Free Republic

Hervana’s hormone-free tablets, now under development, won’t disrupt a woman’s cycle and also offer protection from sexually transmitted diseases. Rachel Teitelbaum is pursuing a dream. A dream that could revolutionize contraception and improve the lives of countless women. She’s found that by sending the right signal to lactobacilli — a type of bacteria naturally present in the female reproductive tract — she can prompt it to produce an antibody that stops sperm dead in their tracks. She and her small team of researchers in Israel are developing a non-hormonal once-a-month tablet that will be as effective as the Pill, but...

The Population Council, the eugenics organization credited with bringing the abortion pill (RU-486) to the United States, turns 65 this month — but it is nothing to celebrate. In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council and served as the organization’s first president. According to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council, Inc., was incorporated following Rockefeller’s Conference on Population Problems, “…to stimulate, encourage, promote, conduct and support significant activities in the broad field of population.” Like its founder, the Population Council’s other members were concerned about population issues — and, like other population organizations such as Planned Parenthood,...

Yesterday, we started to see a new push by Democrats to claim that Republicans are trying to take away your right to birth control! The bastards will not stop until you ‘uterus havers’ ... ... (they don’t dare say women) ... ... are barefoot and pregnant and forced to stay in the kitchen, or something. And we don’t think we have to tell you this isn’t true. Most Republicans we know not only think non-abortifacient birth control should be legal, but they have personally used it. But Democrats are determined to bang that drum regardless of the facts: .@JoeBiden and...

Ever since the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, many states have been moving to enact restrictions on abortions with varying degrees of success. In nearly though not all of these states, exceptions are made for a variety of reasons dealing with cases of rape or incest, risks to the life of the mother, or fetal abnormalities making a fruitful pregnancy unlikely. The rest of the abortions that take place without falling into any of those categories are frequently described as procedures being used as a form of birth control. With these new restrictions coming online,...

The United Nations said Tuesday it suspended food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah due to lack of supplies and insecurity. It also said no aid trucks entered in the past two days via a floating pier set up by the U.S. for sea deliveries. The U.N. has not specified how many people have stayed in Rafah since the Israeli military began its intensified assault there two weeks ago, but apparently several hundred thousand people remain. The World Food Program said it was also running out of food for central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing...

And the Fertility Rates by State largely corresponds to the voting divide in the 2020 pres. election: Fertility Rates by State: Presidential Results 34 posted on 4/29/2024, 9:39:18 PM by daniel1212 (Turn 2 the Lord Jesus who saves damned+destitute sinners on His acct, believe, b baptized+follow HIM)

The market for oral contraception is being turned upside-down as Perrigo has begun shipping Opill to thousands of retail stores nationwide, to be sold as the first over-the-counter birth control pill in the U.S. The FDA approved Opill July 2023 as an OTC birth control option. Perrigo did not publicly release sales projections for the product, and The Motley Fool reported last July that the company is “quite unlikely” to generate $110 million per quarter—the value needed to “make a significant dent” in overall company revenues. The current U.S. prescription birth control pill market is likely worth about $3 billion...

The Washington Post has been hemorrhaging subscribers and web traffic for years. Late last year, the paper conducted yet another round of layoffs, impacting hundreds of employees. Jeff Bezos purchased the paper for $250 million a decade ago, and last year alone, it managed to lose roughly $100 million. This is not a profitable venture, and in normal circumstances, businesses that lose this much money don’t stay around very long. But the Washington Post has stuck around. Jeff Bezos has kept it on life support to fulfill a specific mission, which is to harangue and censor independent voices on behalf...

Opill, the first oral contraceptive approved for over-the-counter use in the United States, will be available in stores and online this month, with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $19.99 for a one-month supply and $49.99 for a three-month supply, according to Perrigo, the company behind the product. Perrigo announced Monday that Opill has shipped to major retailers and pharmacies and will be available to pre-order from select retailers beginning this week. Once the product hits shelves, anyone can buy it without a prescription. It will also be available at Opill.com. Opill works as a “mini-pill,” using only the hormone...

A three-judge panel in New Orleans ruled that a Texas law requiring minors to obtain parental consent to obtain birth control does not conflict with the goals of the federally-funded Title X program, which has given teens birth control confidentially. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas law requiring parental consent to obtain contraception for minors. The decision from a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in New Orleans largely affirms a 2022 ruling from U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, that ended one of the only avenues for Texas teens to confidentially obtain birth control,...

