Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/birth control

  • DXS Op-Ed: How birth control can save the world

    …over the last 50 years, reaching 7 the billion mark in March of this year.  This is an astounding statistic since it took until 1804 – around 50,000 years – to reach our first billion.  World Population: 1800 – 2100 (Wikimedia Commons) What makes these numbers really scary is the concept of carrying capacity, which is an ecological term used to describe the maximum number of individual members of a species that a certain habita…

    Authored by on May 2, 2012

  • Women know something you don’t

    Make no mistake about it. by Emily Willingham Three of my four grandparents were only children. Born early in the 20th century, in the period betwixt the great wars, coming of age in the Great Depression. Only children, in spite of having parents married for decades. Three of them. In all likelihood, their own parents, my great-grandparents–and I knew all of my great-grandmothers–consciously chose not to have more children because,…

    Authored by on March 26, 2013

  • Hormonal birth control explainer: a matter of health

    …ich exists to prepare an egg for fertilization and to make the uterine lining ready to receive a fertilized egg, should it arrive.  Fig. 1. Female reproductive anatomy. Credit: Jeanne Garbarino. In the theoretical 28-day cycle, fertilization (fusion of sperm and egg), if it occurs, will happen about 14 days in, timed with ovulation , or release of the egg from the ovary into the Fallopian tube or oviduct (see video–watch fo…

    Authored by on March 5, 2012

  • Miscarriage: When a beginning is not a beginning

    …ntaneous abortion. Except that some didn’t like the term spontaneous abortion and used intrauterine mortality (Wood, 1994). Or fetal loss. Fetal loss is probably the most common. There is also pregnancy loss (Holman and Wood, 2001). You can use that term, too. Oh, or a-conceptions (a for abortion), compared to l-conceptions (l for live birth) (Wood, 1994). A large number of these fetal losses are before or close to the time of implantation. For m…

    Authored by on September 5, 2012

  • Is there a season for births?

    …t of superstitious people might actively avoid the 13th of any month to escape giving their child an ‘unlucky’ number for a birthday. Does scheduling delivery really affect annual birth patterns? Actually, yes – the fact that 22% of labors are induced means selecting specific days for a birth, and those choices tend to be weekdays. In fact, there is a strong “weekday bias” in births that dates back to the 1930s, when the trend for hav…

    Authored by on February 18, 2013

  • HIV+ doesn’t mean you can’t have children

    …is gay. To their credit, both parents soon rose to the occasion. Angela and her spouse have a healthy toddler, and the grandparents love spending time with him. Angela’s story isn’t everyone’s story. The hubbub at the recent 20th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections was not on the “functional cure” of the baby born to a pregnant woman with HIV, but on why, in this day and age, the mother doesn’t seem to have received the recom…

    Authored by on March 11, 2013

  • Pregnancy 101: My placenta looked like meatloaf, but I wasn’t about to eat it.

    …of us are involved in policing the neighborhoods, some of us build structures, some of us communicate information, some of us deal with food, some of us get rid of waste, etc.  Every cell gets a job (it’s the only example of 100% employment rates!). Now back to the cells in the fertilized egg.  As they start to learn what their specific job will be, the cells within the sphere will start to organize themselves.  After about 5 days after fertil…

    Authored by on July 27, 2012

  • Friday Roundup: Jane Austen’s arsenic poisoning, breastfeeding and bones, dog bites that trigger pregnancy, and a cranky crab

    Jane Austen. Engraving via Wikimedia Commons, in the U.S. public domain. Curious about how climate has changed over the long term–the very, very long term? This video from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts it all into perspective: Jane Austen poisoned by arsenic ?  A mystery author claims that all signs point to arsenic poisoning as the cause of Jane Austen’s death. The rationales that treatments w…

    Authored by on November 18, 2011

  • The vaginal ecosystem.

    …g announcement says. “Preterm infants are at increased risk of life-long disability, poor health, and early death compared with infants born later in pregnancy.” Nearly one in eight children were born prematurely in the US in 2009 (12.18%). Beyond the emotional toll on families, preterm birth also imposes a serious financial cost. “A report by the Institute of Medicine estimated that the annual societal economic burden associated with preterm bir…

    Authored by on February 25, 2013

  • From spiders to breast cancer: Leslie Brunetta talks candidly about her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up

    …very giving. I live in Cambridge, MA, where I could actually make choices about where I wanted to be treated at each phase and know I’d get excellent, humane care and where none of the facilities I went to was more than about 20 minutes away. Some things that women might have some control over and that their families might help nudge them toward: Find doctors you trust. Ask a lot of questions and make sure you understand the answers. But do…

    Authored by on January 31, 2012

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