Word: uterus
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...having babies long after their prime childbearing year -- even after menopause. In yet another twist, Arlette Schweitzer, 42, of Aberdeen, S. Dak., is expected to give birth to her own twin grandchildren next month, having served as a surrogate for her daughter Christa, who was born without a uterus. "Next to Christa, I'm the happiest woman in the world," says Schweitzer. "We feel so blessed...
...many key events in reproduction out of the body, where they are subject to the vagaries of human biology, and perform them in vitro, "in glass." By removing mature eggs from the ovaries, mixing them with sperm in a Petri dish and reintroducing the resulting embryos directly into the uterus, doctors can bypass most of the important barriers to fertility, from low sperm counts to nonfunctioning Fallopian tubes...
...that the embryos just wouldn't stick. Helped by hormone treatments, a woman might produce dozens of eggs each cycle. Her husband's sperm might fertilize 10 of them. But for reasons that remained mysterious, the embryos simply refused to take root -- or implant -- on the walls of the uterus. Even the best-run clinics were getting success rates not much higher than 15% to 20% just five years...
...know that implantation is one of the most difficult hurdles in the human reproductive system. It is estimated that even among perfectly fertile couples, as many as one-third of all pregnancies are lost, before anyone knows they have begun, because the embryos fail to implant in the uterus wall. Only in the past few years have researchers begun to understand why this...
Scientists attribute the implantation rates of GIFT to the way in which the fertilized embryo enters the uterus. In IVF the embryo is squirted, rather violently, into a reproductive tract that has been pretty roughly treated, first by various hormone treatments, then by the egg-retrieval procedure. In GIFT, by contrast, the embryo drifts quietly into the uterus, much as it would naturally. To further improve the success rates, Asch's researchers tried fertilizing the egg in a lab dish and then placing the pre-embryo, or zygote, directly into the Fallopian tube -- a procedure known as ZIFT (zygote intra...