Should A Same Sex Couple Get Fertility Benefits?

Are A Same Sex Couple Entitled to Fertility Benefits?

Same sex couple Sarah Soller-Mihlek, a Brooklyn guitar instructor, and Jill Soller-Mihlek say, “We want to start a family,” speaking into a camera focused on Sarah and “We’ve always dreamed of becoming parents,” adds her wife, Jill.

The couple made the video last year and posted it to Indiegogo, a crowdfunding website, in hopes of raising enough money to pay for fertility treatments. Jill Soller-Mihlek, now 33, was hoping to get pregnant via a sperm donor and intrauterine insemination, which can costs tens of thousands of dollars depending on how long it takes to conceive.

Although the couple’s insurance plan typically covers fertility treatment, their insurer, United Healthcare, would not cover the cost. The reason? Jill Soller-Mihlek didn’t meet its definition of infertility because she did not have sex with men.

The couple’s insurance policy defines infertility as an “inability to achieve pregnancy after 12 months of unprotected heterosexual intercourse.” But women who use sperm donors must pay for costly, physician-supervised therapeutic donor insemination for 12 months before they meet the definition of infertility. (Women 35 and older need to go through six failed attempts before meeting the clinical definition of infertility.)

After the Soller-Mihleks paid $13,507 out of pocket for nine unsuccessful cycles of insemination, they decided to chronicle their travails on Indiegogo and Change.org. While the United Healthcare policy tacitly acknowledges single women and same-sex couples, many policies do not. Some even exclude unwed women. Notably, major insurers like United Healthcare often do cover insemination treatments when the issue is male infertility.

The Soller-Mihleks believe their plan’s criteria for granting medical coverage of fertility treatment reveals a subtle form of discrimination against lesbians. (Needless to say, gay men face even greater obstacles in attempting to gain coverage, given that coverage wouldn’t extend to the woman who’d be carrying for them.)

The Soller-Mihleks say their concern is that a female same sex couple, by definition, is incapable of getting pregnant through heterosexual intercourse and requires medical intervention to conceive. They say the subtext of the United Healthcare policy is that a lesbian could get pregnant by having sex with a man, she just chooses not to.

Shannon Price Minter, head of the legal division at the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco, said: “To me, the central injustice is that when a person has a known condition that precludes them from becoming pregnant, such as a woman who has had her ovaries removed, there is no requirement to go through a period of unprotected intercourse before being recognized as requiring fertility treatments. The same should be true for same-sex couples.”

Tyler Mason, a spokesman for UnitedHealthcare, said the company’s policy is based on the clinical disease of infertility, as defined by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.

“Our coverage criteria are based on clinical trial data, published literature and recommendations from a wide variety of medical specialty societies and state laws,” Mr. Mason wrote in a statement. “We constantly review and update coverage criteria.”

Aetna also uses the clinical definition of infertility to support its reimbursement policies for fertility treatments.

“It’s not a pregnancy benefit,” said Cynthia B. Michener, an Aetna spokeswoman. “It’s based on the clinical disease of infertility, supported by medical evidence and medical society guidelines, including those set out by the A.S.R.M., and it’s the same for everyone.”

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New York Times, November 2, 2015, by Stephanie Fairyington

in Egg Donation / IVF / Known Donor / Legal / Legislation / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Do gay parents parents spend more time with kids?

Study finds gay parents spend significantly more time with kids

Gay parents spend significantly more time with their kids, according to a new study that challenges biases against same-sex parenting.

Researchers from the Population Research Center at the University of Texas found that women in lesbian relationships spend 40% more time engaged in child-focused activities than their straight counterparts, largely because both mothers typically offer as much time as mothers in straight relationships.

Fathers in straight relationships spend only about half as much time on child-focused activity. However, fathers in gay relationships spend roughly the same time as the mothers (around 100 minutes a day).

Lesbian couples invest 40% more time in their children

‘Our findings support the argument that parental investment in children is at least as great – and possibly greater – in same-sex couples as for different-sex couples,’ Kate Prickett, the lead author of the study, wrote on the Child and Family Blog.

