This book uniquely explores American cultural values as a factor in maternal health. It looks beyond the social determinants of health as primarily contributing to the escalating maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States.    The United States is an outlier with poor maternal health outcomes and high morbidity/mortality in comparison to other high-resource and many mid-level resource nations. While the social determinants of health identify social and environmental conditions affecting maternal health, they do not answer the broader underlying question of why many American women, in a high-resource environment, experience poor maternal health outcomes. Frequent near-misses, high levels of severe childbearing-related morbidity, and high maternal mortality are comparable to those of lower-resource nations.  This book includes contributions from recognized medical and cultural anthropologists, and diverse clinical and public health professionals. The authors examine American patterns of decision-making from the perspectives of intersecting social, cultural, and medical values influencing maternal health outcomes. Using an interdisciplinary critical analysis approach, the work draws upon decision-making theory and life course theory. Topics explored include: Cultural values as a basis for decision-making Social regard for motherhood Immigrants, refugees and undocumented mothers Cultural conflicts and maternal autonomy Health outcomes among justice-involved mothers Maternal Health and American Cultural Values: Beyond the Social Determinants is an essential resource for clinical and public health practitioners and their students, providing a framework for graduate-level courses in public health, the health sciences, women’s studies, and the social sciences. The book also targets anthropologists, sociologists, and women studies scholars seeking to explain the links between American cultural decision-making and health outcomes. Policy-makers, ethicists, journalists, and advocates for reproductive health justice also would find the text a useful resource.

How do rapid social and technological changes shape reproductive realms today? This book considers the complex choices, anxieties and challenges that come alongside postmodern reproduction for women and men in the West. Topics include surrogacy, fatherhood, sperm banking, egg donation, contraception, breastfeeding, and postpartum body image.

Fertility preservation has become one of the most important and fast growing fields of reproductive medicine. Although there are several strategies for fertility preservation in female, most of them are still considered experimental. It is important to perfect the existing technologies, but also developing new strategies should be actively sought. The future development of fertility preservation strategies should be based on the sound scientific knowledge and principles. One of the main objectives of fertility preservation in females is prevention of oocyte depletion. The mechanisms of oocyte loss and survival in the ovary are complex, which include genetic control both in germ cells and in somatic cells, DNA damage and repair mechanism, apoptosis and autophagy, and other poorly understood molecular mechanisms. To develop clinically effective and safe strategies for fertility preservation, it is essential to know and understand the fundamentals of oocyte and ovarian biology at the molecular level. Thus, the purpose of this edition is to review the current progress in research related to molecular and genetic control of oocyte development that can be applied to fertility preservation. The main topics that are discussed in this publication include molecular signaling mechanisms of oocyte activation and loss, genomic integrity of oocytes, and epigenetics. "

The average physician and even cancer care-givers are not knowledgeable about the effects of cancer treatment on sex and reproductive life. They are even less aware of the options available for treatment of such patients. "Cancer and Sexual Health" fills a great need for a reference work devoted to the link between cancer and human sexuality. The volume is designed to give a comprehensive and state-of-the-art review of the sexual and reproductive consequences of cancer diagnosis and treatment. It will prove an invaluable resource for those clinicians caring for cancer patients as well as acting as a reference text for the sexual medicine clinician who may not see a large number of cancer patients.

This important volume brings together findings in the psychological and medical treatment of sex offenders. It disseminates research from experts around the world in the field of sex offender treatment, making this knowledge available to researchers and clinicians everywhere. Professionals struggling to find effective methods for treating their patients will find Sex Offender Treatment a valuable tool for their daily work. Chapters in Sex Offender Treatment cover a variety of topics. Authors examine such areas as psychodynamic and psychiatric disorders associated with the sex offender, findings on pharmacologic interventions, treatment techniques and the public perception of sex offender treatment, and cautionary notes for those who provide therapy for sex offenders.Within these areas, some specific themes addressed include: types of personality disorders and implications for more effective treatment the effectiveness of antiandrogen treatment and the promising results of other pharmacotherapies techniques for developing insight in incest perpetrators a study of adult male incest offenders'perceptions of the treatment process an adolescent treatment program using a family communication approach hypotheses regarding sexual offenders and men who batter, using psychodynamic and feminist theory Full of practical strategies and useful information, Sex Offender Treatment is a book professionals will reach for again and again.

Numerous reports demonstrate that the reproductive system could be affected by multiple potential toxicological agents. The volume includes different aspects of the development of new approaches to in vitro testing using sperm cells and systems involved on reproduction in mammals. Comparative analysis of in vivo and in vitro methods has been included to take steps towards the further development of and applications of new systems for germline toxicology.

