About one in seven couples in the UK will have difficulty conceiving, and about one in eight known pregnancies will end in a loss. As many as 29% of low-risk pregnancies will experience unforeseen complications.
Rapid engagement and marriage can sometimes mask underlying issues that may only surface later, especially when couples have not lived together prior to tying the knot.
Since the first IVF baby was born in 1978, technological advancement of reproductive medicine has enabled millions to have children, marking a significant milestone in medical history.
Our partnership with Sesame and IVI RMA reflects our commitment to transparent and affordable solutions that reduce barriers and make care more accessible for our members. By combining transparent pricing with coordinated care, we're removing the barriers that have historically kept quality fertility treatment out of reach for too many families.
It was another detail that the rest of the family apparently knew but had never told me; they thought I already knew. The biology mattered less to me than the secret. Dad had been adopted, it turned out. A classic affliction of the 1950s, in which young, unmarried couples were forced to give away their newborn babies.
Economists from King's College London (KCL) and Stanford University in America looked at parents' participation in the workforce in the US between 2023 and 2025, including the proportion who worked from home at least one day per week. They analysed the impact of this compared with those who did not work remotely.
I've wanted to pursue sterilization since I learned that that was something that a person could do. I've tried a lot of different options for birth control, none of them have worked for me. She added that she never wanted kids, has a history of assault, and is worried about living in a state with one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.
The new law, Senate Bill 729, dictates that large insurance groups (defined as 101 or more employees) must expand their services to cover infertility treatments and diagnoses. In addition, according to the bill's text, large health insurance groups also must be able to cover "a maximum of 3 completed oocyte retrievals." Keep in mind that some of these services are for "medically necessary" cases of infertility - like egg freezing before cancer treatment.
For more than 60 years, contraception has been almost exclusively a women's responsibility. Today, women have more than 14 modern contraceptive options, while men have just two: condoms and vasectomies. That imbalance has pushed women to shoulder physical side effects, financial burden, medical risks, and the career impact of family planning-costs that have been accepted as the "status quo" for far too long.
Over my decades of practice, seeing thousands of people who use donor conception to have their children, I have seen a steady increase in people who want to either co‑parent or who plan to use the sperm or eggs of someone they know and plan to call that person "mom" or "dad." While I have seen many of these beautiful arrangements work out well, many have not.
I can't even count the number of thoughts I have every single day, just bouncing around in my head like a ping pong ball. I think every mom feels the same way, which is why when you ask a mom what's on her mind, her response could range from something like "Oh, just thinking about my kid's new soccer team" to "The fall of democracy and the state of the world."
When I took the assessment, shortly after leaving my partner, he scored an 8/10. If I had gone through with our pregnancy, he would have scored a 10. But we didn't have children because five years earlier, in a Chicago clinic, I'd had a medication abortion. At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become.
While we are profoundly grateful to have Shea in our lives and love her immeasurably, we also recognize that we have a moral obligation to find her genetic parents, she wrote. Our joy over her birth is further complicated by the devastating reality that her genetic parents whom we do not yet know or possibly another family entirely, may have received our genetic embryo. We are heartbroken, devastated, and confused.
Try hard enough, we are often told, and eventually you'll get what you want. But sometimes the hardest - and bravest - thing to do, is to stop trying. After years of hoping to start a family, including the painful rollercoaster of fertility treatment and a devastating miscarriage on Christmas day, Caroline Stafford, found the only way to find some kind of peace again was to accept it was not going to happen and to build a different future.
Lisa Watson suffers the devastating effects of incontinence daily, and believes mid-urethral surgery, otherwise known as vaginal mesh surgery, could change everything. The surgery was paused in Ireland in 2018, and she is calling for the pause to be lifted By anyone's standards, Lisa Watson is a busy woman. During the week, the Wicklow-based mum of two is a credit union risk manager and at weekends she puts on her make-up artist hat.
