reproduction

The Texas ruling also conflicted with one made the same day by a judge in Washington state, directing US authorities to preserve mifepristone access in 17 states and the District of Columbia.Meanwhile, new suits have been filed in an effort to maintain mifepristone access, including a pair of unrelated suits challenging state restrictions in North Carolina and West Virginia. GenBioPro, the primary US manufacturer of generic mifepristone, is the plaintiff in the West Virginia suit, and is also suing the FDA, arguing that…

Are pregnancy and childbirth the most or least natural things we do? At the heart of Louisa Hall’s brainily visceral new novel is a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a book whose uncanny energy is forged in the crucible of reproduction. Pregnant, nauseous, fearful of miscarriage, Hall’s narrator fails in her attempt to write a novel about Shelley, in part because her insights about Shelley’s masterpiece have become too turbulent and revelatory. “How could she,” the narrator asks, “a creature who never had a…

Shira Fishbach, a newly graduated physician, was sitting in an orientation session for her first year of medical residency when her phone started blowing up. It was June 24, 2022, and the US Supreme Court had just handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, nullifying the national right to abortion and turning control back to state governments.Fishbach was in Michigan, where an abortion ban enacted in 1931 instantly came into effect. That law made administering an abortion a felony punishable…

Menopause may be entering public consciousness (although, bewilderingly, it’s not a mandatory part of the curriculum in 41 percent of UK university medical schools), but many other areas of women’s health suffer from an information gap for both clinicians and patients. According to the Women’s Health Strategy findings, only 8 percent of respondents felt that they had access to enough information on gynecological conditions such as endometriosis and fibroids. And moving away from conditions and toward basic anatomical…

By the time someone has symptoms of ovarian cancer, it is usually in an advanced state. Treatment is extraordinarily difficult, and, sadly, most people will die. One in 78 women will develop ovarian cancer, and more than 230,000 women in the U.S. are currently affected. Of these, approximately 80 percent have no family history of ovarian cancer and no indication that they were at risk for developing it. In addition to the lack of early symptoms, late stage diagnosis occurs because there is no effective way to screen for…

If they found a mutation in around 50 percent of an offspring’s DNA, they concluded that it was likely a germline mutation—one inherited through either the mother’s egg or the father’s sperm. Natural selection can act directly on such a mutation. Less frequent mutations were deemed to have happened spontaneously in tissues outside the germline; they were less relevant to evolution because they wouldn’t get passed on.(Surprisingly often, mismatches in the family trios told the researchers that the fathers listed by the…

The ovary is a time machine. It travels to the future, reaching old age ahead of the rest of the body. At birth, each ovary contains around a million follicles—tiny, fluid-filled sacs that hold immature eggs. But the decline of these follicles is immediate and unceasing. By puberty, only about 300,000 remain. By age 40, the vast majority are gone. And by 51, the average age of menopause in the United States, virtually none are left. Humans are an oddity in this regard. Most mammals remain fertile up to the end of their…

After conflicting legal rulings triggered widespread uncertainty about the future of abortion pill access in the United States, both US-based telehealth providers and overseas pill-by-mail sellers want to make one thing clear: They’re here to stay.Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, virtual abortion clinics have taken a more prominent role in reproductive healthcare. Before that decision, virtual abortion clinics accounted for 4 percent of abortions in the US; after the decision, the number rose to 11 percent,…

In a statement, Jim Stansel, executive vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, called the FDA the “gold standard for determining whether a medicine is safe and effective” and said the group has “serious concerns with any court substituting its opinion for the FDA’s expert approval decision-making.” Marcus Schabacker, president and CEO of ECRI, a global independent nonprofit organization that advances evidence-based medicine, worries about the effect the rulings could have on…

Rivron’s laboratory was the first to create these embryo-like structures in 2018. His team showed that mouse stem cells can self-organize into structures that resemble a blastocyst, which forms five or six days after sperm fertilizes an egg. They dubbed the balls of cells “blastoids.” Then in 2021, several labs showed they could create human blastoids using stem cells. And last year, researchers at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology reported that they created mouse structures mimicking…