Volume Two advances the exploration of the fundamental principles of oxidative stress and toxicity on male (and female) reproduction. It includes the advances in research on male reproductive health, the impact of environmental factors, the protective measures using bioactive compounds and traditional medicines, and how to limit toxic exposure. It includes coverage of: Oxidative stress and male infertility Environmental stressors and sexual health Heavy metals, pesticides, fine particle toxicity and male reproduction Protective measures against oxidative stress in gametes/embryos by using bioactive compounds/phytomedicines in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Role of reactive oxygen species on female reproduction Radiation and mutagenic factors affecting the male reproductive system Both volumes provide a comprehensive look at the most basic concepts and advanced research being conducted by world famous scientists and researchers in male infertility and reproduction.

Master the essentials of oral biology with patient-centered approach. New illustrations and discussions of emerging issues keep you updated with advances in the dental professions and patient care. Written by Daniel J. Chiego Jr., and Professor Sausan Al Kawas both are experienced educators and researchers in oral histology and embryology, this book provides the basic science you need to succeed in the classroom and in clinical practice.

This book discusses many aspects of fetuses and motherhood from fields as wide as sociology and medicine. It examines changing perceptions of the fetus over recent decades, comparing western ideas with those of non-western countries; examining maternal mental health during COVID-19 and charting the ascent of the 'fetus' to a cult phenomenon, which has currently reappeared in the courts. This work, given its multifaceted approach, will be of interest to a varied and wide range of people, from parents to doctors and nurses, to anthropologists and ethnologists, to scientists, to students of various disciplines, to psychologists and psychoanalysts, to lawyers dealing with the topic and to a general public simply interested in these fundamental themes.

The overall scope of this new series will be to evolve an understanding of the genetic basis of (1) how early mesoderm commits to cells of a heart lineage that progressively and irreversibly assemble into a segmented, primary heart tube that can be remodeled into a four-chambered organ, and (2) how blood vessels are derived and assembled both in the heart and in the body. Our central aim is to establish a four-dimensional, spatiotemporal foundation for the heart and blood vessels that can be genetically dissected for function and mechanism. Since Robert DeHaan's seminal chapter "Morphogenesis of the Vertebrate Heart" published in Organogenesis (Holt Rinehart & Winston, NY) in 1965, there have been surprisingly few books devoted to the subject of cardiovascular morpho genesis, despite the enormous growth of interest that occurred nationally and inter nationally. Most writings on the subject have been scholarly compilations of the proceedings of major national or international symposia or multi authored volumes, without a specific theme. What is missing are the unifying concepts that can often make sense out of a burgeoning database of facts. The Editorial Board of this new series believes the time has come for a book series dedicated to cardiovascular mor not only as an important archival and didactic reference phogenesis that will serve source for those who have recently come into the field but also as a guide to the evo lution of a field that is clearly coming of age.

Drawing on never before used archival materials, Replacing the Dead exposes the history of Soviet and Russian abortion policy. It is not unusual for nations recovering from wars to incentivize their populations to raise their birthrates. The post-World War II Soviet pronatalism campaign attempted this on an unprecedented scale, aiming to replace a lost population of 27 million. Why, then, did the USSR re-legalize abortion in 1955? Mie Nakachi uses previously hidden archival data to reveal that decisions made by Stalin and Khruschev under the rubric of 'family law' created a society of broken marriages, "fatherless" children, and abortions, each totaling in the tens of millions. The government reversed laws regarding paternal responsibility, thereby encouraging men to impregnate unmarried women and widows, and blocked available contraception, overriding the advice of the medical establishment. Some 8.7 million out-of-wedlock children were born between 1945 and 1955 alone. In the absence of serious commitment to supporting Soviet women who worked full-time, the policy did extensive damage to gender relations and the welfare of women and children. Women, famous cultural figures, and Soviet professionals initiated a movement to improve women's reproductive health and make all children equal. Because Soviet leaders did not allow any major reform, an abortion culture grew among Soviet women and spread throughout the Soviet sphere, including Eastern Europe and China. Based on groundbreaking research, Replacing the Dead traces how the idea of women's right to an abortion emerged from an authoritarian society decades before it did in the West and why it remains the dominant method of birth control in present-day Russia.

Human beings have been producing more twins, triplets, and quadruplets than ever before, due to the expansion of medically assisted conception. This book analyzes the anticipatory regimes of making multiple babies. With archival documents, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and registry data, this book traces the global and local governance of the assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) used to tackle multiple pregnancy since the 1970s, highlighting the early promotion of single embryo transfer in Belgium and Japan and the making of the world's most lenient guidelines in Taiwan.

