A Less Brutal Alternative to IVF
By Kristen V. Brown,
The Atlantic
| 01. 27. 2025
After my 20th shot of hormones, I texted my boyfriend, only half kidding, “I’m dying.” We had decided to freeze embryos, but after more than a week of drugs that made me feel like an overinflated balloon and forced me to take several secret naps a day, I no longer cared whether we froze anything. I was not doing this again. In order to maximize the number of eggs that can be harvested from the human body, most women who undergo an egg retrieval spend two weeks, give or take, injecting themselves at home with a cocktail of drugs. The medications send the reproductive system into overdrive, encouraging the maximum number of egg-containing follicles to grow and mature at once. They can also cause itchiness, nausea, fatigue, sadness, headaches, moodiness, and severe bloating as your ovaries swell to the size of juicy lemons. Some people experience ovarian hyperstimulation, which can lead in rare cases to hospitalization. Studies have found the stress of fertility treatment to be a primary reason people stop pursuing it, even if they have insurance coverage...
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By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...