#Fertility clinics

[phoenixyfriend]

Big news of the morning, which I first heard on NPR's Up First (2/21/24), but here's a text version from APNews:

The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law, a decision critics said could have sweeping implications for fertility treatment in the state.

Alabama already outlaws abortion at any point in the pregnancy with no exceptions save for life of the mother, but this goes a step further, and introduces the term "extrauterine children."

Ironically, this came from a lawsuit about destroyed embryos at a fertility clinic, but rather than just ensuring the prospective parents can sue for wrongful death that the embryos were killed (someone broke in, the clinic was not at fault), this law may actually result in mass closures of fertility clinics across Alabama.

Current standards for IVF involve harvesting as many eggs at once as possible, and fertilizing them all to raise the chances of implantation with successive rounds of IVF (in case it doesn't take the first time), and then remaining embryos are frozen for if/when the couple wants their next child, and once the couple decides they're done, the embryos are destroyed to free up space for more clients. The new ruling would force them to keep embryos frozen forever, or be sued for wrongful death, which they can't afford, so many are saying they may close their doors instead.

[audubonfertility]

Looking for a trusted fertility clinic in Alabama? Audubon Fertility provides personalized fertility care, offering advanced treatments such as IVF, IUI, and egg freezing. Our dedicated team of specialists is committed to supporting your journey to parenthood with cutting-edge technology and compassionate care. Visit our Alabama clinic for comprehensive fertility services tailored to your unique needs. Schedule your consultation with our experts today!

[illumefertility-blog]

At Illume Fertility, we specialize in personalized fertility care. Our dedicated team is here to support you with advanced treatments and compassionate guidance on your path to family.

[bestivfcenters]

The Best IVF Centers and Fertility Clinics in Hyderabad

BestIVFCenters is dedicated to providing top-quality fertility treatment options for couples struggling with infertility. These centers understand the emotional and physical toll that infertility can take on individuals and offer a range of advanced techniques and procedures to help couples achieve their dream of starting a family. With a team of experienced and highly skilled fertility specialists, state-of-the-art facilities, and a patient-centric approach, these fertility centers in Hyderabad are considered among the best in the field.

[fertilityjourneyguide]

Male Infertility: Seeking Answers and Solutions at the Fertility Clinic

Male infertility can be a challenging and emotionally distressing issue for many couples trying to conceive. Fortunately, advancements in medical science have opened up new avenues for diagnosis and treatment. One of the crucial steps in addressing male infertility is seeking answers and solutions at a fertility clinic. In this comprehensive guide, we explore the role of fertility clinics in diagnosing and treating male infertility, with a focus on the Testicular Sperm Extraction (TESE) procedure.

Understanding Male Infertility

Before delving into the solutions offered by fertility clinics, it's essential to understand what male infertility entails. Male infertility refers to the inability of a man to impregnate his partner despite regular, unprotected sexual intercourse over an extended period. Infertility can result from various factors, including low sperm count, poor sperm motility, or structural issues in the reproductive system.

The Role of Fertility Clinics

Fertility clinics are specialized medical facilities staffed with experts in reproductive medicine. These clinics play a pivotal role in diagnosing and treating both male and female infertility issues. When it comes to male infertility, fertility clinics offer a range of diagnostic tests and therapeutic interventions.

Diagnostic Procedures at Fertility Clinics

Semen Analysis

The initial step in evaluating male infertility often involves a semen analysis. During this test, a sample of semen is collected and examined in the clinic's laboratory. Key parameters, such as sperm count, motility, and morphology, are assessed. Abnormalities in any of these factors can point to potential fertility issues.

Hormone Testing

Hormone imbalances can contribute to male infertility. Fertility clinics conduct blood tests to evaluate hormone levels, especially those related to testosterone and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH). These tests can identify hormonal irregularities that may be affecting fertility.

Testicular Sperm Extraction (TESE)

One of the advanced procedures offered by fertility clinics to address male infertility is Testicular Sperm Extraction (TESE). This procedure is typically recommended when other treatments have failed or when there is a blockage preventing sperm from reaching the ejaculate.

How TESE Works

TESE involves the extraction of sperm directly from the testicles. The procedure is performed under local anesthesia, and a small incision is made in the scrotum. A small piece of testicular tissue is removed, and sperm is isolated from this tissue for use in assisted reproductive techniques such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).

Candidates for TESE

TESE is often recommended for men with conditions such as obstructive azoospermia, where sperm is produced but cannot reach the ejaculate due to a blockage. It can also be an option for men with non-obstructive azoospermia, where the testicles don't produce enough sperm. Fertility specialists at the clinic will determine if TESE is the right solution for individual cases.

