Author: PFLAGLI

The Fight for Fertility Equality

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Fertility Equality

A fertility equality movement has formed around the idea that one’s ability to build a family should not be determined by wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.

Fertility Equality – While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere. Because until early April, paying a surrogate to carry a pregnancy was illegal in New York state.hidden costs queer

The change to the law, which happened quietly in the midst of the state’s effort to contain the coronavirus, capped a decade-long legislative battle and has laid the groundwork for a broader movement in pursuit of what some activists have termed “fertility equality.”

Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.

“This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy. “True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers L.G.B.T.s face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles.”

The movement is led mostly by L.B.G.T.Q. people, but its potential to shift how fertility coverage is paid for could have an impact on straight couples who rely on surrogates too.

Mr. Poole-Dayan and others believe infertility should not be defined as a physical condition but a social one. They argue that people — gay, straight, single, married, male, female — are not infertile because their bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making.

Rather, their specific life circumstances, like being a man with a same-sex partner, have rendered them unable to conceive or carry a child to term without medical intervention. A category of “social infertility” would provide those biologically unable to form families with the legal and medical mechanisms to do so.

“We have this idea that infertility is about failing to become pregnant through intercourse, but this is a very hetero-centric viewpoint,” said Catherine Sakimura, the deputy director and family law director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “We must shift our thinking so that the need for assisted reproductive technologies is not a condition, but simply a fact.”

Fertility equality activists are asking, at a minimum, for insurance companies to cover reproductive procedures like sperm retrieval, egg donation and embryo creation for all prospective parents, including gay couples who use surrogates. Ideally, activists would also like to see insurance cover embryo transfers and surrogacy fees. This would include gay men who would transfer benefits directly to their surrogate.

NYTimes.com July 22, 2020 by David Kaufman

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Baby Was Infected With Covid-19 in Utero, Study Reports

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Covid-19 in utero

Researchers said the case strongly suggests that Covid-19 can be transmitted in utero. Both the mother and baby have recovered.

Researchers on Tuesday reported strong evidence that the Covid-19 can be transmitted from a pregnant woman to a fetus in utero.Covid-19 in utero

A baby born in a Paris hospital in March to a mother with Covid-19 tested positive for the virus and developed symptoms of inflammation in his brain, said Dr. Daniele De Luca, who led the research team and is chief of the division of pediatrics and neonatal critical care at Paris-Saclay University Hospitals. The baby, now more than 3 months old, recovered without treatment and is “very much improved, almost clinically normal,” Dr. De Luca said, adding that the mother, who needed oxygen during the delivery, is healthy.

Dr. De Luca said the virus appeared to have been transmitted through the placenta of the 23-year-old mother.

Since the pandemic began, there have been isolated cases of newborns who have tested positive for the coronavirus, but there has not been enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the infants became infected by the mother after they were born, experts said. A recently published case in Texas, of a newborn who tested positive for Covid-19 and had mild respiratory symptoms, provided more convincing evidence that transmission of the virus during pregnancy can occur.

In the Paris case, Dr. De Luca said, the team was able to test the placenta, amniotic fluid, cord blood, and the mother’s and baby’s blood.

The testing indicated that “the virus reaches the placenta and replicates there,” Dr. De Luca said. It can then be transmitted to a fetus, which “can get infected and have symptoms similar to adult Covid-19 patients.”

A study of the case was published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Dr. Yoel Sadovsky, executive director of Magee-Womens Research Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study, said he thought the claim of placental transmission was “fairly convincing.” He said the relatively high levels of the coronavirus found in the placenta and the rising levels of virus in the baby and the evidence of placental inflammation, along with the baby’s symptoms, “are all consistent with SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

Still, Dr. Sadovsky said, it is important to note that cases of possible coronavirus transmission in utero appear to be extremely rare. With other viruses, including Zika and rubella, placental infection and transmission is much more common, he said. With the coronavirus, he said, “we are trying to understand the opposite — what underlies the relative protection of the fetus and the placenta?”

NYTimes.com, July 16, 2020 by Pam Belluck

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Overlooked No More: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneering Gay Activist

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overlooked

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

Before the word “homosexuality” existed, he argued that same-sex attraction was innate, and that those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else.Overlooked

By the time the overlooked lawyer and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs took the podium at a meeting of the Association of German Jurists in 1867, rumors about his same-sex love affairs — and the subsequent threat of arrest and prosecution — had already cost him his legal career and forced him to flee his homeland.

