Month: January 2022

Israeli same-sex couples, trans, single fathers approved for surrogacy

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Israeli same-sex couples, trans, single fathers approved for surrogacy

All Israeli Citizens – including single fathers, same-sex couples and transgender individuals – will be able to access surrogacy starting from January 11, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz announced Tuesday as he and Health Ministry Director-General Prof. Nachman Ash presented an update to the regulations implementing the Surrogacy Law.
 
“This is a historic day for the struggle of the LGBT community in Israel and for Israeli society as a whole,” Horowitz said. “We are putting an end to years of injustice and discrimination. The surrogacy equality revolution is underway.”
 
Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a surrogate mother bears a child for an individual or a couple unable to have children for various reasons. The woman can either become pregnant through artificial insemination of a man’s sperm (traditional surrogacy), or an embryo produced through in-vitro fertilization is implanted in her uterus, and therefore there is no genetic connection between the fetus and the surrogate mother. In Israel, only the latter form of surrogacy is allowed. Usually, the surrogate mother agrees to give up all parental rights.
The new rules allowing single fathers and same-sex couples to access surrogacy come following a decision on the topic by the High Court of Justice, which deemed the previous version of the law unconstitutional two years ago.
 
In July, the court ruled that it would fix the law itself after the government failed to do so by a set deadline and asked the court to act for this purpose.
 
The Jerusalem Post, January 4, 2022 By ROSSELLA TERCATIN
 
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The post Israeli same-sex couples, trans, single fathers approved for surrogacy appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

When They Warn of Rare Disorders, These Prenatal Tests (NIPT) Are Usually Wrong

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Some of the NIPT tests look for missing snippets of chromosomes. For every 15 times they correctly find a problem, they are wrong 85 times.

After a year of fertility treatments, Yael Geller was thrilled when she found out she was pregnant in November 2020. Following a normal ultrasound, she was confident enough to tell her 3-year-old son his “brother or sister” was in her belly.

NIPT

Noninvasive parental testing NIPT concept. Vector flat healthcare illustration. Genetic test. Baby in womb, blood vessel, dna spiral symbol. Design for healthcare, pharmacy, family planning

But a few weeks later, as she was driving her son home from school, her doctor’s office called. A prenatal blood test (NIPT) indicated her fetus might be missing part of a chromosome, which could lead to serious ailments and mental illness.

Sitting on the couch that evening with her husband, she cried as she explained they might be facing a decision on terminating the pregnancy. He sat quietly with the news. “How is this happening to me?” Ms. Geller, 32, recalled thinking.

The next day, doctors used a long, painful needle to retrieve a small piece of her placenta. It was tested and showed the initial result was wrong. She now has a 6-month-old, Emmanuel, who shows no signs of the condition he screened positive for.

Ms. Geller had been misled by a wondrous promise that Silicon Valley has made to expectant mothers: that a few vials of their blood, drawn in the first trimester, can allow companies to detect serious developmental problems in the DNA of the fetus with remarkable accuracy.

In just over a decade, the tests have gone from laboratory experiments to an industry that serves more than a third of the pregnant women in America, luring major companies like Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics into the business, alongside many start-ups.

The tests initially looked for Down syndrome and worked very well. But as manufacturers tried to outsell each other, they began offering additional screenings for increasingly rare conditions.

The grave predictions made by those newer tests are usually wrong, an examination by The New York Times has found.

January 2, 2022, www.nytimes.com, By Sarah Kliff and Aatish Bhatia

Click here to read the entire article.

The post When They Warn of Rare Disorders, These Prenatal Tests (NIPT) Are Usually Wrong appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families