Word: ovum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...possible to discover the presence of a bleeding disorder known as hemophilia. A female carrier of hemophilia will have either a normal X chromosome or a defective one--one that is linked to hemophilia. Male infants conceived from an ovum containing the defective X chromosome will be hemophiliacs. It could be perfectly simple, then, to test carriers of hemophilia, determine whether or not their babies are defective, and then depending on the wishes of the parents to abort...
...says, even if a fetus is not human, "to destroy what might be human is to be willing to destroy what is human." In that case, then contraception is equivalent to murder since any pair of ovum and sperm has the potential to be human. Would Jimson recommend that we all burn our Trojans and Enovids and fall into bed precipitously...
...Lonely Ovum...
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...
...factor over which would-be parents have some control, provided they start to exercise it early enough, is the age of the ovum at the time of conception. Rockefeller University's Dr. E. Witschi reported that studies in several animal species show that an old or "stale" egg is especially likely, if fertilized, to result in the birth of a defective baby. In humans, it is known that the risk of having a mongoloid, for instance, increases from one in 2,000 births for a woman at age 25 to one in 50 at age 45. For a woman...