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I was almost 40 when my youngest child was born. Being an older mom isn’t easy, but I personally have nothing to compare it to. New York Magazine has an extensive article on the growing number of women in their 50s and 60s who, with the help of modern technology, are becoming mothers for the first time. Some people think it’s creepy, others are concerned about the children, and obstetricians worry about health problems. But some research finds a bright side.
In 2008, Brad Van Voorhis, head of the fertility clinic at the University of Iowa, decided he wanted to measure how well children conceived through in vitro fertilization do on intelligence tests, hoping to dispel lingering concerns about their cognitive abilities. So he and his team compared the standardized-test scores of 463 IVF kids ages 8 to 17 against the scores of other kids in their classes. They found that the IVF kids scored better overall and in every category of test—reading, math, and language skills. And they found that the older the mother, the better the kid performed.
Van Voorhis guesses that the children of older mothers outperform their peers because the mothers, who’ve waited so long to have them, are more engaged. It’s a recipe for success: “Fewer kids at home, more attention to the kids they do have, and more money to devote to their education.” Other studies corroborate these findings. In research published in the journal Fertility and Sterility in 2007, Richard Paulson, head of the fertility program at the University of Southern California, found that mothers in their fifties reported less parental stress than those in their thirties and forties, the same level of mental functioning, and the same perception of fatigue. The fiftysomething women in his small national sample, incidentally, were also less likely than their counterparts to employ a nanny. They are more checked in.
Link -via The Frisky
(Image credit: Wayne Lawrence/Institute for Artist Management)
A fertility clinic in Copenhagen wanted an easy way to transport biological materials in insulated storage through the city, and so commissioned the construction of the Sperm Bullitt:
The Sperm Bike is, like the company’s sperm donations, a Danish product and constructed around the Danish Bullitt cargo bike from Larry vs Harry.
Producing the Sperm Bike was no easy task. It was constructed by the Danish company 10 Tons – who specialise in zoological and botanical models as well as paleontologic reconstructions, including full-size whales and dinosaurs.
With the tail, the bike is 2.9 metres long and fully-loaded with… um… sperm… it weighs 50 kg. About the same as my cargo bike with two kids and a bag of groceries.
If you scroll to the bottom of the linked article, you can find links to images of other unique custom cargo bikes built by the same company.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Copenhagenize
Quick: do you think that the future will be more or less religious?
Robert Rowthorn, an emeritus professor of economics, likened religion as a gene (after all, you are most likely to "inherit" your parents’ religion) and came to an interesting conclusion:
Rowthorn’s model shows that, even when the religious defection rate is high, the overall high fertility rate of religious people will cause the religiosity allele to eventually predominate the global society. The model shows that the wide gap in fertility rates could have a significant genetic effect in just a few generations. The model predicts that the religious fraction of the population will eventually stabilize at less than 100%, and there will remain a possibly large percentage of secular individuals. But nearly all of the secular population will still carry the religious allele, since high defection rates will spread the religious allele to secular society when defectors have children with a secular partner. Overall, nearly all of the population will have a genetic predisposition toward religion, although some or many of these individuals will lead secular lives, Rowthorn concluded.
Strange, but true. A recent study led by Shevach Friedler published in the medical journal Fertility and Sterility showed that laughter can promote pregnancy:
To test the idea, the research team had a medical clown visit their fertility clinic periodically over one year. Of the 219 women in the study, half underwent embryo transfer on a day the clown was at the clinic.
During recovery from the procedure, each woman had a 15-minute visit from the clown, who performed a specific routine created by Friedler – who has studied movement and mime – and a colleague.
The researchers found that, compared to women who came to the clinic on a "non-clown" day, those who’d had a laugh were more than twice as likely to become pregnant, when other factors such as age, type of infertility and the number of embryos transferred, were taken into account.
Ripley’s fertility statues are going on tour and will be visiting a Ripley’s museum near me. It is claimed that thousands of women, many who thought they would never conceive, have become pregnant after touching the statues. I know these pregnancies are the result of coincidence, not science, but if I visit the exhibit I’ll be sure to give the statues a wide berth.
In 1993 Ripley Entertainment acquired two African fertility statues, little knowing that they would become the all-time most popular Ripley museum exhibit. Initially they stood like sentinels in the Orlando world headquarters, an interesting conversation piece for sure, but nothing more. Then, unexplainably there seemed to be a population explosion going on in the Ripley office. First it was the receptionist, the woman who sat nearest them who became pregnant, then others who either by fault or desire touched the statues, found themselves in a maternal way. Thirteen months later when the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the Ripley birth phenomena – 13 pregnancies in 13 months – suddenly the statues were national news.
British medical researchers are working on growing human embryos that would have three parents: the father’s sperm, the mother’s egg nucleus, and another mother’s egg cytoplasm. In The Daily Telegraph, Richard Alleyne writes:
IVF often fails in older women because there are abnormalities in the outside of their eggs, known as cytoplasm, which surrounds the nucleus.
The team at St Mother Hospital in Kitakyushu, Japan, believe one way around the problem would be too implant the healthy nucleus – which contains most of the information to produce a baby – into the cytoplasm of a donor, usually a younger mother.
The team successfully did this in 31 eggs and of these seven formed “early stage embryos” when injected with sperm in a test tube.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NIH