Standing in Munich before more than 500 lawyers, officials and academics — many of whom jeered as he spoke — Ulrichs argued for the repeal of sodomy laws that criminalized sex between men in several of the German-speaking kingdoms and duchies that existed in the years before the creation of a unified German state.

“Gentlemen, my proposal is directed toward a revision of the current penal law,” he said, according to the historian Robert Beachy in the 2014 book “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity.”

Ulrichs described a “class of persons” who faced persecution simply because “nature has planted in them a sexual nature that is opposite of that which is usual.”

Same-sex attraction was a deeply taboo topic at the time; the word “homosexuality” would not even exist for another two years, when it was coined by the Austro-Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny. So the ideas in Ulrichs’s speech — that such attraction was innate, and that those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else — were revolutionary.

His remarks preceded by more than 100 years the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, which are widely seen as the start of the modern L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement.

They helped inspire the rise of the world’s first gay rights movement, 30 years later in Berlin.

They foreshadowed the imposition of a sodomy law across the German Empire that would later be used by the Nazis to target gay men, thousands of whom were killed in concentration camps.

Although overlooked they made history: Ulrichs is believed to have been the first person to publicly “come out,” in the modern sense of the term.

“I think it is reasonable to describe him as the first gay person to publicly out himself,” Robert Beachy said in an interview. “There is nothing comparable in the historical record. There is just nothing else like this out there.”

His speech was also deeply unwelcome at the 1867 meeting, where the audience erupted in shouts of “Stop!” and “Crucify!” that ultimately forced Ulrichs off the stage.

For much of Ulrichs’s life, same-sex relations were widely seen as a pathology or as a sin to which any person could succumb if seized by wickedness. These views still exist in some parts of the world.

Ulrichs helped forge the concepts of gay people as a distinct group and of sexual identity as an innate human characteristic in a series of pamphlets he wrote from 1864 to 1879 — at first under a pseudonym, but under his own name after he gave his speech at the 1867 conference.

“By publishing these writings I have initiated a scientific discussion based on facts,” he wrote in a letter published in 1864 in Deutsche Allgemeine, a pan-German newspaper.

NYTimes.com by Liam Stack, July 1, 2020

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The Challenges of the Pandemic for Queer Youth

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pandemic queer youth

The Challenges of the Pandemic for Queer Youth – Issues include limited access to community support and counseling and, in some cases, quarantining with unsupportive family members.

The pandemic has affected queer youth in many ways.  When Brittany Brockenbrough’s transgender son lost his in-school counseling and the ability to have meet-ups with other L.G.B.T.Q. youth during the pandemic, his mental health suffered.How Coronavirus Is Affecting Surrogacy

“He began to feel depressed and was withdrawn,” said Ms. Brockenbrough, a mother of two in Virginia. She was later able to get her son teletherapy and in-home support from a local mental health agency and to find ways for him to stay in touch with others in his community through such activities as weekly Zoom meetings and online game nights.

“He is doing much better now that he is back in treatment and staying connected to the community,” she said. “Social distancing and taking precautions is necessary, but for the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, even those who have supportive parents, losing the ability to have that in-person social support with other L.G.B.T.Q.+ youth can have a significant impact.”

As young people continue to adjust to the pandemic, some are dealing with increased anxiety and stress. For those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, there may be additional challenges and risks resulting from limited access to community support, lack of in-school counseling and, in some cases, the difficult circumstances of quarantining with unsupportive family members.

“My parents do not accept that I am gay,” an 18-year-old from Yonkers, N.Y. who did not want his name published, said. “My support system was mostly at school, and now I am quarantining with family members who don’t accept who I really am.”

 

The young man, whose virtual high school graduation was last week, said his parents reacted with “anger” and “disgust” when they found out he was gay, and that being home with them during the Covid-19 shutdown has been very uncomfortable. “It is humiliating to have to rely on people who do not respect you,” he said.

L.G.B.T.Q. youth are already a vulnerable population and at higher risk for anxiety, depression, homelessness and self harm than their non-L.G.B.T.Q. peers. A 2018 study in JAMA Pediatrics by researchers at Harvard University and the Fenway Institute found that transgender youth were at a greater risk for attempted suicide, depression and anxiety, and that gender-affirming mental health services are greatly needed to address these concerns.