‘On measures of child-focused time, children with two parents of the same sex families actually seem to receive more time investment. They received more focused time from their parents – 3.5 hours a day, compared with 2.5 hours by children with two different-sex parents.’

Child-focused activities are those that support their physical and cognitive development, such as reading to them, playing with them, helping with homework, bathing them and taking them to the doctor.

It does not include watching television or doing housework while a child is around. Child-focused activities, as well as certain family events such as eating meals together or reading books, are associated with better child outcomes. The study used 11 years of census data from 2003-2013, with a sample of more than 40,000 parents, 55 parents of whom were in gay relationships.

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gaystarnews.com – by Darren Wee, October 21, 2015
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Same sex couples face more obstacles to infertility treatment

Study suggests same sex couples face more obstacles to infertility treatment

Same sex couples encounter more obstacles to treatment for infertility than opposite-sex couples, suggests a new study that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

“For example, same sex couples often must undergo psychological evaluations before being treated for infertility — a process that is not normally required for opposite-sex couples,” said study author Ann V. Bell, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, who noted that the U.S. medical system is standardized to work with heterosexual couples.

Bell’s study is based on interviews with 95 people — 41 heterosexual women of low socioeconomic status, 30 heterosexual men, and 24 women in same-sex relationships. “These people are on the margins of our understandings of infertility, as it is generally viewed as a white, wealthy, heterosexual woman’s issue,” Bell said.

The new study builds on her 2014 book Misconception, which focused on the 41 women of low socioeconomic status, as well as 17 women of high socioeconomic status, to explore social class and infertility. Through her interviews with the 41-women for the book, Bell found that their experiences related to infertility were shaped by inaccurate stereotypes and that doctors often assumed infertility was not a problem for them.

Bell has extended her earlier research beyond social class to include the effects of infertility on men and same-sex couples. The “medicalization” of infertility — studying and treating it as a medical condition — is a process that has increasingly led to disparities and inequalities, she said.

“Most of the research out there is about women, even though just as many men are affected by infertility,” Bell said. “It’s still viewed as a woman’s issue.”

Click here to read the entire article.

 

EurekaAlert.org, August 26, 2015

CHICAGO —

in Anonymous/Known Donation / IVF / Science / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Egg Donation or Sperm: kids have a right to know ?

Do children have the right to know if they’re the result of a stranger’s sperm or egg donation?

Although she has two half-sisters from her dad’s previous marriage, there was nothing in Jess Pearce’s childhood to make her doubt her biological origins. She tanned, her father tanned; he was tall, so was she. Yet when she was 28, her mother dropped a bombshell.

“She sat me down one Sunday afternoon and said she had something she wanted to tell me,” Jess recalls. “She looked quite upset, and I thought, ‘She’s going to die.’” Instead, her mother told her, “Your dad isn’t your real dad.”

Jess’s father had undergone a vasectomy after his first marriage. When he met her mother he tried to get it reversed, but the operation failed and they opted for sperm donation through the NHS. Jess was conceived on the third try at St George’s Hospital in Hyde Park Corner; all her parents knew about the donor was that he was from Middlesex. The clinic advised Jess’s parents to keep the insemination a secret. “No one knew,” says Jess. “It was literally just my mum and my dad and two of their best friends.” This was the norm back then, says Olivia Montuschi, co-founder of the Donor Conception Network. “The vast majority of [parents] were told not to tell their children… They just thought it was in everybody’s best interest that the secret was kept – go home, make love, and who knows?”

Olivia herself has had two children through donor insemination because her husband is infertile. They had resolved to be honest with their kids from the outset. “I remember telling this to a nurse when she was inseminating me, and getting a very odd look as if to say, ‘Why would you do that?’” she says.

Reactions range from shock and horror to “That’s interesting; I thought there was something odd going on,” says Montuschi. “More often than not, you will find that there have been odd discrepancies in things that parents have said,” she says. “Or [the child] will wonder about the complete lack of physical likeness or [shared] interests with the non-genetic parent.”