Drawing on diverse examples from literature, film, memoirs, and popular culture, Men, Masculinities, and Infertilities analyses cultural representations of male infertility. Going beyond the biomedical and sociological towards interdisciplinary cultural studies, this book studies depictions of men's infertility. It includes fictional representations alongside memoirs, newspaper articles, ethnographies and autoethnographies, and scientific reporting. Works under discussion range from twentieth-century novel Lady Chatterley's Lover to romantic comedy film Not Suitable For Children, and science fiction classic Mr Adam, as well as encompassing genres including blockbuster romance and memoir. Men, Masculinities, and Infertilities draws upon both sociological and popular culture research to trace how the discourse of cultural anxiety unfolds across disciplines. This engaging work will be of key interest to scholars of popular culture studies, gender and women's studies (including queer and sexuality studies), critical studies of men and masculinities, cultural studies, and literary studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Reprogenetic technologies, which combine the power of reproductive techniques with the tools of genetic science and technology, promise prospective parents a remarkable degree of control to pick and choose the likely characteristics of their offspring. Not only can they select embryos with or without particular genetically-related diseases and disabilities but also choose embryos with non-disease related traits such as sex. Prominent authors such as Agar, Buchanan, DeGrazia, Green, Harris, Robertson, Savulescu, and Silver have flocked to the banner of reprogenetics. For them, increased reproductive choice and reduced suffering through the elimination of genetic disease and disability are just the first step. They advocate use of these technologies to create beings who enjoy longer and healthier lives, possess greater intellectual capacities, and are capable of more refined emotional experiences. Indeed, Harris and Savulescu in particular take reprogenetic technologies to be so valuable to human beings that they have insisted that their use is not only morally permissible but morally required. Rethinking Reprogenetics challenges this mainstream view with a contextualised, gender-attentive philosophical perspective. De Melo-Martin demonstrates that you do not have to be a Luddite, social conservative, or religious zealot to resist the siren song of reprogenetics. Pointing out the flawed nature of the arguments put forward by the technologies' proponents, Rethinking Reprogenetics reveals the problematic nature of the assumptions underpinning current evaluations of these technologies and offers a framework for a more critical and sceptical assessment.

Male Reproductive Function gives an up-to-date review on the physiology and disease processes associated with the male reproductive system. The first few chapters describe the regulation of the functions of the testis and the integration of its components: germ cells, Sertoli cells and Leydig cells. This is followed by a description of puberty and aging, and the disorders or dysfunction that may be associated with these physiological processes. Discussions on the current methods for the diagnosis and treatment of male hypogonadism, male infertility and male sexual dysfunction follow, with detailed descriptions of types of androgen replacement and the benefits and risks of such treatment. The book concludes with the development of male contraception and the possible influence of the environment on the male reproductive system. Male Reproductive Function represents a conglomeration of the efforts of experts in andrology from all over the world, both in basic cellular/molecular biology as well as in clinical science and practice. This book is suitable for endocrinologists, urologists, general internists, gynecologists and other students in the field of male reproduction.

This book offers a vision of politics that govern the womb; from antiquity ('be fertile and replenish the earth'), through the ages (hysterectomy, to extirpate women's 'hysteria'), up to the present time (abortion wars; assisted reproduction), and into the future (reprogenetics; the artificial womb). It explores how the womb has served humanity, either tacitly or explicitly, through the ages and examines how women have accepted and still perceive the rules created by men as natural - including the new anti-abortion laws in the USA - because 'that is the way things are.' The book also explores how the emerging of assisted reproduction technologies and novel genetic tools (reprogenetics) will pose additional challenges to womb bearers, as all women will be made to reproduce with IVF. What is more, the advent of the artificial womb is in sight; the gender and social implications of this development would be enormous. Certainly not just another organ, the womb has been and remains a powerful tool that cannot be left to the decisions of half of the population. This book engages a wide audience, including women and men, professionals and laypersons who are interested in gender, politics, legislation, women's health, and ethics.

Among the vast literature on contemporary reproductive technologies, Prosthetic Bodies stands out in its effective combination of insights, methods, and theories from the history of medicine, constructivist science and technology studies, and feminist theory. The double focus on IVF and related techniques, and fetal treatment and surgery, enables the identification of debatable tendencies within today's reproductive medicine: the translation of ever more medical problems basically unrelated to women's own reproductive health - and, in the case of fetal diagnosis and treatment, sometimes formerly even unrelated to reproduction as such - into medical indications for invasive, often highly experimental interventions in women's bodies. The analyses show how, through the operations and workings of reproductive technologies themselves, as well as a variety of discursive mechanisms within scientific language, today's recasting of men's fertility problems and children's congenital anomalies as women's reproductive problems comes to appear inevitable. The book challenges the ability of traditional forms of medical ethics and law to adequately identify this incremental process. The careful analyses and arguments in Prosthetic Bodies will be relevant to students of science and technology, gender studies, philosophy, medical ethics, and law, and others interested in the cultural, ethical, and political ramifications of contemporary reproductive technologies.

