It’s not just about a woman’s fertility, but it also offers clues to how your body works, and possible problems. A fun little movie that teaches women what natural family planning really is so they won’t dismiss it as “the rhythm method.” And good news for all the sceptics: The creator of this film is not religious and the word “abortion” never comes up. (h/t)

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IEf73_l7Yo#t=289]

A discussion of possible pitfalls in promoting long acting reversible contraceptives in the USA:

A recent experiment in St. Louis designed to “promote” LARCs targeted disproportionately African-American (50 percent) and poor (37 percent public assistance) women with the result that, while less than 10 percent of American women regularly choose LARCs for themselves, 75 percent of the St. Louis group used them.

The bigger philosophical question is what happens when infertility is the default, as contrasted with fertility.

Though from what I can see, the growing number of men who have had vasectomies have already achieved this culture of infertility. Friends my age on the online dating scene appear to but rarely encounter men who haven’t had one.

Three parent embryos was approved in the UK yesterday. This article explains what this is about:

But what has been proposed, and now approved by the House of Commons, is not a treatment at all.  The proposed technique ignores people who already have mitochondrial disease, spurning them in favor of creating new individuals who will (advocates hope) not carry the genetic mutations.  The proposal is to manufacture genetically-engineered babies.  Mitochondria are inherited from the mother, so the proposal calls for recombining parts from two different eggs to engineer a genetically new egg (or destroying and recombining parts from two different embryos, to assemble a genetically new embryo), theoretically with healthy mitochondrial DNA.

My cab driver this morning understood this sounds like a terrible idea. The question is, why didn’t the majority in the UK Parliament?

Amy Julia Becker makes a great point about finding out that her child had Down syndrome.

There is some false, yet underlying assumption that pregnant women have to go through genetic testing to know if their child has the disability.

But more importantly, that tiny bit of medical information, in essence tells us nothing.  Not only are the doctors  “ill-equipped to interpret test results and to offer a fair and balanced description of Down syndrome” but the fact itself does nothing to describe who these little people are.  The medical information does not describe these little girls and boys, who despite their disability, will have all kinds of interests, quaint personality traits, and precious moments.

Being a parent of a child with Downs is as joy-filled and full of surprises as any parenting experience would be.

Genetic testing merely puts parents on a search and destroy mission without ever allowing them to know who their child is.

In the hospital, we received a diagnostic portrait of our child. Some of it was spot on: she has tubes in her ears and wears glasses. She needed a heart procedure. She still sees therapists every week. And yet the diagnostic portrait, even though it included some accurate facts, never showed me anything true about our daughter. It never told me that she wouldn’t love dress up clothes or baby dolls but that she would love spelling words and playing Monopoly. It never told me that she would sneak the iPad under the covers—not to play games or watch videos—but to read Matilda. It never told me she would form a friendship with my 88-year old grandmother, and that together they would read and sing and look at pictures. It never told me how much of her life would be worth celebrating.

photo credit: Wondermonkey2k via photopin cc

This came out yesterday, just days before the celebration of Christmas.

Health Canada has set an internal deadline of mid-January to finally make a decision on the abortion pill, a drug that is already available in 60 countries but has been stuck in Canada’s drug-approval pipeline for more than three years.

Sadly this article does NOT accurately describe the routine consequences of the RU486 abortion pill, which for most women is a harrowing ordeal.

You can read an article that I wrote on the issue that explains the serious problems with this drug.  The number of deaths world-wide stand at about 22, but the adverse effects of RU486 are much more prevalent and often under-reported.

I will be writing on this issue again in the coming year.

For now, we will not allow any Grinches to steal the joy of Christmas, so a very Merry Christmas to you all!

photo credit: Sarah_Ackerman via photopin