Postponing Motherhood Places Too Much Faith in Reproductive Science: Experts
By Sharon Kirkey, Postmedia News,
Montreal Gazette
| 11. 17. 2011
The growing numbers of women postponing motherhood are placing too much blind faith in science to help them conceive when they're ready to have a baby.
That's the warning being issued by this country's pregnancy specialists.
The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada — which has just issued new guidelines to doctors on "advanced reproductive age" and fertility — worries that women are overestimating the success rates of artificial procreation.
Short of using a younger woman's donated eggs, no assisted baby-making technology today can get around the reality that the supply and quality of a woman's eggs shrinks over time — and that by the time a woman reaches her early to mid-30s, each egg offers less chance of pregnancy and a higher risk of miscarriage.
More women over 40 are now seeking treatment for infertility — even though the failure rate for that age group is close to 90 per cent, fertility experts say.
"Fertility treatments aren't a sure-fire route to pregnancy — their rates of success are greatly influenced by age-related declines in fertility," Dr. Allison Case...
Related Articles
Several recent Biopolitical Times posts (1, 2, 3, 4) have called attention to the alarmingly rapid commercialization of “designer baby” technologies: polygenic embryo screening (especially its use to purportedly screen for traits like intelligence), in vitro gametogenesis (lab-made eggs and sperm), and heritable genome editing (also termed embryo editing or reproductive gene editing). Those three, together with artificial wombs, have been dubbed the “Gattaca stack” by Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency company...
Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, MacArthur Genius, liberationist, storyteller, writer, and friend of CGS, died on November 14. Alice shone a bright light on pervasive ableism in our society. She articulated how people with disabilities are limited not by an inability to do things but by systemic segregation and discrimination, the de-prioritization of accessibility, and the devaluation of their lives.
We at CGS learned so much from Alice about disability justice, which goes beyond rights...
By Lucy Tu, The Guardian | 11.05.2025
Beth Schafer lay in a hospital bed, bracing for the birth of her son. The first contractions rippled through her body before she felt remotely ready. She knew, with a mother’s pit-of-the-stomach intuition, that her baby was not ready either...
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...