They Say: Housework and Having Kids Don’t Mix

In our house, everyone helps out with chores.  For the most part, I do the cooking and my wife does the clean-up because that’s where our strengths lie, but we aren’t locked into those roles.  But the idea of “women’s work” is not new — there is a reason there is so much humor based on the idea of men not cleaning up after themselves or trying to get them to help out.  In our culture, housework is not seen as masculine.  Well, if you’ve had a hard time getting your partner to help out around the house, things just got a whole lot worse.
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New test Can Predict Fertility Decline

Unlike a lot of people who deal with infertility, I had a diagnosis and an expectation that things would go not so well long before I was remotely interested in having kids. I was diagnosed with PCOS at age 23 and my wonderful primary care doctor was fairly nonchalant about the fact that when I did want to get pregnant, a little Clomid would do the trick.

It didn’t. But at least I was able to tell my now-husband that getting pregnant might not be so easy once things started getting serious, so neither of us were especially surprised when things didn’t go so well. Many of my friends who also faced down infertility said they envied me that, that I was able to tell my partner long before we were formally committed and let him decide if he was up for the challenges we might face.

A new genetic test might give a new group of women that chance. Continue reading »

RIP Cookie, Hello Conceive Magazine

It’s been a bad year for print and parenting with Cookie’s demise this week and Wondertime earlier this year. If we breeders ever needed some good news, it was now.

So here it is: Just as Conde was pulling plugs, Bonnier Corp was actually shelling out cash this week - and for a parenting title to boot. Continue reading »

13’s Lucky for Woman Who Tried IVF Dozen Times

Who says thirteen’s an unlucky number? It was the luckiest of all for the first woman ever to give birth using a new egg-screening technique.

It was the British mom’s thirteenth attempt at in vitro fertilization (IVF), and after a dozen failed IVF cycles, doctors opted for comparative genomic hybridization (CGH). Continue reading »

Mother Pleads with Authorities to Stop Her “Dangerous” Daughter from Having Babies

Kate Elizabeth Hutchinson, a 36-year-old psychiatric ward patient, recently gave birth to her 6^th or 7^th child (no one knows for sure). This after birthing all her former children with different fathers, having all stripped from her care and one, according to police, possibly murdered. Two of the woman’s children were born with autism and another died of muscular dystrophy four years ago.

Now her mother, Helen, is begging authorities to step in.

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The Top 10 Weirdest Things Said to Pregnant Women

5. This old lady at Target looked at me and shook her head. She said, “You young girls need to see there are other things to do in the winter, and you won’t end up in your situation.” I told her I was in my mid 20s and had been married for 3 years and that my “situation” was actually a blessing!

It’s nice when geriatric strangers walk up to you and call you a harlot.

Recently iVillage asked readers to respond to the question, “What’s the weirdest, rudest or most oblivious thing anyone has said to you while you were pregnant?” The top answers ranged from baffling, to TMI to creepy. Continue reading »

When “Where You Came From” Has an Extra Layer

The “where did I come from” question is one most parents sweat about. Explaining their origins to your children is one of those major “don’t screw this up” parenting moments, because if you get it wrong at worst you damage their self-esteem and at best? You’re getting mocked every time they reminisce about their childhoods with their friends as an adult.
It’s even more fraught for parents who have had some sort of help to bring their children into the world. This NYT article talks about how parents whose children were carried by surrogates address that issue with their kids. Continue reading »

Daily Sex Really Could Make a Baby

Proving once again that there’s never too much of a good thing, scientists have given the go-ahead to have as much sex as you want. Even if you’re not planning a baby right now, word has it daily sex (yes, we said daily) is good for sperm motility. Continue reading »

NY OKs Paying Women for Eggs for Research

Here’s something that throws that whole “I want to donate my body to science” saying out the window. New York State has said OK to paying women for their eggs . . . at least when they’ll be used for research.

It’s got bioethicists in a tizzy, and I’m still weighing out how I feel about it myself. On the one hand, women are paid for their eggs when it’s an “egg donation” so another person (be it a gay man or another woman) can make a baby. And it takes “work,” to donate eggs . . . regardless of who is getting them in the end, women have to take fertility drugs for a period of time plus daily hormone injections and actually go through the harvesting procedure (including going under anesthesia, which not everyone is comfortable with).

Just check out what it takes to do the Lupron injection: Continue reading »

Knowing When to Stop Running in the Fertility Marathon

Tom Teicholz has written a really compelling, four-part series on male infertility over at yourtango.com. Actually, it’s not just about male infertility. The narrative starts out that way, but more than anything, his story is about traveling the twisting, seemingly endless road of trying to conceive a child, and all the ovulation tests, frustrations, sperm count assessments, crushing disappointments and acupuncture sessions that come with the ride.

We all know that it isn’t easy to get pregnant, but these sorts of stories about fertility-challenged couples often leave me gasping at how exceedingly, unjustly difficult it can be for deserving people to become parents. Two things in particular that leaped out at me as I was reading Teicholz’s piece: the amount of money (more than $200,000!) and time (six years!) that he and his wife Amy spent trying to have a baby. Which raises the question: how do you know when you’ve hit the wall in the fertility marathon and just need to quit?

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