Word: ovum
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...Precedents. Medicine does not know for certain how joined twins are formed. Most authorities believe that the splitting of an ovum, which would form identical twins, is somehow arrested before the split is complete. Others, pointing out that Siamese twins show marked differences in height and weight, features and temperament, believe that two separate embryos from different ova may join...
Writing in Fertility in Marriage (Farrar, Straus; $3), Dr. Louis Portnoy of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital put his faith in the basal temperature curve, which drops lower each month at about the time an ovum (egg) is released by the ovary, then rises sharply again, thus marking the most favorable time for conception. This is nonsense, snaps Dr. Edmond J. Farris-no M.D., but an anatomist (Ph.D.) who has trodden on many a medical toe with his hobnailed views...
...Farris method, two immature female white rats are injected with the woman's urine each day. Then the rats are killed. The time when the woman's ovum will be released is predicted by observing the reddening of the rats' ovaries. With that knowledge, a physician can advise a couple when to have relations with the best chance of causing conception-sometimes fixing the time as precisely as a six-to-twelve-hour period, Dr. Farris claims. Some extreme examples: one man left a board meeting, at which he was being elected executive vice president...
...that of postcoital artificial insemination between spouses . . . What medical science does [in such cases] is to further pump or inject the semen, coitally deposited, right into the external os, into the cervical canal, hoping that the teeming millions of injected spermatozoa may swim their way up ... to meet an ovum.. This method, utilized to aid nature, might obtain the moralist's permission...
Quantity. In experiments last year Umbaugh induced three foster pregnancies, but all aborted. He believes now that the fault was multiple pregnancy: he had injected 15 ova at once, and cows have difficulty in carrying even twins. In future, he intends to insert only one fertilized ovum into each foster...