Word: womening
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...reasoning behind the prerequisite, according to officials, is that spaceflight could potentially harm the women's fertility. "It's out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots," Xu Xianrong, director of the PLA's Clinical Aerospace Medicine Center in Beijing and a member of the selection panel, told the official government news agency Xinhua. "Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious, because this is a first for China." Ensuring that the female astronauts have already reproduced, he said, will guarantee that their family...
...couples face, says "where there is no balance and the career has demanded too much of the woman, there may be chronic sleep deprivation, stress-related disorders, anxiety, depression and sacrifices to parenting ability and quality of life." But, he adds, "it would be a mistake to assume that women who intentionally delay marriage to pursue other goals are less capable or mature...
...known, some medical specialists hold that it's actually male astronauts whose reproductive capabilities are more vulnerable. "As far as the acute effects of radiation," says Dr. Richard Jennings, who practices gynecology and aerospace medicine in Texas and co-authored the study, "men are much more at risk than women since the spermatogonia are very sensitive to radiation." (Watch a video about a female welder for NASA...
...potential solution, the report proposes not that female pilots begin having children earlier, but that members of both sexes store reproductive cells for future use. For women, banking eggs would not only eliminate the theoretical difficulty of damage to reproductive tissues by cosmic radiation, but also solve the problem of age-related fertility decline. (See pictures of the world's space programs...
...remedy, however, is not likely to be of much interest to China, whose one-child policy demonstrates the nation's ongoing commitment to curbing - not encouraging - population growth. Beijing, it seems, is not so much concerned with disrupting family planning - if it were, it might consider astronaut applications from women who are certain they do not want children or broaden the prerequisite to include spacemen - but with the image of the women it recruits to represent it on the galactic stage. In China, being a married mother is, arguably, as much a mark of excellence as sweet-smelling breath...