Immunity is modulated by sex hormones and thus has an important role in the sex bias commonly seen in autoimmunity. Hormonal contraceptives are widely used by women, different studies show an association between their use and an increased risk of developing several autoimmune diseases. The incidence and prevalence of autoimmune disorders are higher in women than in men. Approximately 78% of patients suffering from these pathological conditions are women. It is known that hormones modulate the immune system. As an example, cortisol controls the immune response via the circadian rhythm, regulating T cell-mediated inflammation. …Studies conducted in the past century...

Hillary Clinton is warning about the legality of birth control in the wake of a decision by the Alabama Supreme Court that found frozen embryos created through fertility treatments are children under state law. “They came for abortion first. Now it’s [in vitro fertilization], and next it’ll be birth control,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and secretary of State said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “The extreme right won’t stop trying to exert government control over our most sacred personal decisions until we codify reproductive freedom as a human right,” Clinton added.

When you think about the common procedure of getting a contraceptive implant, it’s not often associated with open-heart surgery, but for one young Victorian woman, this is an uncomfortable reality. Cloe Westerway, aged 22, underwent a standard routine procedure to have an Implanon inserted two years ago in a women’s health clinic, but in the following days, things started to take a turn. Cloe began experiencing heart palpitations, excessive sweating and heartburn symptoms and immediately knew something wasn’t quite right. When the doctors tried to remove the implant, there was one problem: they couldn’t find it, with subsequent scans revealing...

The Dominican Republic had already begun building a wall at its border with Haiti. Then it cracked down on immigration, deporting tens of thousands of Haitians back to their impoverished and gang-ravaged country.Now it’s closing the border entirely. President Luis Abinader announced the Dominican Republic will shut all of its land, air and sea frontiers with Haiti starting Friday morning, amid a festering dispute over Haiti’s plans to construct a canal off a river that separates the two countries. The announcement Thursday afternoon significantly escalates tensions between the two nations, which share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and a long...

Do we know if estrogen in the water supply is a significant problem? What are its major sources? How does this relate to morality and politics? Some research:► The next abortion fight could be over wastewater regulation Abortion opponents plan to use environmental laws to curb access to pills used to terminate an early pregnancy. The new approach comes as the pills mifepristone and misoprostol, which people can take at home during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, have become the most common method of abortion in the U.S. and virtually the only option for millions of people in states...

For half a century, Gursaran Pran Talwar has been developing what he hopes will be the next big thing in birth control. A nonagenarian who was once the director of India’s National Institute of Immunology, Talwar envisions bringing to market a new form of contraception that could block pregnancy without the usual trade-offs—an intervention that’s long-acting but reversible; cheap, discreet, and easy to administer; less invasive than an intrauterine device and more convenient than a daily pill. It would skip messy, sometimes dangerous side effects, such as weight gain, mood swings, and rare but risky blood clots and strokes. It...

When the War of 1812 broke out, the Town of Billerica, Mass., was in the middle of an extraordinary baby boom. Twelve other families in the town had 13 children. Five had 14 offspring and one had 15. Twenty-six families each had 10 children, 20 families had 11 children and 24 families had 12 children. The largest family had 21 children by two wives. That meant 90 families accounted for 1,043 children. The average Billerica family had an average of 11.6 children per family. The town’s population grew almost exclusively because of its fecundity. In 1810, the population of the...

Ladies, if you’re striking out on bad dates your birth control could be to blame. A podcast host is claiming the pill can change to whom you’re attracted — so maybe you don’t have bad taste after all. In a viral TikTok, Elisha Covey from Dallas suggested that birth control mimics pregnancy in a woman’s body — and, to some degree, it does. The pill prevents ovulation from occurring and changes the cervical mucus, with some help from hormones, to make it harder to become pregnant. “If you are on the pill, obviously not pregnant, you’re attracted to different men...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., decided to reveal some "uncomfortable" personal information during a House Oversight Committee hearing about abortion, specifically regarding her personal method of birth control. Before going into a question about treatment of ectopic pregnancies, the New York Democrat noted that such circumstances can arise from the failure of an intrauterine device, or IUD. Ocasio-Cortez also decided to announce that she uses one herself, blaming Republicans for the nature of the abortion debate. "I, for example, since Republicans are forcing this conversation in uncomfortable ways, then I will meet them to it," Ocasio-Cortez said. "I have an IUD....

Dr. Hill told BuzzFeed that birth control pills can affect so much more than our ability to become pregnant: "The birth control pill changes women’s sex hormones, which means that its effects go far beyond contraception. There are hormone receptors on virtually all cells in the body – including all major structures in the brain. Because of this, hormonal birth control can have an impact on nearly every aspect of who a woman is." To date, research finds that hormonal birth control can influence all kinds of things, such as "a woman’s mate preferences" and even "her relationship satisfaction." She...