Success Rates and Considerations

The success of fertility treatments, including TESE, can vary depending on various factors, including the underlying cause of infertility, the age of the female partner, and overall health. Fertility clinics work closely with patients to provide personalized treatment plans and offer support throughout the process.

Conclusion

Male infertility is a complex issue, but with the expertise and advanced treatments available at fertility clinics, there is hope for couples seeking to overcome this challenge. From diagnostic tests to specialized procedures like TESE, fertility clinics play a vital role in helping couples achieve their dream of parenthood.

[rodspurethoughts]

Revolutionary PRP Fertility Treatment for Improved Ovarian and Uterine Health Offered by New Hope Fertility Center

New Hope Fertility Center is proud to offer innovative and effective fertility treatments to individuals and couples struggling with infertility. As part of their mission to help patients achieve their dreams of starting or growing their families, New Hope is utilizing platelet-rich plasma (PRP) fertility treatment. PRP therapy has shown promising results in improving fertility outcomes by…

[drshivanisachdevgoursciivf]

SCI IVF Hospital is the Delhi's leading infertility treatment centre and has a target to help infertility peoples to get his/ her own child.

Unlock your doors of parenthood. Talk to an IVF Specialist! S 21, Greater Kailash Part 1, New M-Block Market, New Delhi – 110048 ✉ sciivfhospitals@gmail.com 📲 011-41022905/7/9, + 91 9267937367

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A "secure" system can be the most dangerous of all

Two decades ago, my life changed forever: hearing Bruce Schneier explain that “security” doesn’t exist in the abstract. You can only be secure from some threat. A fire alarm won’t protect you from burglaries. A condom won’t protect you from mass shootings. It seems obvious, but how often do we hear about “security” without any mention of who is being made secure, and from which threat?

Take the US welfare system. It is very “secure” in that it is hedged in by a thicket of red-tape, audits, inspections and onerous procedures. To get food stamps, housing vouchers, or cash aid, you must navigate a Soviet-grade bureaucratic system of Kafkaesque proportions. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the USA has become a “Utopia Of Rules” (as David Graeber put it), subjecting everyday people to the state-run bureacracies that the USAUSAUSA set endlessly ridiculed the USSR for:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

(The right says it wants to “shrink the US government until fits in a bathtub — and then drown it” — but not the whole government. They want unlimited government bloat for that part of the state that is dedicated to tormenting benefits claimants, especially if its functions are managed by a Beltway Bandit profiteer who bills Uncle Sucker up the wazoo for rubber-stamping “DENIED” on every claim.)

The US benefits system has a sophisticated, expensive, fully staffed anti-fraud system — but it’s a highly selective form of anti-fraud. The system is oriented solely to prevent fraud against itself, with no thought to protecting benefits recipients themselves from fraud.

And those recipients — by definition the poorest and most vulnerable among us — are easy pickings for continuous, ghastly, eye-watering acts of fraud. These benefits are distributed via prepaid debit cards — EBT Cards — that lack the basic security measures that every other kind of card has had for years. These are simple magstripe cards, lacking basic chip-and-pin defenses, to say nothing of contactless countermeasures.

That means that fraudsters can — and do — install skimmers in the point-of-sale terminals used by benefits recipients to withdraw their cash benefits, pay for food using SNAP (AKA Food Stamps), and receive other benefits.

It’s impossible to overstate how widespread these skimmers are, and how much money criminals make by stealing from poor people. Writing for Businessweek, Jessica Fu describes the mad scramble benefits recipients go through every month, standing by ATMs at midnight on the night of the first of every month in hopes of withdrawing the cash they use to pay for their rent and utility bills before it is stolen by a crook who captured their card number with a skimmer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-06-28/ebt-theft-takes-millions-of-dollars-from-the-neediest-americans

One of Fu’s sources, Lexisnexis Risk Solutions’s Haywood Talcove, describes these EBT cards as having the security of a “glorified hotel room key.” He recounts how US police departments saw a massive explosion in EBT skimming: from 300 complaints in January 2022 to 18,000 in January 2023.

The skimmer rings are extremely well organized. The people who install the skimmers — working in pairs, with one person to distract the cashier while the other quickly installs the skimmer — don’t know who they work for. Neither do the people who use cards cloned from skimmer data to cash out benefits recipients’ accounts. When they are arrested, they refuse to turn on their immediate recruiters, fearing reprisals against their families.

