Word: childlessness
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...society legitimates the practice, does it imperil its most venerable notions of kinship? Or if surrogacy is prohibited, are childless couples denied a way to realize the most venerated purpose of their union? Such issues are central to a New Jersey trial in which a judge must answer the most searing question of all: Whose child is this...
...after another, life's most intimate and privileged matters -- sexual relations, conception, birth and death -- have been delivered to the unsanctified ground of science and commerce. The results may be welcome: the laboratory study of sex leads to treatments for sexual dysfunction; technologies of fertility give hope to the childless; mechanical organs offer the chance of longer life. But even as the gains are counted, the reservations mount. Even when the mind assents, the heart sometimes shivers...
Having children can sometimes be a trial. But a study revealed at the Dallas meeting last week by Epidemiologist Evelyn Talbott suggests that not having offspring can lead to far more serious consequences. Childless women over 50, she reported, may be at greater risk for sudden, fatal heart attacks than their contemporaries who are mothers...
Were the heart-attack deaths of the childless older women triggered in part by psychological pressures, such as loneliness and regret over not having had children? Talbott leans toward a more biological explanation. In these women, she says, abnormal levels of female hormones may have played a role. She concedes that for now the study "raises more questions than it answers...
Whitehead, 30, a New Jersey housewife, volunteered her services to the Infertility Center of New York last year because, she said, she wanted to help a childless couple. After psychological testing and legal counseling, she agreed to be artificially inseminated by William Stern, 40, whose wife Elizabeth, a 40-year-old pediatrician, says she cannot have children. In return, the Sterns promised to pay Whitehead $10,000 and the same amount to the center, as well as to cover about $5,000 in other expenses...