In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF)

The Pentagon Will Pay to Freeze Troops’ Sperm and Eggs

Military troops (The Political Insider)

Family-friendly policies have been proliferating workplace culture within the past year, and now there’s another company to add to that list: the Pentagon.

The Defense Department will a pilot program that allows troops to freeze sperm and eggs in an effort to retain service members. This policy is especially aimed at women: After 10 years of service (which would place a woman in her late 20s, assuming she enlisted when she was 18), women’s retention rate is 30% less than that of men’s. The cost is estimated to be around $150M for five years, or $30M per year.

The move comes as the Defense Department noted changing policies that allowed for longer maternity leaves and “improved child care.” After creating a plan, the Defense Department will outline a plan, and will evaluate two years after implementation. The Defense Department is following in the footsteps of certain Silicon Valley companies such as Facebook, which recently began offering female employees the option of freezing their eggs.

So far, the Defense Department is the only government agency that will allow freezing sperm and eggs within their healthcare policy.

It’ll be interesting to see how the pilot program goes, and how it changes the quality of life for military members.

Kim Kardashian West’s Implanted Male Embryos: How Common Is It?

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West (US Weekly)

As the whole world knows by now, Kim Kardashian is pregnant with her second child, a boy, through in-vitro fertilization (IVF). Apparently, her husband Mr. Kim Kardashian (a.k.a. Kanye West) wanted a boy, or, as he calls it, “an heir.”

To achieve the desired result, Kardashian chose to only implant male embryos (and evidently, it worked). She most likely underwent preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a procedure which screens embryos for sex characteristics, looking for XX (a girl) or XY (a boy).

In 2012, it was estimated that PGD was used for 4K-6K procedures per year. In 2014, fertility treatment procedures, including but not limited to IVF, were estimated at around 165K+ per year. PGD is used with IVF, so PGD cases comprise between 2%-3% of total fertility treatments.

Interestingly, the U.S. is one of the only countries in the world within which PGD may used for “prenatal sex selection.” In many countries, its use is restricted to medical and chromosome-related issues.

Nobody can yet say if this will become a widespread practice. It does raise some questions about the ethics of calling the shots on choosing your child’s sex. But this isn’t a new concern: New York University’s Director of the Bioethics Program S. Matthew Liao wrote a paper on the subject in 2004 for the “Journal of Medical Ethics” while at Johns Hopkins University. About halfway through the paper, he acknowledges, “As far as I know, no one has tried to use genetic engineering for sex selection.” Things have certainly changed in 11 years. Welcome to your brave new world.

Sofia Vergara’s Frozen Embryos: Is There A Precedent for IVF Egg Custody?

Last week, “Modern Family” actress Sofia Vergara’s former fiancé Nick Loeb penned an op-ed for “The New York Times” regarding Vergara’s frozen eggs. The pair had initially frozen the eggs via in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in case they later wanted children, before their relationship ended last year. (Vergara is currently engaged to “True Blood” actor Joe Manganiello.) Now Loeb wants to unfreeze an eggs to implant within a surrogate, and have a child using his ex-fiance’s egg. (When the two were together, they had signed an agreement regarding using the eggs only with permission from both of them, but there wasn’t any discussion on what might happen if they split.) Vergara, as owner of said egg(s), is (naturally and understandably) refusing to release her eggs.

I wanted to find out of there was a precedent set for IVF egg custody. According to “Chicago Lawyer” magazine, there are no definitive laws or one-approach-fits-all (yet), but 10 states so far have made rules regarding IVF custody and procedure cases.

One big commonality between a lot of these approaches is an issue familiar to sexuality: consent. Courts are generally weighing the desires of each partner, called “balance of interests.” This can be applied if one partner wants to use the eggs, but the other doesn’t want that person to use them. Iowa takes a “co-consent” approach, in that both parties must agree to “sign off when the embryo is implanted in the woman.”

Contracts guide decisions in other states. In these instances, courts rely on “contracts drawn up by the couple before the embryos were created.” New York, Washington, Texas and Oregon follow this method.

