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FERTILITY
Embryos’ Next Stop? Genome Sequencing
What: Wired interviews Noor Siddiqui, the founder of Orchid, a company that offers extremely in-depth analysis of embryos. Siddiqui was a “teenage Thiel fellow” and a Stanford-trained computer scientist and has chosen to test her company’s technology on her own embryos. Orchid says it can sequence the entire genome of an embryo, which Siddiqui explains could “mitigate risks for thousands of diseases that previously you weren’t able to detect. It’s kind of like a vaccine for everything that we know, genetic-wise, at once.”
Why it matters: The company’s existence also brings up ethical questions, but as Siddiqui points out – their goal isn’t eliminating all disease and suffering, just the slice we know has a genetic component.
Source: Wired
PREGNANCY + POSTPARTUM
Fake Legal Risk Stopping Study of Pregnant and Lactating Women
What: For years, pregnant and breastfeeding women haven’t been included in clinical trials because of presumed legal liability. But it turns out that after a close examination of the law, a report from the National Academies of Sciences found that “that while fear of legal liability is pervasive, actual legal liability is not, and is often conflated with other concerns, such as reputational risk, increased costs, and trial complexity.”
Why it matters: As the author of this op-ed points out, “just like everyone else, pregnant and lactating women get sick and may need to take medication.”
Source: JAMA
Tom Cruise’s Postpartum Haterade Reminds Us How Far We’ve Come
What: In a piece that is a trip down memory lane, Business Insider reminds us that just under 20 years ago, Tom Cruise thought he could remain a beloved movie star and say that Brooke Shields was “irresponsible” for taking an antidepressant for postpartum depression, because “psychiatry is a pseudo-science” and that “drugs aren’t the answer.” (He was wrong.)
Why it matters: At an event this week, Shields said it “gave women in particular — they were so angry — you gave them a reason to fight for something they didn’t even know they wanted to fight for…So it actually, ironically, helped the platform because everybody was talking about it. It sort of backfired. Way to put it into pop culture.”
Source: Business Insider
MENSTUATION
Total Eclipse of the Menstrual Moon Cycle Theory
What: Sad news for eclipse fans: a study found that menstrual cycles “likely don’t follow the 29.5 day cycles of the Moon – but are instead governed by your body’s internal clocks.” Researchers looked at data from nearly 27,000 women and found “only a weak correlation” with the moon. Instead, the body appears to follow circadian rhythms, and will even catch up when the internal clock is out of sync.
Why it matters: Science doesn’t actually know what triggers menstruation when and why, or as this article puts it, “menstrual cycles usually have a monthly pattern, but the mechanisms that decide this pattern are mysterious.”
Source: BBC Science Focus
ABORTION ACCESS
The History of America’s Abortion Bans
What: Arizona’s state supreme court brought back a law from 1864 to ban abortion, which prompted the New York Times to look at the history of why it was passed in the first place. It turns out that abortion was not a moralized battle over life and death, but bans started in part after the American Medical Association was founded, and “its members — all male and white at that time — sought to curtail medical activities by midwives and other nondoctors, most of whom were women. Pregnancy termination methods were often provided by people in those vocations, and historians say that was one reason for the association’s desire to ban abortion.”
Why it matters: It’s a reminder of how women’s health has been manipulated into morality fights as a tool for power for centuries.
Source: New York Times
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