Reproductive Tourism Lays Bare the Fertility Industry’s Market Orientation

Last updated on: January 10, 2012 at 10:33 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

A reader sent me a link to a Slate article about the burgeoning practice of reproductive or fertility “tourism.” This is an increasingly common practice by which infertile people from one country access fertility services in another country, often for economic reasons, but also for regulatory reasons. For example, people from relatively wealthy Western nations hire low-income Indian women to serve as surrogates, often also procuring donated gametes through the same clinics that recruit and care for the surrogates. In... Read more

Eggsploitation’s Bad Science

Last updated on: January 8, 2012 at 8:01 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

In Thursday’s post, I mentioned the independent film Eggsploitation, which I criticized for its “junk science.” The filmmaker, Jennifer Lahl, asked me to clarify what I meant by that criticism. Although I’ve written about this film before, because this is a new blog with some new readers, I’m going to respond to her publicly. I hope my response also clarifies my approach to reproductive ethics. Eggsploitation’s overall message is that the combination of infertile patients desperate for viable eggs and... Read more

Check Out My New Web Site!

Last updated on: January 5, 2012 at 3:14 pm By Ellen Painter Dollar

I finally have a dedicated author web site at www.ellenpainterdollar.com. A big thanks to Marc Miller of Big Ocean Studios for creating my site within a tight budget. I highly recommend him to any authors or other folk who need a nice web site but don’t have thousands of dollars to spend! I invite you to go explore my new site. Much of the information there is also available here on the blog. But there are two additional areas on... Read more

Fertility Treatment Might Cause Ovarian Cancer (But Your Doctor is Unlikely to Tell You That)

Last updated on: January 4, 2012 at 10:23 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

A large, comprehensive study in the Netherlands indicates that ovarian stimulation (artificially inducing a woman’s ovaries to produce multiple eggs) increases the risk of ovarian cancer two-fold. Previous studies examining a possible link between fertility treatment and increased cancer risk were inconclusive for various reasons, including the studies being too small. (That has not stopped some advocates who are uniformly opposed to assisted reproduction from using junk science to make unsubstantiated claims about the link between fertility drugs and cancer,... Read more

5 Reasons I’m Ignoring Your Healthy-Eating Advice

Last updated on: January 2, 2012 at 6:31 pm By Ellen Painter Dollar

Eating better to improve health and/or lose weight tops many New Year’s resolution lists. Most of us know our dietary pitfalls—for example, I don’t eat as many veggies as I should because I hate chopping stuff—and what we should do to eat more healthfully. Yet we often don’t. Once, when I was complaining to a friend about a persnickety, fault-finding dietitian at my daughter’s orthopedic hospital, my friend said, “Who can blame dietitians for being crabby? No one listens to... Read more

It Only Took 10 Years

Last updated on: January 1, 2012 at 9:34 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

This month my book, No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction, will be released. As with nearly any book, particularly a first one, the journey to this milestone was a long one. It started 10 years ago when, in 2002, Daniel and I decided to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to try to conceive a child who would not inherit my disabling bone disorder, osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), which causes fragile bones... Read more

10 Favorite Blog Posts from 2011

Last updated on: December 30, 2011 at 7:08 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

I thought I’d join the blogger bandwagon and finish up my week of year-end lists with a list of my top blog posts from 2011. Because this blog is only two weeks old, I’m including links to five favorite posts from each of my former blogs. I should note that these are a subjective choice. Each of these posts got a lot of response from readers in one way or the other—comments, shares on Facebook and Twitter, page views, etc.—and... Read more

My 6 Favorite Books of 2011

Last updated on: December 28, 2011 at 7:37 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

My big Christmas gift this year was a Kindle Fire from my mom and dad. Despite the Fire’s well-publicized flaws, I have quickly become enamored of having an e-reader. When I found myself the day after Christmas without a book to read, I just clicked on the handy link to the New York Times bestseller list, where I quickly found and purchased several books I’ve been meaning to read. Such immediate gratification, of course, came at a price. But in... Read more

4 Great Blogs I Discovered This Year

Last updated on: December 27, 2011 at 7:19 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

Before getting to the real topic of today’s post, I wanted to share this post from Prison Fellowship, which picked up on my mention of the Angel Tree project in last week’s post on letting our kids lead us toward giving at Christmas. This week, I’ll be posting several year-end lists, starting with today’s list of great blogs I discovered this year. I subscribe to many blogs through Google Reader, but there are only a handful that inspire me to... Read more

Learning to Love the Christmas Pageant

Last updated on: December 22, 2011 at 7:34 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

It’s nearly here—Christmas Eve. Dozens of cookies are stacked on my back porch, most of the gifts are wrapped and in their basement hiding place ready to be piled under the tree, the house is clean…enough. Tomorrow night, we’ll begin our celebrations with our church’s Christmas pageant, in which my oldest daughter will be an innkeeper, my middle daughter an angel, and my five-year-old son will be in the “starring” role of…you guessed it…the star. The pageant tradition is one... Read more