Some states take a blended approach (kind of like a blended orgasm). Tennessee, New Jersey and Pennsylvania first look for existing contracts between both parties before moving on to consent.

Other states are complete outliers in their approach. Iowa has “contemporaneous-mutual-consent,” which is a written agreement that states that both parties must sign off on use of the embryos. Massachusetts is another outlier, stating that the woman receives custody of the embryos in event of divorce.

Vergara and Loeb’s situation may bring attention to this dilemma shared by other ex-couples, and it could drive inquiries and move future legislation forward. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

The UK Introduces “3-Parent Baby” Bill

Human embryos (Bloomberg)

Britain made history this week by becoming the first country to introduce a “3-parent baby” bill.

Approved by the House of Commons, the Human Fertilization and Embryology (Mitochondrial Donation) Regulations 2015 seeks to eradicate genetic diseases that are passed from mother to child via defective mitochondria. (Defective mitochondria causes diseases such as brain damage, heart failure and blindness.) The genetic diseases would then cease to be passed to future generations.

For those who aren’t up on their fifth-grade science, here’s how it works: There are two healthy parents, save for the defective mitochondria (the cells that convert food into energy). A third woman would donate her healthy mitochondria via a modified in-vitro fertilization (IVF) technique. From then on, the mitochondria are permanently altered for the better.

There are two ways the procedure can be executed. For visual learners, diagrams are below:

Method 1 – Embryo Repair (BBC)

In the first method, the nuclei from the parents’ fertilized embryo is added to the donor’s fertilized embryo. The modified embryo is then placed into the womb.

Method 2 – Egg Repair (BBC)

In the second method, the nucleus from the mother’s egg is placed into the donor egg, with the healthy mitochondria.

In fact, calling a resulting baby from the procedure a “3-parent baby” is a misnomer: The donor would only give about .1% of her DNA. It would only change the portion that houses the genetic disease. Per the BBC, reproductive ethicist Dr. Gillian Lockwood notes:

Less than a tenth of one per cent of the genome is actually going to be affected. It is not part of what makes us genetically who we are. It doesn’t affect height, eye colour, intelligence, musicality.

If the measure passes through the House of Lords, the first baby to benefit from this procedure could be born next year.

NPR notes that U.S. agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have also been looking into the process, since 1-4K American children are born with a mitochondrial disease (numbers per the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation).

It’s safe to say that Britain will pave the way with how they handle this measure, and the world will be watching (and learning).

How Many People Fantasize About Having Sex With Identical Twins?

Twins Jordan and Zac Stenmark (Lyra Mag)

I read an NPR article on twins recently, calling millennials “Generation Twin.” This name applied due to the fact that one million more twins were born between 1980 and 2012. (This checks out with my personal anecdotal evidence: I graduated high school in 2004, and my class of 106 students boasted three sets of twins.)

“The Atlantic” goes a bit deeper into why this is: The rise in twins is due to the rise in fertility drugs, most notably IVF. Older women are the ones mostly using fertility drugs, and producing most of the babies. Also, older women are statistically more likely to have twins than younger women.

Here’s a handy table to visualize the rise in twins over the past decades:

Twins’ birth rate, 1980-2012 (The Atlantic)

That got me wondering if sexual fantasies about twins (both identical and fraternal) have also increased.

After doing some digging, I really couldn’t find anything. I didn’t find any studies about sexual fantasies, or fantasies coming true, involving twins.

The closest I got was the recent study on sexual fantasies by researchers at Canada’s University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres, published in the “Journal of Sexual Medicine.” “Business Insider” helpfully took all the data for male fantasies and put it together. The closest question the researchers asked the 717 men used about twins was about having sex with two women. Over 84% of men reported this fantasy, but we cannot extrapolate that this necessarily means twins.

The identical-twin fantasy didn’t show up for the women either, but that’s perhaps more understandable: Women aren’t generally depicted as having that particular fantasy (though I’m sure there are some outliers).

I find it strange that a fantasy that looms so large in popular culture (for men, at least) has basically no data to back it up.

Sex & Stats: Where Numbers Come to Bang

Statistics. Economics. Sex.