals has shown that, in the rare cases when the foetus progresses to term, it is frequently oversized - posing a risk to the mother during birth - and post-natal death is common. The Royal Society, Britain's leading academic institution, backed the call by more than 60 other national science academies, including those of the US, China and France, ahead of a UN debate on 29 September. Lord...

Pregnancy and childbirth make woman's body stronger Scientists determined that delivery of 3-4 children has favorable effect upon woman's health, and not only health. Correspondent of Zhenskoye Zdorovye (Woman's Health) discussed the issue with director of the Moscow medical center for marriage and family problems, Mikhail Berkenheim -Many families now have only one child, or maximum two. Some women won't give birth to babies at all. Are woman's health and her genital functions interrelated? If we speak about the medical aspect, it is harmful for woman's health to have no children. Indeed, if a woman doesn't give birth to babies...

In a rite of spring nearly as old as the Nebraska sandhills, greater prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse gather before dawn on their respective dancing grounds at Valentine National Wildlife Refuge in the north-central part of the state. While females watch, the males lower their heads, raise their tails, spread their wings, inflate colorful air sacs on their necks and stamp their feet while making hollow cooing or moaning sounds. The basic purpose of this elaborate display is to attract a mate. Indeed, the dancing ground, or lek, is the avian equivalent of a singles bar, said Dr. Robert Gibson,...

Five law lords rejected the final appeal yesterday by the Pro-Life Alliance against the law that allows experiments with cloned human embryos. The alliance successfully argued in the high court in 2001 that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, which regulates research on embryos, did not cover cloned embryos produced by cell nuclear replacement (CNR), the technique used to produce Dolly the sheep. The ruling, which would have left human cloning totally unregulated, forced the government to rush through legislation banning the use of cloning to produce a baby. It also threatened to wreck the use of early-stage cloned...

Washington News Physician criticized by women's groups named to FDA panel The Associated Press12/25/02 7:09 PM WASHINGTON (AP) -- A physician who has been criticized for his views on birth control was named to a Food and Drug Administration panel on women's health policy. Dr. W. David Hager, a University of Kentucky obstetrician-gynecologist, was among 11 physicians appointed Tuesday to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. Hager has questioned the safety of the abortion pill, RU-486, and acknowledges he is anti-abortion. Abortion-rights activists are concerned about Hager's appointment because he participated in a Christian Medical Association campaign this...