Hannah Brown, South Australian Health & Medical Research Institute and Louise Hull, University of Adelaide
If you’re one of the one in six Australian couples experiencing infertility, you’ve probably thought about IVF. Here’s a step by step breakdown of how it all works.
The ‘egg timer’ blood test reveals the quantity of eggs women have, not the quality, which declines with age. It’s also expensive and can give false low readings.
Forecasts of designer babies followed the announcement of the gene-edited twins, just as they have for any reproductive technology since 1978. This signals the public must learn more about genetics.
Endometriosis is cut or vaporised with an electric current or laser. It ranges from a simple, 20 minute operation to complex surgery involving important organs such as the bowel and bladder.
For women and men not ready to have children, there are new ways to preserve fertility. And experimental techniques offer hope for sick children whose treatments jeopardize future childbearing.
Conversations about reproduction should be a routine part of medical care for transgender people – but assumptions and non-inclusive language can act as barriers to informed consent.
The concept of three-parent babies defies what we learned in health class. But how and when is the third parent involved? At what stage? Jennifer Barfield gives us an update on the birds and the bees.
Some social groups are falling through the gaps of fertility data. Men, ethnic minorities and the LGBT community have explicitly been excluded from surveys.
Some patients might be offered IVF who don’t actually need it, and some might be offered repeated cycles of treatment, even when they aren’t likely to succeed.
A study in mice shows it is possible to delete extra chromosomes in a range of conditions that are associated with infertility, including Down’s syndrome.
Although the number of children conceived through in vitro fertilisation born with abnormalities remains extremely low, a recent study in Kenya shows that the risk of genetic disorders is higher.
As the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society urges the government to consider “compensation” for surrogacy, we need to talk about the implications of this rhetoric for women.
Professor - Emerging Technologies (Stem Cells) at The University of Melbourne and Group Leader - Stem Cell Ethics & Policy at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, The University of Melbourne