Word: fallopian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such observations have set many a feminist off on fanciful speculations of her own. Author Mary Ellmann, for instance, has noted that "each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition from the ovary through the Fallopian tubes to the uterus, an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily, too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa...
...complex hormonal system sends a messenger chemical to her ovaries, telling them to ripen one of the 50,000 or more potential egg cells with which she was born. Usually, only one ovary responds, and on Day 10 or soon after, a fully formed ovum is released into the Fallopian tube. The ovum takes three or four days to work its way down
Other contraceptive techniques are farther off-but not beyond possibility. How about a drug that works the way an IUD apparently does, speeding ova through the Fallopian tubes so that they cannot be fertilized, or preventing the implantation of fertilized ova in the uterine wall? Searle's Dr. Thomas P. Carney is searching for a chemical that will serve to activate the specific muscles involved. In his research with infertile women, St. Louis' Dr. William H. Masters noticed that some had cervical mu cus so hostile to sperm that it killed them almost on contact. In normal women...
...nature has worked things out, a woman secretes a moderate amount of estrogenic hormones during the first ten or twelve days of her menstrual cycle. At about the time she ovulates, releasing into her Fallopian tubes an egg ready for fertilization, her output of estrogens rises sharply. Had it been at this higher level all along, she never would have ovulated. Soon after ovulation, estrogen output declines and there is a sudden increase in a different hormone-progesterone, sometimes called "nature's contraceptive," which prevents ovulation until the next cycle...
...woman, or salpingectomy, is admittedly major surgery, but Dr. Alan F. Guttmacher, president of Planned Parenthood-World Population, contends that it is no more difficult or dangerous than an appendectomy. It must be done in a hospital under general anesthesia. Through an abdominal incision, a gynecological surgeon cuts both Fallopian tubes and ties off the separated ends. After that there is no way for an egg to pass from the ovary to the womb...