Sperm and Egg Edition
I’m having a little trouble getting into the holiday spirit this year. The events I look forward to—family present-opening sessions and the Salad Bowl (our annual New Year’s Day football game played with a head of lettuce)—have been cancelled. The wrapping paper I ordered online was terrible. And, since I’ve spent no time in stores or my car, I haven’t heard the same eight Christmas songs on an endless loop which has always been both infuriating and comforting. But I have written a couple of holiday-themed articles that I thought I’d share with you. First my take for Rewire News Group on last year’s remake of Baby It’s Cold Outside, the winter classic that many have described as more than a little bit rape-y. The rewrite is pretty funny—he calls her a car, the driver’s name is Murray—but doesn’t solve the actual problem with the song; our heroine actually wants to stay and have sex but has been taught that good girls don’t. And, a holiday sex toy shopping list that I pulled together for Bedsider. It’s probably too late to get these goodies under the tree but every day can be a gift-giving day. Or, maybe, buy some for yourself. My gift to myself is going to be taking next week off to say a proper goodbye (and good riddance) to this year full of disappointment and despair. 2021 will be better. Happy New Year to all of us!
A Heart-Warming Tale Steeped in Anti-Abortion Rhetoric
A baby born earlier this month may have set a record for the oldest frozen embryo to result in a successful live birth. Having been frozen for 27 years, the embryos used were actually older than the woman who gave birth. I heard about this story from SNL’s Weekend Update and thought I was going to come here and provide a heart-warming Christmas story about a medical marvel, but then I read further and realized this story is really about the anti-abortion scheme that is “embryo adoption.”
Tina and Benjamin Gibson did not want to chance simply getting pregnant because he has cystic fibrosis and she is a carrier. They were foster parents for a few years and were considering adoption when her father mentioned the idea of embryo adoption, a process by which you can use someone else’s leftover, still-frozen embryos via in vitro fertilization (IVF).
IVF, the reproductive technology that creates embryos in “test tubes” and then transfers them into a uterus, was pioneered in the late 1970s and has helped millions of people have children they could not otherwise have whether they were dealing with genetic concerns like the Gibsons, infertility problems, or the biological limitations of, say, being in a same-sex couple. It is estimated that as of 2018, 8 million children had been born using this method.
Most people undergoing IVF make extra embryos because the process of extracting eggs is complicated (extracting sperm, not so much) and many embryos don’t survive the implantation process. This can result in having leftover embryos on ice. Individuals and couples can save the embryos to have more children in the future, destroy them, or donate them to science or someone else who wants to have a baby.
Embryo donation is not new, but in the early 2000s, a number of Christian agencies sprung up to foster what they call embryo adoptions. These agencies are founded on the belief that life begins at conception and that frozen embryos are, therefore, babies-in-waiting that they should rescue by finding an adoptive parent who will carry them to term. The agencies refer to the embryos and the children born as “snowflake babies.” And, they help encourage this option by keeping the cost down for prospective parents.
The language of adoption might seem cute and harmless but it’s yet another semantic attempt—straight out of the anti-abortion playbook—to convey personhood to what is essentially a cluster of frozen cells. Moreover, the agencies, or at least the people who donate embryos to them, blatantly discriminate against certain prospective parents. The program and marketing director of one such agency told the New York Times last year that she has limited ability to make matches because her clients usually don’t want their embryos going to single parents, same-sex couples, or atheists. While it is within each couple’s rights to decide who can get their genetic material, it is not okay that these agencies have been receiving government support since the days of George W. Bush.
The Trump administration has championed snowflake babies as a way to put a happy face on its anti-science rejection of fetal tissue research. In 2019, the administration announced that all such research would be required to go through an ethics review by a new advisory board. This summer, it announced the make-up of that board and to the surprise of absolutely no one, 10 out of the 15 advisors oppose abortion and a number have publicly said they oppose all funding for fetal tissue research. (Many commentators brought this up when Trump himself benefitted from an experimental Covid-19 drug that was derived using fetal cells. But his hypocrisy and self-interest know no bounds.)
As for the baby born to the Gibsons, Molly is healthy and happy and joins her big sister Emma who came from the same donor. Though the IVF specialist who treated the family swears that this is the record for the oldest frozen embryo, other experts say that there is no way to know because there is no centralized location for that kind of data. In the end, this is a heartwarming Christmas story for one family and that’s great, but it could have been achieved through embryo donation which has all of the benefits without the anti-abortion jargon, discriminatory practices, and blurred lines between church and state.
