Can a DIY fertility test help you plan when to have a baby?
By Zoë Corbyn,
The Guardian
| 01. 21. 2018
My sisters, aged 27 and 30, are seated at their computers poring over the slick websites of companies promising to reveal secrets to them about their fertility. “Get insight into how your fertility is tracking relative to your age,” promises one. “Get the tools you need to have more control over your fertility,” says a second. “Gauge how long you have left to conceive,” says a third. The tests, which look at the levels of one or more female hormones in the blood, style themselves as easy to order and are less than what one would pay in a fertility clinic. “The information seems relatively cheap and readily available, so why not find out?” says my older sister. “I just assumed I wouldn’t have any fertility issues,” says the younger. “I realise after looking at these websites I probably shouldn’t assume this.”
These companies are the latest outgrowth of the growing global market in fertility services. Fuelled by women delaying childbirth longer, it includes IVF and egg freezing and is expected to generate $21bn (£15.5bn) in revenue globally by 2020...
Related Articles
By Karin Hammarberg and Catherine Mills, BioNews | 10.13.2025
The Australian fertility industry has been rocked by several recent cases of embryo and sperm mix-ups. With a lack of transparency about what clinics do to prevent such errors recurring, trust and confidence in the industry and how it is...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...
By Jessica Mouzo, El País | 10.03.2025
DNA is the molecule of life: this double-helix structure, present in every cell in the body and organized into fragments called genes, stores the instructions for making organisms function. It is a highly precise biological machine, but sometimes it breaks...
By Daniel Hildebrand, The Humanist | 10.01.2025
When most people hear the word eugenics, they think of dusty history textbooks and black-and-white photographs: forced sterilizations in the early 20th century, pseudoscientific charts measuring skulls, the language of “fitness” used to justify violence and exclusion. It feels like...