Sarah Gundle, a clinical psychologist in New York City, said that while online supports are available during this crisis and can provide help, for many they cannot replace in-person treatment and interaction with a community that accepts and validates your identity.

“L.G.B.T.Q.+ youth who have to be at home for extended periods of time and live with unsupportive family members — or their family environment makes it unsafe for them to be out at home — can experience a profound sense of isolation,” Dr. Gundle said. “A pandemic brings significant uncertainty — there is no definitive end — and it can feel as if there is no escape. Many L.G.B.T.Q.+ youth also have to worry about their safety and the repercussions if their family members find out.”

When college campuses closed in March because of the pandemic, having to return home to an unsupportive space was not a safe option for some students.

Danushi Fernando, the director of L.G.B.T.Q. and Gender Resources at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said that approximately 225 students — following state guidelines — remained on campus through the spring semester for various reasons, some because they did not feel safe sheltering with their families. Vassar also provided support for students through virtual gatherings, support groups and counseling.

NYTimes.com, June 29, 2020 – by Misha Valencia

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The Hidden Costs Of Starting A Family When Queer

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hidden costs queer

The Hidden Costs Of Starting A Family When Queer

The Hidden Costs Of Starting A Family When Queer – Jac Ciardella sat at his kitchen table in New Jersey and inserted a syringe into a navel orange. His hand flexed as he squeezed the plunger, pushing water into the fruit’s rind. He needed the practice. He was about to inject fertility drugs into his wife, Candice Ciardella, and he wanted to get it exactly right. He knew how painful it could be. gay money
 
Just a year earlier, in February, 2017, the spouses’ positions were swapped: Candice, now 37, was administering the shot for Jac, who’s 40. Jac is a transgender man, and both he and his wife have undergone in vitro fertilization (IVF) in order to have a child.
The couple’s fertility journey started in 2015. The original plan had been to use donor sperm to impregnate Candice. But after six unsuccessful attempts at intrauterine insemination (IUI), they decided to try IVF on Jac, with the idea that Candice could carry one of his fertilized eggs. Candice began giving her husband shots of the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), to make him produce extra eggs. 
 
“For years, needles were just part of the routine for us,” Candice says. “I think we had more empathy for one another because we both knew what it felt like. When it comes to the shots and the appointments, not many spouses can say: ‘I know exactly what you’re going through.’ We can.”
 
The process was emotionally taxing for both of them, but especially for Jac. “Someone’s head is between your legs, and it’s awkward for anyone — but, being transgender, it’s extra awkward,” Jac says. “Mentally, I’m feeling like I’m not supposed to be in that position. For me to feel comfortable going through IVF while still keeping my sanity and my integrity was huge.” 
 
Three cycles of IVF weren’t successful, and testing revealed no clear issues that would cause infertility. So in 2018, the Ciardellas decided to try IVF again, on Candice this time. 
 
“It was emotionally defeating. If you can survive IVF and infertility, your marriage should be able to survive just about anything else,” Jac says.  “It’s humbling and debilitating and cruel.” Adding to their stress was the financial strain. The Ciardellas were acutely aware that each failed cycle of IVF and IUI was costing them — big time. “You’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars going out the door,” he says. “It takes toughness.”
Jac and Candice’s story is unique, but the financial burden they faced is not. Most LGBTQ+ couples who want children have to confront the fact that starting a family will be expensive. Adoption, fertility treatments, and surrogates are all costly, often lengthy processes.
 
The Ciardellas say their insurance only covered their testing for issues that could cause infertility, such as blocked fallopian tubes. They had no financial help with the sperm, the IUIs, or the rounds of IVF. All told, over the course of three years, the couple would spend about $120,000 on four IVF cycles, $20,000 on fertility drugs, plus over $10,000 on IUI. “I got those numbers imprinted on my brain,” Jac says. “We always knew that to be parents, we’d need to be cutting into a good chunk of change — but we didn’t expect it to be quite that much.” 
 
Sandy Chuan, MD, a fertility specialist at San Diego Fertility Center, confirms that the costs of conceiving via fertility treatments can be shockingly high for LGBTQ+ couples. 
 