Remember the Sperm: Study Finds Father’s Health Related to Pregnancy Loss
There are countless articles suggesting that anyone with a uterus who wants to have a successful pregnancy should lose any extra pounds, change their diet, stock up on folic acid, and not wait until their eggs get too old, but we traditionally pay a lot less attention to the health of the other person in the fertilization equation. A new study suggests that the father’s (or sperm donor’s) health matters too—the risk of pregnancy loss is higher when sperm comes from somebody who had certain medical conditions in the years before conception.
Researchers at Stanford University combed seven years of insurance records to find couples (specifically a man and a woman) whose information was linked by a shared policy and who had experienced a pregnancy that ended in a live birth, still birth, miscarriage, or ectopic pregnancy. They then limited their review to couples in which the woman was between the ages of 20 and 45 and analyzed the health care the men had in the four years prior to conception to see if there was a history of metabolic disorders (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, or diabetes), heart disease, lung disease, or cancer.
The study included information from almost one million pregnancies, about a quarter of which ended in loss of some kind. After adjusting for the health of the pregnant woman, the researchers found a 10% increased risk of pregnancy loss when fathers had one metabolic disorder, a 15% increase when they had two, and a 20% increase when they had three or more components.
A study like this—that analyzes health records retrospectively—is inherently only as good as its data and, in this case, the fact that researchers only looked at employer-sponsored insurance policies (which leans toward a certain socioeconomic demographic) could skew this data. Still, the results are interesting and in keeping with existing research that has found a link between a baby’s health and paternal age/health. While this still might not be enough information to radically change what we tell couples about getting ready for pregnancy, the study’s lead author made a decent point in MedPage Today: “It's certainly not bad advice to tell a man to be healthy, to have a good diet and exercise. It’s good for the health of a man, but it also can help a pregnancy as well.”
Perhaps it is also time for men to suffer through the horse pills and fish oil capsules that are prenatal vitamins. I could only get mine down with the help of a coffee milkshake. Or, at least, that’s the story I told myself and my husband (maker of the coffee milkshakes) at the time.
TikTok Gives Fertility Advice (And It’s Likely Not Wrong)
A TikTok creator recently garnered over one million likes and eight million views for a video in which she whispers that the over-the-counter drug Mucinex helps you get pregnant. She explained that she tracks her fertile signs because she has endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and noticed improvements recently when she took the medication for symptoms of Covid-19. In asking her doctor why this happened, she learned that the drug—known for commercials featuring an animated mucus monster who speaks with a gruff voice and carries a suitcase—is sometimes recommended to help conception.
This is an instance in which what TikTok says might actually be how it fucking works. Emphasis on the might. Guaifenesin, the generic name for the medicine in Mucinex, is designed to thin mucus so that it can drain from your sinuses, be blown out your nose, or be coughed up from your lungs. But there’s mucus in other places, too. When she mentioned her “fertile signs,” the Julia behind @juliasendojourney was likely checking the consistency of her cervical mucus.
Some people who are trying to get pregnant and those who are committed to natural family planning to prevent pregnancy feel their cervical mucus first thing in the morning every day to determine how close they are to ovulation. At the beginning of a menstrual cycle there probably isn’t very much of it; leading up to ovulation there is more and it’s usually thicker, yellow, white, or cloudy in color, and kind of sticky; and at ovulation the mucus thins out, clears up, and becomes silky or slippery. Many people say it reminds them of egg whites. I learned of it as “ferning” mucus because under a microscope it can have a leaf-like pattern. This is because our bodies are set up to help get us pregnant and thinner, stringier, slipperier cervical mucus makes it easier for sperm to swim through. (Remember, when we talked about how contraception does/doesn’t work courtesy of Ted Cruz, I mentioned that hormonal contraception thickens cervical mucus to keep sperm out.)
In theory, a medication like Guaifenesin which thins out mucus could help people get pregnant and there is anecdotal evidence that it works, which is likely why Julia’s fertility doctor and sites such as Baby Center recommend it to those who want to get pregnant. But, despite having been studied for decades, there is no real scientific proof that it’s an effective strategy. One fertility expert who spoke to the Health after Julia’s video went viral said that the theory behind it was true, but it was unlikely to do much because cervical mucus is already quite thin at the time of ovulation.
Dr. Natalie Crawford, a fertility expert who spoke to Bustle last week, agreed that cervical mucus should thin out appropriately around ovulation. She said that Guaifenesin might actually be more helpful if used by men who have high viscosity semen which can make it more difficult for sperm to swim. She, too, repeated that while this has been discussed for years in fertility literature, there’s no hard evidence, but added that it was inexpensive, posed few risks, and could work for some people.
So, thank you, once again, to TikTok for spreading interesting information, though I can’t help but wonder what percentage of the app’s users are trying to get pregnant versus the percentage who are trying desperately not to.