Though some parents feel under pressure to tell their kids about their genetic heritage, many decide to keep the details of their child’s conception under lock and key. A 2003 survey by the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge found that 47 per cent of parents of kids conceived after egg donation had no intention of telling. It’s not just the child’s feelings at stake. Even a genuine desire to tell can create tensions with grandparents or other family members who think it should remain a secret. Then there’s the wider taboo of where babies come from. “A lot of people find it really difficult to talk about, not necessarily because there is a genetic difference in the family, but because the discussion takes them into areas of parenthood where they wouldn’t normally have to go,” says Petra Nordqvist of the University of Manchester. “They’d have to say, ‘My sperm doesn’t work and we’ve had to undergo five years of IVF.’ Some people just hate having that kind of conversation with their families.”

Click here to read the entire article.

theindependent.co.uk by Linda Geddes, August 10, 2015

in Anonymous/Known Donation / Egg Donation / Ethics / Parenting / Science / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Kids of gay parents fare well, 3 more studies find!

3 (more) studies find children of gay parents fare well

NEW YORK — On the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, new research suggests that children raised by gay parents are well adjusted and resilient, HealthDay reports. Four new studies were scheduled to be presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Toronto that set out to assess the psychological and sociological health of children raised by same-sex couples. One study looked at the experience of 49 pre-adolescent youngsters adopted by either two-dad or two-mom households. The children’s average age was 8.

Led by Rachel Farr, a research assistant professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, researchers interviewed both children and parents. Nearly 80 percent of the boys and girls said they felt “different” from other children because of their parents’ status, the study found. But less than 60 percent felt they had been stigmatized because of their same-sex family structure. And 70 percent appeared to respond to adversity with resilience, demonstrating an upbeat attitude about their family, the researchers found according to HealthDay. A second study compared rates of anxiety and/or depression among 3- to 10-year-olds raised by 68 gay male couples with those of youngsters raised by 68 heterosexual parents. The team led by Robert-Jay Green, a retired professor of clinical psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco, found that all of the children were psychologically healthy.

Click here to read the entire article.

 

Washington Blade – by Staff, August 7, 2015

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iSperm lets your iPad analyze your swimmers at home

CNET.com, by Michael Franco – July 20, 2015

The iPad can be used to show home movies — including films of babies as they come home from the hospital, take their first steps, and later, lock themselves in their rooms with loud music and their cell phones. Soon, iPads might be able to show a home movie of what a baby looked like before it was even created, by beaming live-action movies of your sperm swimming around.

That will be the case if Taiwanese startup Aidmics has its way.

The company has already invented a device called iSperm which according to Reuters has been sold to almost 200 farmers around the world. They use it to analyze the sperm counts of their boar to maximize the success of breeding programs. The news agency reports that Aidmics has announced plans to seek approval from the US Food and Drug Administration next year to expand the device’s use to men.

“Morphological assessment of sperm head and tail has never been this easy,” says the iSperm website.

Click here to read the entire article.

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Unused Embryos Pose Difficult Issue: What to Do With Them

By Tamar Lewin, New York Times, June 17, 2015

After years of infertility, Angel and Jeff Watts found a young egg donor to help them have a baby. They fertilized her eggs with Mr. Watts’s sperm and got 10 good embryos. Four of those embryos were transferred to Ms. Watts’s womb, resulting in two sets of twins — Alexander and Shelby, now 4 years old, and Angelina and Charles, not yet 2.

But that left six frozen embryos, and on medical advice, Ms. Watts, 45, had no plans for more children. So in December she took to Facebook to try to find a nearby Tennessee family that wanted them.

“We have 6 good quality frozen six-day-old embryos to donate to an amazing family who wants a large family,” she posted. “We prefer someone who has been married several years in a steady loving relationship and strong Christian background, and who does not already have kids, but wants a boat load.”

In storage facilities across the nation, hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos — perhaps a million — are preserved in silver tanks of liquid nitrogen. Some are in storage for cancer patients trying to preserve their chance to have a family after chemotherapy destroys their fertility. But most are leftovers from the booming assisted reproduction industry, belonging to couples like the Wattses, who could not conceive naturally.

And increasingly families, clinics and the courts are facing difficult choices on what to do with them — decisions that involve profound questions about the beginning of life, the definition of family and the technological advances that have opened new reproductive possibilities.

Since the first American “test tube” baby was born in 1981, in vitro fertilization, at a cost of $12,000 or more per cycle, has grown to account for more than 1.5 percent of all United States births.