She says sperm samples can cost $600 to $900 per vial. One IUI attempt without insurance costs about $700 to $1,000, plus the donor sperm. “I usually tell my clients to ballpark around $1,500, but they might need to do three to six rounds,” Dr. Chuan explains. If IUI is unsuccessful, the next step is IVF, which Dr. Chuan says can cost as much as $15,000, plus $4,000 to $5,000 for medications to stimulate egg production. The price point for procedures can vary by state and market.
 
Refinery29.com, by Molly Longman, June 15, 2020
 
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Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules

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gay america

The court said the language of the Civil Rights Law of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a stunning victory.legal surrogacy in New York

The vote was 6 to 3, with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The case concerned Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. The question for the justices was whether that last prohibition — discrimination “because of sex”— applies to many millions of gay and transgender workers.

The decision, covering two cases, was the court’s first on L.G.B.T. rights since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the court’s major gay rights decisions.

Those decisions were grounded in constitutional law. The new cases, by contrast, concerned statutory interpretation.

Lawyers for employers and the Trump administration argued that the common understanding of sex discrimination in 1964 was bias against women or men and did not encompass discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. If Congress wanted to protect gay and transgender workers, they said, it could pass a new law.

Lawyers for the workers responded that discrimination against employees based on sexual orientation or transgender status must as a matter of logic take account of sex.

The court considered two sets of cases. The first concerned a pair of lawsuits from gay men who said they were fired because of their sexual orientation. The second was about a suit from a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, who said her employer fired her when she announced that she would embrace her gender identity at work.

The cases concerning gay rights are Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., No. 17-1618, and Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, No. 17-1623.

The first case was filed by Gerald Bostock, a gay man who was fired from a government program that helped neglected and abused children in Clayton County, Ga., just south of Atlanta, after he joined a gay softball league.

Washington State Supreme CourtThe second was brought by a skydiving instructor, Donald Zarda, who also said he was fired because he was gay. His dismissal followed a complaint from a female customer who had expressed concerns about being strapped to Mr. Zarda during a tandem dive. Mr. Zarda, hoping to reassure the customer, told her that he was “100 percent gay.”

Mr. Zarda died in a 2014 skydiving accident, and his estate pursued his case.

Most federal appeals courts have interpreted Title VII to exclude sexual orientation discrimination. But two of them, in New York and Chicago, have ruled that discrimination against gay men and lesbians is a form of sex discrimination.

In 2018, a divided 13-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, allowed Mr. Zarda’s lawsuit to proceed. Writing for the majority, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann concluded that “sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination.”

In dissent, Judge Gerard E. Lynch wrote that the words of Title VII did not support the majority’s interpretation.

“Speaking solely as a citizen,” he wrote, “I would be delighted to awake one morning and learn that Congress had just passed legislation adding sexual orientation to the list of grounds of employment discrimination prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I am confident that one day — and I hope that day comes soon — I will have that pleasure.”

NYTimes.com, by Adam Liptak, June 15, 2020

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Korean Adoptee Wins Landmark Case in Search for Birth Parents

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Korean adoptee

In the first verdict of its kind, a South Korean court has ruled that Kara Bos, an American who is a Korean adoptee, is a daughter of an 85-year-old man in Seoul.

A court in Seoul ruled Friday that a Korean adoptee, adopted by an American couple almost four decades ago must be recognized as a daughter of an 85-year-old South Korean man, providing hope for the thousands of Korean-born adoptees who want to know the identities of their birth parents.adopted kids, adoption new york, new york adoption, new york state adoption

On Nov. 18, exactly 36 years after she was found abandoned in a parking lot in a city in central South Korea, Kara Bos, now an American citizen, filed her paternity lawsuit, the first in South Korea by an overseas adoptee. After winning the lawsuit, Ms. Bos now hopes to confront her father to ask him who her mother was.

Ms. Bos was flown to the United States 10 months after she was found abandoned, becoming one of thousands of South Korean babies and toddlers shipped annually out of their birth country for overseas adoption in the 1970s and ’80s.

In recent years, Ms. Bos has been making trips to South Korea in search of her birth mother. She wanted to meet her biological father not only to press him on her mother’s identity, but to find out why she was abandoned. But three women she believed to be her half sisters have blocked her from meeting the elderly man, claiming that she was not family. As a last resort, she filed the paternity lawsuit.

