Preventing Age Related Fertility Loss

This unique book provides expert advice on all the different aspects related to fertility preservation for age related infertility. Although, there is a lot of information available on the Internet and in books about fertility preservation for cancer treatment, little information is available for young women that are confronted with a ticking biological clock. While men have been able to cryopreserve sperm since the 1950s, women have only recently gained the opportunity to preserve their gametes through the egg vitrification technique. Therefore, many women confronted with a risk of imminent fertility loss, such as chemotherapy, are now freezing their oocytes instead of embryos. Successful oocyte cryopreservation offers them a reproductive autonomy independent of men. Moreover, it now enables single women to preserve their reproductive chances. The most important threat for female fertility is ovarian aging as it causes a progressive decline in the reproductive chances. The general trend to delay motherhood due to societal changes confronts many women and couples with a diminished fertility. This fertility problem can often not be cured by in vitro fertilization, which makes that an increasing number of women require oocyte donation as the treatment of last resort. In the last few years, fertility centres around the world have started to offer the opportunity cryopreserve oocytes to young, often highly educated, single women. This patient population is unique as compared to other patients in the fertility clinic as they perform a preventive treatment. They are neither confronted with infertility nor are they undergoing a treatment that might cause an imminent treat to their fertility.

Welcomed as liberation and dismissed as exploitation, egg freezing (oocyte cryopreservation) has rapidly become one of the most widely-discussed and influential new reproductive technologies of this century. In Freezing Fertility, Lucy van de Wiel takes us inside the world of fertility preservation—with its egg freezing parties, contested age limits, proactive anticipations and equity investments—and shows how the popularization of egg freezing has profound consequences for the way in which female fertility and reproductive aging are understood, commercialized and politicized. Beyond an individual reproductive choice for people who may want to have children later in life, Freezing Fertility explores how the rise of egg freezing also reveals broader cultural, political and economic negotiations about reproductive politics, gender inequities, age normativities and the financialization of healthcare. Van de Wiel investigates these issues by analyzing a wide range of sources—varying from sparkly online platforms to heart-breaking court cases and intimate autobiographical accounts—that are emblematic of each stage of the egg freezing procedure. By following the egg’s journey, Freezing Fertility examines how contemporary egg freezing practices both reflect broader social, regulatory and economic power asymmetries and repoliticize fertility and aging in ways that affect the public at large. In doing so, the book explores how the possibility of egg freezing shifts our relation to the beginning and end of life.

This document presents papers on the following topics: overcoming the obstacles to prevention of infertility, the effectiveness of sexually transmitted disease infertility-related prevention programs, the burden of chlamydial and gonococcal infection in Canada, social factors relevant to sexually transmitted diseases and to strategies for their prevention, feasibility of economic evaluations of sexually transmitted disease prevention programs in Canada, issues in evaluating programs to prevent infertility related to occupation hazards, and a proposed framework for reducing the incidence of infertility.

An award-winning scientist, in this urgent, thought-provoking and meticulously researched book, shows how chemicals in the modern environment are changing--and endangering--human sexuality and fertility on the grandest scale.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. This book explores the experiences of some of the pioneering users of social egg freezing technology in the UK and the USA.

A truly interdisciplinary approach to the study of health, Health Psychology: An Interdisciplinary Approach uses the social ecological perspective to explore the impact of five systems on individual health outcomes: individual, culture/family, social/physical environment, health systems and health policy. In order to provide readers with an understanding of how health affects the individual on a mental and emotional level, the author has taken an interdisciplinary approach, considering the roles of anthropology, biology, economics, environmental studies, medicine, public health, and sociology.