The embryos with the greatest chance of developing into a healthy baby are used first, and the excess are frozen; a 2002 survey found about 400,000 frozen embryos, and another in 2011 estimated 612,000. Now, many reproductive endocrinologists say, the total may be about a million.

Couples are generally glad to have the leftover embryos, backups in case a pregnancy does not result from the first tries.

“But if I ask what they’ll do with them, they often have a Scarlett O’Hara response: I’ll think about that tomorrow,” said Dr. Mark V. Sauer, of Columbia University’s Center for Women’s Reproductive Care. “Couples don’t always agree about the moral and legal status of the embryo, where life begins, and how religion enters into it, and a lot of them end up kicking the can down the road.’’

There are no national statistics on what happens with these leftover embryos. As a practical matter, many sit in storage indefinitely, academic researchers say, either at fertility clinics or other facilities, costing $300 to $1,200 a year. A small percentage of people stop paying the storage fees and leave it to the clinic or facility to figure out what to do.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Egg Donation / IVF / Legal / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

The Regnerus Gay Parenting Study Is Even More Flawed Than We Thought

by Camille Beredjick, May 12, 2015

As they gear up for legal battles nationwide, anti-LGBT activists’ weapon of choice is the infamous “Regnerus study,” a report by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus that claimed to “prove” same-sex parenting is inherently harmful to children. The study has been thoroughly debunked as methodologically and ethically flawed, and experts far and wide — including Regnerus’ own university — have said they want no affiliation with it.

We thought we’d seen it all, but nope — two sociologists are taking another crack at determining the study’s scientific validity (or lack thereof), and what they’re finding is even more absurd than the fallacies we were already aware of.

Indiana University’s Brian Powell and the University of Connecticut’s Simon Cheng actually redid the study for Social Science Research, the same journal that published the original article. Not surprisingly, when they used proper methodology and eliminated “suspect data” — see below for a laughable example — they found that kids fare just as well when raised by a same-sex couple as by a mom and dad.

From Right Wing Watch:

By eliminating suspect data — for example, a 25-year-old respondent who claimed to be 7’8″ tall, 88 pounds, married 8 times and with 8 children, and another who reported having been arrested at age 1 — and correcting what they view as Regnerus’ methodological errors, Cheng and Powell found that Regnerus’ conclusions were so “fragile” that his data could just as easily show that children raised by gay and lesbian parents don’t face negative adult outcomes.

“[W]hen equally plausible and, in our view, preferred methodological decisions are used,” they wrote, “a different conclusion emerges: adult children who lived with same-sex parents show comparable outcome profiles to those from other family types, including intact biological families.”

In his original study, Regnerus claimed adults who had been raised by gay or lesbian parents were more likely to have depression, abuse drugs, engage in criminal behavior, and acquire STDs, as well as have a higher likelihood of having experienced childhood sexual abuse. Regnerus and others have used these findings to testify against marriage equality, but a more detailed look at the study shows that he hardly spoke to any children of same-sex parents at all:

The Regnerus study was promptly scrutinized by fellow social scientists, who pointed out major flaws in his methodology. Many people who he categorized as having been raised by a gay or lesbian parent had spent very little time with that parent or with his or her same-sex partner. Even Regnerus admitted that his data included only two people who said they had been raised for their entire childhoods by a same-sex couple.

…

Regnerus compared the outcomes of children raised in what he called “intact biological families” (with married biological parents) “lesbian mother” families and “gay father” families, finding differences between “lesbian mother” families and “intact biological families” in 24 of the 40 areas he looked at, and differences between “gay father” families and “intact biological” ones in 19 areas.

But in scrutinizing Regnerus’ data, Cheng and Powell determined that of the 236 respondents whom Regnerus had identified as having been raised by a lesbian mother or gay father, one-tenth had never even lived with the parent in question and an additional one-sixth hadn’t lived with that parent for more than one year. Still more had provided inconsistent or unreliable responses to survey questions, throwing their reliability into doubt. That means, Powell says, that over one-third of the 236 people whom Regnerus classified as having been raised by a lesbian mother or gay father “should absolutely not have ever been considered by Regnerus in this study.”