Offering a well-organized, straightforward approach to a highly complex subject, Larsen's Human Embryology, 6th Edition, provides easy-to-read, comprehensive coverage of human embryonic development for today's students. It integrates anatomy and histology with cellular and molecular mechanisms, focusing on both normal development and congenital anomalies. Highly illustrated with superb drawings and photographs, it features a strong clinical focus based on the most up-to-date scientific discoveries and understanding.Contains new information on gene editing via CRISPr technology, organoids and the study of human disease, transcription factors and signaling pathways, and single cell sequencing. Includes clinical scenarios that describe prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human birth defects and disease. Features a superior art program, online animations, and high-quality drawings and photographs throughout-ideal for today's visual learners. * Includes a strong clinical emphasis through the use of Clinical Tasters, Embryology in Practice, and In the Clinic sections. Provides additional information on mechanisms of development and research approaches and strategies to establish these mechanisms with In the Research Lab sections. Begins each chapter with an overview of main points as well as a graphical summary, with key terms listed in bold type. Covers the embryology information that today's medical students need to know for Board exams, clinics, and more, in a readable, straightforward manner. Enhanced eBook version included with purchase. Your enhanced eBook allows you to access 50 narrated animations, multiple-choice questions, and all of the text, figures, and references from the book on a variety of devices.

Why are boxers actually better than briefs? How can hamsters help determine what's wrong with my sperm? My wife's already moody enough - why am I injecting her with even more hormones? Do I have to fill the whole cup at the fertility clinic? If you're a man going through fertility treatments with your significant other, these might be just a few of the questions you've faced. And, much to your dismay, you've realised the answers are a lot harder to find than you'd like. Until now. "How to Make Love to a Plastic Cup" is the man's guide to anything and everything related to infertility. But it's not just the same old boring nuts and bolts (no pun intended). Author Greg Wolfe, who went through four cycles of IVF on his journey to fatherhood, lays it all out with side-splitting humor. From understanding a woman's cycle, to 'porn etiquette' at the clinic, to detailed instructions on administering hormone shots, this book has everything a man needs to know to get the job done. For those men tired of searching the bookshelves for a volume that speaks to their experiences in the wild world of infertility (and for those women whose men don't quite get it), there's no need to look further. "How to Make Love to a Plastic Cup" covers the whole gamut of information for couples dealing with infertility in a fresh, engaging way any man can appreciate.

Women most fully experience the consequences of human reproductive technologies. Men who convene to evaluate such technologies discuss "them": the women who must accept, avoid, or even resist these technologies; the women who consume technologies they did not devise; the women who are the objects of policies made by men. So often the input of women is neither sought nor listened to. The privileged insights and perspectives that women bring to the consideration of technologies in human reproduction are the subject of these volumes, which constitute the revised and edited record of a Workshop on "Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction Technology: Analysis by Women" (EIRTAW), held in June, 1979, at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Some 80 members of the workshop, 90 percent of them women (from 24 states), represented diverse occupations and personal histories, different races and classes, varied political commitments. They included doctors, nurses, and scientists, lay midwives, consumer advocates, historians, and sociologists, lawyers, policy analysts, and ethicists. Each session, however, made plain that ethics is an everyday concern for women in general, as well as an academic profession for some.

At last, a comprehensive collection of essays that examines and advances ethical evaluations of the controversial and increasingly popular practice of embryo adoption. In the United States alone, 400,000 frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization exist but are no longer desired for that purpose. What are we morally obliged or permitted to do about these a oesparea embryos? More of their genetic parents are considering donating these embryos to others to gestate and raise. This practice is politically volatile (figuring in debates about embryonic stem cells) and medically and morally complex. At the present time within the Roman Catholic Church there is no official teaching on embryo adoption. Catholic ethical analyses grapple with the way embryo adoption comports with respect for embryonic human life yet challenges Catholic moral critiques of assisted reproductive technologies.

This volume is the first to bring together leading philosophers and theologians to engage Catholic debates about embryo adoption in an interactive format. The editors, a philosopher bioethicist and a moral theologian, provide a helpful overview of the practice and the arguments surrounding embryo adoption. They engage neglected Catholic ethical resources and issues to advance the current debate and chart new directions in Catholic moral thinking about this intriguing practice. The volume also includes a description of embryo adoption from a physician practitioner along with reflections from a couple who successfully adopted an embryo.