These low-level crooks stroll up to ATMs and feed a succession of cloned cards into them, emptying account after account. Or they swipe cards at grocery checkouts, buying cases of Red Bull and other easily sold grocery products with some victim’s entire SNAP balance.

Some police agencies are pursuing these criminal gangs and trying figure out who’s running them, but the authorities who issue SNAP cards are doing little to nothing to stop the pipeline at their end. Simply upgrading SNAP terminals to chip-and-pin would exponentially raise the cost and complexity that thieves incur.

Indeed, that’s why every other kind of payment card uses these systems. How is it that these systems were upgraded, while SNAP cards remain in mired in 20th century “glorified hotel room key” territory? Well, as our friends on the right never cease to remind us: “incentives matter.”

When your credit card gets cloned, it’s your banks and credit card company that pays for the losses, not you. So the banks demanded (and funded) the upgrade to new anti-fraud measures. By contrast, most states have no system for refunding stolen benefits to skimmers’ victims.

In other words, all of the anti-fraud in the benefits system is devoted to catching benefits cheating — a phenomenon that is so rare as to be almost nonexistent (1.54%), notwithstanding right wingers’ fevered, Reagan-era folktales about “welfare queens”:

https://blog.gitnux.com/food-stamp-fraud-statistics/

Meanwhile, the most widespread and costly form of fraud in the benefits system — fraud perpetrated against benefits recipients — is blithely ignored.

Really, it’s worse than that. In deciding to protect the welfare system rather than welfare recipients, we’ve made it vastly harder for benefits claimants who’ve been victimized by fraudsters to remain fed and sheltered. After all, if we made it simple and straightforward for benefits recipients to re-claim money that was stolen from them, we’d make it that much easier to defraud the system.

“Security” is always and forever a matter of securing some specific thing, against some specific risk. In other words, security reflects values — it reveals whose risk matters, and whose doesn’t. For the American benefits system, risks to the system matter. Risks to people don’t.

It’s not just the welfare system that prioritizes its own risks against the people it exists to serve. Think of the systems used to fight drug abuse in clinical settings.

Medical facilities that use or dispense powerful pain-killers have exquisitely tuned, sophisticated, frequently audited security systems to prevent patients from tricking their doctors or pharmacists into administering extra drugs (especially opioids). “Extra” in this case means “more drugs than are strictly necessary to manage pain.”

The rationale for this is only incidentally medical. Someone who gets a little too much painkiller during a medical procedure or an acute pain episode is not at any particular risk of enduring harm — the risks are minor and easily managed (say, by keeping a patient in bed a little longer while they recover from sedation).

The real agenda here is preventing addiction and abuse by addicted people. There’s a genuine problem with opioid abuse, and that problem does have its origins in overprescription. But — crucially — that overprescription wasn’t the result of wimpy patients insisting on endless painkillers until they enslaved themselves to their pills.

Rather, the opioid epidemic has its origins in the billionaire Sackler crime family, whose Purdue Pharma used scientific fraud, cash incentives, and other deceptive practices to trick, coerce, or bribe doctors into systematically overprescribing their Oxycontin cash cow, even as they laundered their reputation with showy charitable donations:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

The Sacklers got to keep their billions — and people undergoing painful medical procedures or living with chronic pain are left holding the bag, subject to tight pain-med controls that forces them to prove — through increasingly stringent systems — that they truly deserve their medicine.

In other words, the beneficiary of the opioid control system is the system itself — not the patients who need opioids.

There’s an extremely disturbing — even nightmarish — example of this in the news: the Yale Fertility Clinic, where hundreds of women endured unimaginably painful egg harvesting procedures with no anaesthesia at all.

These women had complained for years about the pain they suffered, and many had ended up needing emergency care after the fact because of traumatic injuries caused by undergoing the procedure without pain control. But the doctors and nurses at the Yale clinic ignored their screams of pain and their post-operative complaints.

It turned out that an opioid-addicted nurse had been swapping the fentanyl in the drug cabinet for saline, and taking the fentanyl home for her own use.

This made national headlines at the time, and it is the subject of “The Retrievals,” a new New York Times documentary series podcast:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html

If the pain medication management system was designed to manage pain, then these thefts would have been discovered early on. If the system was designed so that anyone who experienced pain was treated until the pain was under control, the deception would have been uncovered almost immediately.

As Stafford Beer said, “the purpose of any system is what it does.” The pain medication management system was designed to manage pain medication, not pain itself.