“Because of the lawsuit, I actually now have a right to register as his daughter,” Ms. Bos told reporters outside the Seoul Family Court following its ruling on Friday. The ruling followed DNA test results that showed a 99.9981 percent probability that the man and Ms. Bos were father and daughter.

Ms. Bos flew from Amsterdam to attend the court ruling on Friday. She has lived in Amsterdam since 2009 with her Dutch husband, a son and a daughter, running a drowning-prevention program for children.

If she is included in his father’s family registry, Ms. Bos by South Korean law will become entitled to split his inheritance with her other siblings. And her half sisters cannot stop her from meeting her father.

nytimes.com, June 12, 2020 by Choe Sang-Hun

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Planned Parenthood – In a divorce, who gets custody of the embryos?

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In a divorce, who gets custody of the embryos?

In a divorce, who gets the embryos? In the summer of 2014, a newly minted Phoenix lawyer named Ruby Torres had a whirlwind few weeks that would end up determining the course of her life. After being diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer in the late spring, Torres, then 33, met with a fertility specialist in early July to see if she could preserve her ability to have children before chemotherapy-induced menopause. She was told she had just one chance—just one fertility cycle—to extract eggs ahead of her urgently needed treatment.divorce embryos

At the time, egg freezing was an iffy science; even after the advent of a flash-freezing process called vitrification, many unfertilized frozen eggs never survived the thawing process. Torres was advised to freeze embryos instead. Which meant she needed to find sperm. Immediately.

She had been dating a man named John Terrell for several years. They had a “good relationship”—at least in her eyes. Terrell initially declined to be Torres’ sperm donor (jacking off into a cup at a doctor’s office didn’t appeal to him, she recalled), but he eventually agreed after he learned that Torres’ ex-boyfriend had volunteered first. On a Friday in July, they signed a contract at a fertility clinic, which said that neither of them could use the embryos without the other’s consent. At lunch a few days later, they made the “rash decision” to get married. At the Bloom Reproductive Institute in Scottsdale soon after, Torres’ eggs were extracted and they made seven embryos together.

“I was happy that he had changed his mind,” Torres told me on the phone in February. “He was the man I was in love with. He was the one I wanted to be with and wanted to be the father of my children.”

In a divorce, who gets the embryos? Fast-forward two years later: The couple’s relationship had collapsed. The split was not amicable. According to Torres, the tail end was marred by infidelity and domestic violence (a charge that Terrell denies). Even though she remembers Terrell verbally giving her the embryos, the fate of their genetic material became the center of their divorce trial in family court. The judge eventually ruled against Torres, deciding that they must be donated to a third party. When Torres appealed, the court came down in her favor, ruling that her right to procreate outweighed her ex-husband’s desire not to. Then Terrell appealed the decision to the Arizona Supreme Court, which reversed the appeals court decision in late January: Torres cannot use the embryos without the consent of her ex-husband, and must donate them instead. Her hopes of having a biological child were permanently crushed.

Torres sees this as a simple issue, the right to have a baby: By denying her ownership of her embryos, she said, “you are taking my child from me.”

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is through Terrell’s eyes: He believes his right not to become a parent trumps her desire to become one. His relationship with Torres was never serious, he claimed; they only dated “on and off.” According to family court testimony and a March phone call I had with his lead counsel at the Arizona Supreme Court, Eric M. Fraser, he married Torres to give her health insurance. He provided the sperm not because he saw a future with her, but because it was the “honorable thing,” especially since her cancer diagnosis seemed like “basically a death sentence.”

By the time their relationship ended, Fraser told me, Terrell was sure he did not want to create a baby with Torres. There was “no realistic way” he could have stayed out of that child’s life; they had overlapping friends and lived in a small community where everyone knew each other. Plus, the courts could not waive child support responsibility. No matter how many times Torres requested a preemptive child support waiver for Terrell in the event that she used the embryos—and she did request that—there was no way he could be off the hook for payments in case she died or got sick or went to jail. Unlike sperm donation or many adoptions, this wasn’t anonymous. Everyone would know he was the father.

