Day: March 1, 2009

Cheaper By The Dozen

Drawn by payments of up to $10,000, an increasing number of women are offering to sell their eggs at U.S. fertility clinics as a way to make money amid the financial crisis.

Fertility organizations across the country said there had been a growing interest. The Centre for Egg Options in Illinois has seen a 40 percent increase in egg donor inquiries since the start of 2008.

New York City’s Northeast Assisted Fertility Group said interest had doubled and the Colorado Centre for Reproductive Medicine said it had received 10 percent more inquiries.

The Reproductive Science Centre of New England, which does not deal directly with egg donors, said it had gone from no inquiries to now receiving several a month.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends that total payments to donors be capped at $10,000.

A 2007 study by the society found the U.S. national average payment was $4,216. Payments by clinics in the Northeast were found to average just over $5,000, while those in the Northwest averaged just under $3,000.

Katherine Bernardo, egg donor program manager at Northeast Assisted Fertility Group, said while some women saw donation as an easy way to make money, not everyone was accepted.

“There is an economic climate that encourages women to find creative ways to make money,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that anyone interested in egg donation actually goes on to donate because so few women are actually eligible.”

Bernardo said only 5 percent to 7 percent of the applications she received resulted in the retrieval of eggs. An ideal candidate, she said, was in her twenties, healthy, attractive and well-educated.

Egg donors undergo medical, psychological and genetic testing as well as a background check. If selected, a donor must undergo hormone injections until her eggs are ready to be retrieved.

Not as much money is on offer for men looking to donate sperm. Several sperm banks in New York City, where men are paid about $60 each time they donate, said there had not been a rise in donors.

Lyrics And Sex

High exposure to lyrics that describe degrading sex is associated with high levels of sexual behaviour in teens, a new study suggests.

The research, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, was conducted in three large urban high schools in the Pittsburgh area, and involved asking Grade 9 students about the number of hours a day they listen to music and their favourite musical artists.

STDs are particularly problematic in poor communities, Primack said, and that was a reason for focusing on three urban high schools where about half the kids take part in a lunch program — indicating they fall below a certain income level.

“We divided the cohort into three … those who were exposed to the lowest amount (of music with degrading references), those who were exposed to sort of the medium amount, those who were exposed to the most,” he said.

“And those who were exposed to the most were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse, and that’s even controlling for all of the other factors that we looked at that we thought might be related to uptake of sexual intercourse.”

Daniel Levitin, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, said the study “clearly adds to our body of knowledge about the connection between musical lyrics and … experiences of young people.”

But Levitin, author of the bestselling book “This is Your Brain on Music,” said the study wasn’t designed in a way that it could tell us about any causes of the young people’s behaviour.

“The important thing to bear in mind is whatever it is that’s causing young people to engage in increasingly risky sexual activity at a younger age — we don’t know whether there’s some third factor out there in the world that’s causing them both to engage in that activity and to seek out this music.”

JUst play the song backwards and thge teens will do their himework and cut the grass without being told.

Sex Ed Misinforms

It is Sunday….It is SEX!

The report is authored by Texas State University professors David Wiley and Kelly Wilson, who submitted open records requests to Texas’ 1,031 school districts (not including charter schools) for textbooks, curricula and other documents related to sexuality education. Wiley and Wilson said 990 districts, 96 percent, responded.

In the report, the researchers say:

“More than 3.7 million Texas students currently attend school in a district where they will not encounter even the most basic information about how to protect themselves from unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. … The size and location of a school district does affect the likelihood a student will encounter more comprehensive information (abstinence-plus). Students in large, urban districts still largely hear an abstinence-only message, but close to one in five districts include more comprehensive information. That is a substantially higher rate of abstinence-plus education than the state average. Compare that to rural areas, where we did not find a single instance of any information beyond abstinence among the state’s smallest districts. Worse still, 16 percent of these small, rural districts forgo sexuality education altogether.”

“If lawmakers intended [School Health Advisory Councils] to ensure appropriate content and instruction in the classroom, data gathered for this report would indicate that this experiment in local control must be judged a failure. … More than three-quarters of Texas school boards passed policies, adopted curricula and contracted with providers without any formal advice from their local SHACs. Almost a quarter (24.8 percent) of districts reported no formal policy at all governing sexuality education. Teachers in these schools must address the sensitive topics surrounding human sexuality with no guidance — or protection — from a policy adopted by the local school board.”

“A common thread running throughout materials submitted by most districts is the use of fear- and shame-based instruction about sex. … The state’s most widely used vendor-produced curriculum, Scott & White Worth the Wait, which is used in 17 percent of Texas school districts, is fairly typical in warning students that premarital sexual activity leads to depression, suicide and divorce later in life.”