The system was designed to be secure from opioid-seeking addicted patients. It was not designed to make patients secure from pain. Its values — our values, as a society — were revealed through its workings.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/13/whose-security/#for-me-not-thee

[Image ID: A down-the-barrel view of a massive, battleship-gray artillery piece protruding from the brick battlement of a fortress. From the black depths of the barrel shines a red neon 'EBT' sign.]

Image: Bjarne Henning Kvaale (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oscarsborg_28cm_Krupp_cannon_4_-_panoramio.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[awesomefringey]

what's the Sono from a fertility clinic? what happened?

Brianna posted a pic of her sono/ultrasound when pregnant with Freddie that turned out to be from a fertility clinic. It exclusively deals with parents who struggle with pregnancy and provides fertility and surrogacy programs. Their clients are literally on the opposite side of “I’m so fertile I got accidentally pregnant in a one night stand” if you know what I mean.

The printout had a few more flaws. See a post about it here.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alex Bollinger at LGBTQ Nation:

A Democratic super PAC is targeting Republicans over potential IVF restrictions, which started earlier this year when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that state laws protecting “unborn children” also apply to those “located outside of a biological uterus.” IVF (in vitro fertilization) is a process where several fertilized embryos are created outside the uterus and then implanted in order to help a person get pregnant. The process uses multiple embryos to increase the chances of resulting in a pregnancy, and extra embryos can be frozen and sometimes destroyed. Many same-sex couples use the procedure to help build their families.

Some conservatives oppose IVF because of the destruction of embryos, and the Alabama Supreme Court cited the Bible in its ruling, which resulted in several clinics in the state stopping their IVF procedures. The Progress Action Fund launched a new ad called “Republicans Stealing Your Baby” last week, which shows a straight white couple with a baby who they refer to as their “IVF miracle.” Then, an old white Republican lawmaker appears and takes the baby away. “Sorry, she’s not yours anymore,” he says. “I’m your Republican congressman. We made IVF illegal, and we’re not letting you criminals raise her.”  “You can’t do this, she’s our baby!” the mother says. “I won the last election, so it’s my decision,” the Republican responds. “If you want a baby, you have to make one the old-fashioned way, and I’ll be watching.”

This ad from Democratic-affiliated Super PAC Progress Action Fund targeting the GOP’s war on IVF is so spot-on.

Video:

[sylvanas-girlkisser]

Anyone remember how in Mass Effect 2 it's revealed that Miranda hooks up with random men from dating apps, with the explicit purpose of getting pregnant and never seeing them again?

The Doylist explanation for this is obviously that this is Mass Effect and the writers either didn't know, or didn't think about artificial insermination. Like Miri babe, you can entirely skip paying for tinder gold and just use your exorbitant salary as an unethical scientist/assassin working for the proud boys, to have a licensed professional get you pregnant in the sort of strictly business relationship you're looking for.

However, for a Watsonian explanation, I think it's much more funny to imagine Miranda just has a huge breeding kink she refuses to acknowledge as such; and the reason you never see her drink is because she knows she will start rambling about how every woman secretly desires to spend her whole life pregnant and make everyone uncomfortable.

[audubonfertility]

Looking for a trusted fertility clinic in Mississippi? Audubon Fertility provides personalized care to help you on your journey to parenthood. Our expert team offers advanced fertility treatments, including IVF, IUI, egg freezing, and more, with a compassionate approach to reproductive health. Visit our Mississippi location for comprehensive fertility services tailored to your unique needs.

[slowandsweet]

A century after Virginia Woolf made her epochal case for the importance of having a room of one’s own in which to create — that womb of “fertile solitude from which works of art are born — Australian cartoonist, poet, and philosopher Michael Leunig offers a singsong echo of Woolf’s timeless insistence. Maria Popova

[bestivfcenters]

Best Fertility Clinics In Bangalore — Best IVF Centers

In recent years, the demand for infertility treatments has led to a proliferation of IVF (in vitro fertilization) centers across the globe. Among the many factors that contribute to an IVF center’s success, a combination of medical expertise, state-of-the-art facilities, patient-centric care, and ethical practices play a pivotal role. The Best IVF Centers: One of the best fertility clinics in Bangalore has risen to become one of the top choices in India.

[folktaylor]

you know i knew in an abstract sense how difficult trying for a baby would be because you know, cis lesbian couple but there was definitely a part of me that was like PFT nah, it’ll be way easier for us. but you truly cannot plan for all the curveballs this process will throw at you. it’s so grueling and there’s so many raw emotions that come up. like we’re both fairly uncomplicated with no evidence of fertility issues but it’s all of the outside factors that impact and prolong the process and it’s so exhausting.

[dailybehbeh]

Behbeh