According to estimates by reproductive endocrinologists, there may be about a million frozen embryos in the United States. There have been court battles over the fate of frozen embryos since the 1990s. But if the last few years are any indication, many more will become mired in divorce court. Torres and Terrell’s case is one of a handful of similar ones that have continued to pop up around the country, all involving the fate of embryos created by a couple who were once together and now are not. Many of them hinge on whether the right to be a parent is more important than the right not to be. There have been judges in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Jersey, and California who were swayed by arguments similar to Fraser’s, and therefore ruled against the spouse seeking to use the embryos. Most publicly, last October a judge in Louisiana dismissed a lawsuit filed against the actor Sofia Vergara by her ex-fiancé, Nick Loeb, for possession of their embryos. These cases sometimes go the other way: Courts in Illinois and Pennsylvania awarded embryos to women because they had no other chance of having a biological child. Legal experts suspect that one of these embryo cases will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, having huge implications for abortion, stem cell research, and in vitro fertilization.

vice.com, June 1, 2020 by Nona Willis Aronowitz

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Better fertility treatments can mean much older parents. But how does this affect their offspring?

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Older parents

For nearly 40 years, fertility treatment has grown ever more advanced and so entrenched that it’s not uncommon for couples to begin their families in their late 30s, 40s or even 50s, producing much older parents.

Much older parents…  But even as questions about the technology to extend fertility have been answered — yes, children born through in vitro fertilization are healthy; yes, freezing embryos appears to be safe; yes, mothers can generally deliver babies safely well beyond the classic childbearing years — another important question is emerging: How old is too old for their offspring?

Offspring like Hayley, the 10-year-old daughter of a 58-year-old, Ann Skye.

“I knew that she was going to really need to build her own support system in life, or potentially would need to,” said Skye, who lives in North Carolina and works in public health. “I think that has really impacted the way we parented her. We were strong proponents of letting her cry [herself] to sleep for that same reason: She needs to be able to self-soothe.”

In December, two prominent psychologists and two reproductive endocrinologists published an opinion paper in the Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics questioning whether it was time to establish age restrictions in the field. They wrote that research has shown that children often experience social awkwardness if their parents are a half-century older than them and face greater risk of autism and psychopathologies. These children are also more likely to serve in a caregiving role and experience bereavement as adolescents or teens compared with their peers whose parents gave birth in their 20s and 30s, they wrote.

Do those risks constitute the potential for “great harm” to the child and outweigh a person’s right to “reproduce without limitation or interference” at any age, the authors asked.

“It is a self-perpetuating issue; the more older patients that seek [fertility] treatment, the more people feel that it is reasonable to seek treatment, especially in an age where sensational births are widely celebrated as positive events in the media,” they wrote.

In the United States, the number of live births to mothers ages 45 to 49 increased from 3,045 in 1996 to 8,257 in 2016, and the number to mothers ages 50 to 54 increased from 144 births to 786 births over the same time period, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The average age of women becoming mothers in the United States is now 26, up from 23 in 1994, according to the Pew Research Center.

WashingtonPost.com, May 30, 2020 by Eric Berger

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They were right: Same-sex marriage ‘changed everything.’ Well, by adding $3.7 billion to the economy.

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gay marriage $3.7 billion

When same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States in 2015, a lot of conservatives and religious folks predicted it would be the end of the world.  Instead, it added $3.7 billion to the economy.

Same-sex marriage = $3.7 billion.  In fact, on the day same-sex marriage was made legal, searches on the popular website Bible Gateway for “end times” reached an all-time high. Evangelical preacher Pat Robertson claimed that after the decision we’d all be having relations with animals.gay marriage $3.7 billion

“Watch what happens, love affairs between men and animals are going to be absolutely permitted. Polygamy, without question, is going to be permitted. And it will be called a right,” Robertson said.

Well, the world didn’t end and no one has married their cat … yet. But what did happen was a surge of economic activity.

A new study by the The Williams Institute found that since same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide in the United States in 2015, LGBT weddings have boosted state and local economies by an estimated $3.8 billion.

“Marriage equality has changed the lives of same-sex couples and their families,” the study’s lead author Christy Mallory, said in a statement. “It has also provided a sizable benefit to business and state and local governments.”

Since Massachusetts first legalized gay marriage in 2004, more than half a million same-sex couples have married in America.

The economic impact of same-sex marriage has created more than 45,000 jobs and generated an additional $244 million in state and local taxes. Over $500 million in revenue has been generated by friends and family members traveling to and from same-sex weddings.

upworthy.com, by Tod Perry, May 29, 2020

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