Click here to read the entire article.

in Education / Parenting / Religious / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Premature Babies May Survive at 22 Weeks if Treated, Study Finds

May 7, 2015, by Pam Belluck

A small number of very premature babies are surviving earlier outside the womb than doctors once thought possible, a new study has documented, raising questions about how aggressively they should be treated and posing implications for the debate about abortion.

The study, of thousands of premature births, found that a tiny minority of babies born at 22 weeks who were medically treated survived with few health problems, although the vast majority died or suffered serious health issues. Leading medical groups had already been discussing whether to lower the consensus on the age of viability, now cited by most medical experts as 24 weeks.

The Supreme Court has said that states must allow abortion if a fetus is not viable outside the womb, and changing that standard could therefore raise questions about when abortion is legal.

For most parents and doctors, the new study will intensify the agonizing choices faced about how intensively to treat such infants.

The study, one of the largest and most systematic examinations of care for very premature infants, found that hospitals with sophisticated neonatal units varied widely in their approach to 22-week-olds, ranging from a few that offer no active medical treatment to a handful that assertively treat most cases with measures like ventilation, intubation and surfactant to improve the functioning of babies’ lungs.

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Expensive, Exhausting, And Deeply Unsexy: Babymaking While Queer

April 21, 2015 by Lindsay King-Miller at Buzzed.com

My partner Charlie and I had been married for a little over a year when we decided to start trying to have a baby in August 2013. Despite being the butch in our relationship and using male pronouns, Charlie knew from the start that he wanted be the gestational parent. He’s always had a fascination with pregnancy and birth — a fascination that once led him to briefly pursue a midwifery apprenticeship — and he was excited to experience all the highs and lows of carrying a child. I, on the other hand, dread physical pain, and was overjoyed by the prospect of becoming a parent without going through pregnancy.

Charlie’s cycle operates with clocklike precision, so we figured it would be easy enough to identify the opportune moment. We started by trying to conceive at home — all you need is a syringe and a clean jar. We painted our guest room in pastels, recruited a dude we know and love to donate sperm, and got underway.

Unfortunately, the magic I’d anticipated was pretty much gone the first time I went for a walk around the block so that our friend could jerk off in our bathroom. After that, we decided that it would be less awkward if he made his donation at his own home, then dropped by with the jar — sperm can live outside the body for several hours, especially if they’re kept warm — but calling and saying, “Charlie’s ovulating, can you come over?” wasn’t very romantic either. We had to skip insemination one month because our donor couldn’t escape his roommates, who didn’t know about our conception attempts, for the requisite five minutes. Also unforeseen was the discomfort of making small talk every time he dropped off his jar, camouflaged in a paper bag — no one really wants to chat about how work is going at such a moment, but without a little conversation the whole thing felt too transactional. “Thank you for your genetic material, Unit B. Your service is no longer required.”

And there was a squick factor that neither Charlie nor I anticipated. We were competent, sex-positive adults who wanted to have a baby — surely we could handle a jar with a little semen in it! Turns out that other people’s bodily fluids are disconcerting, no matter how chill and mature you promise yourself you’ll be about the whole thing. I’m sorry to contribute to the body-shaming and negativity that pervades our culture, but let’s be real: A jar of sperm is super gross. Every month, Charlie would calmly draw up the sperm into the syringe while I shrieked and covered my eyes as though it was the gory scene in a horror movie (no, that’s not true — movie gore bothers me way less).

The insemination wasn’t much better. We had originally looked forward to this part — the two of us alone in our room, sharing the beautiful, intimate moment of creating our future child. Inseminating just before or even during sex is supposed to up your odds of success, which we figured was a bonus. We’d read about it online and it seemed easy, straightforward, and even fun. But it was almost impossible to get into the moment, since we were pressed for time (sperm were dying by the second!) and limited by the necessity that Charlie stay lying on his back with a pillow under his hips. I tried to help with the syringe, but couldn’t find a comfortable angle, so Charlie had to take over.

Nothing kills a mood like a syringe.

(Originally Posted Marrh 19, 2015)

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in IVF / Known Donor / Legal / Parenting / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments