Conference turris::womannotes-v2

    Not necessarily. It depends on the cause of the inability to conceive.
    
    The question is sort of moot though, because as humans, we can overcome
    many of the medical problems we face. 
    
    Mark

    
    re.1
    i wouldn't say the queston is moot.
    if we are breeding infertility into the race and over much time
    the whole race becomes infertile and everyone had to rely on
    artificial means for conception, what happens if somehow we
    lost the means for artificial conception?
    i think its a bit naive to think that because we know how to do
    it now we will always know how to do it.
    
    and what difference does the cause of the inability to conceive
    make?  i can understand if there was some physical injury that
    is responsible for the inabilty.  This would not be passed along
    genetically.  But if its something that person was born with
    and its corrected (through whatever artificial means), then that
    trait has a chance of being passed along.
    
    

    If, as is rather common, the reason for the inability to conceive
    lies in a low sperm count of the man, and they decide to have
    the woman artificially inseminated, his infertility is certainly
    *not* bread into the race, since neither the mother nor the donor
    had any problems.
    
    Other problems typically are caused by infectious diseases (i.e.,
    PID), leading to the Fallopian tubes becoming blocked.  If the
    blockage is removed or the baby is conceived in a test-tube, it
    still shouldn't be any problem, since most of these are not hereditary.
    
    If the problem is inability to ovulate without the aid of drugs,
    or low sperm count that was corrected by refining the sperm out
    of the semen, and inseminating her with a sooped-up version of the
    SO's sperm, this could indeed lead to breeding infertility into
    the race over time.  I still don't think it will ever matter that
    much - most people are not infertile, and that will probably remain
    so.
    
    Elizabeth

    
    well, i was hoping to hand this off and let people run with it,
    but it looks like this idea has been sacked with no gain :-)
    
    i certainly would agree that it is nothing to panic over.
    it would probably take many thousands of years before it was
    noticeable, but this is probably exactly what the people 
    starting the nuclear plants thought ("sure we'll have toxic
    waste, but its not that much and we'll figure a way to 
    dispose of it safely before it becomes a problem")
    
    Bob
    

   If you're going to worry about medical "helps" breeding
   undesirable traits into the human species, there are
   plenty of more common things to worry about.

   Would you argue that treating heart disease, or high
   blood pressure, or diabetes breeds these conditions
   into the species?   Is the availabilty of eye-glasses
   decreasing the number of people born with good 
   vision?   What about vaccinations?  Is the world's
   population becoming less disease-resistant with
   the advent of vaccinations?  The list could go
   on for pages....

   If these treatments are indeed "weakening" the species
   would you argue that they should be banned?   

    You are assuming that infertility is hereditary.  Current medical
    thinking is that heredity has nothing to do with the ability to
    conceive.  There are many factors that can affect a couple's ability
    to conceive and produce a live baby (and that's how 'success' is
    measured -- by the number of live babies, not number of conceptions),
    and typically hereditary factors are not even considered unless
    the mother took a drug like DES that is known to affect fertility.
    
    As far as other drugs currently being used for fertility treatment
    and their possible future effects, most of the drugs in use today
    have been in use long enough to study their affects, and the only 
    side effects appear to be multiple births.   A good portion of the 
    drugs used basically act by tricking the body into doing what it is not.
     For instance, Clomid is used to trick the woman's brain into thinking
    that not enough estrogen is being produced so that estrogen is produced
    longer thus getting more of it into the system and working to regulate
    ovulation.  The possible side effects, depending on the dose, are
    multiple births in about 10% of the cases, with less than 1% resulting
    in triplets or more. 
    
    I have more information if you would like me to look up specifics.
    
    Cathy

    Actually, Cathy (and others, earlier), Bob did specify the sort
    of infertility that's genetically-based.  
    
    Which having been said, and acknowledging that I'm neither geneticist
    nor biologist, I would guess, Bob, that the number of infertile states
    that are both genetic in origin *and* amenable to medical correction is
    very very small...small enough that the effects of "thwarting nature"
    will wash out of the gene pool in the same way that cosmic-ray
    mutations do.  
    
    Does anyone have any hard data to either confirm or refute my
    speculation? 
    
    						=maggie

    
    RE.5
    Beth, good points.  i hadn't drawn it out that much in my head.
    i would say, we certainly are breeding those cases into the 
    human race (diabetes, high blood pressure, etc).  but, i'd say
    if we lost the ability to treat those things, it wouldn't have 
    nearly the effect as if we breed infertility into the race and
    then lose the ability of artificial conception.
    
    RE.7
    Maggie, maybe i've had a high esposure, but i know three women who
    have had operations to fix one thing or the other before they could
    have children.  All were cases of things they were born 
    with and not from some injury or disease.
    i certainly have no hard evidence, but i would venture to guess
    that the incidence of this happening is higher than you suggest.
             
    

    Are you sure, though, that the problems were _genetic_, Bob?  For
    example, there are plenty of non-genetic intrauterine events that can
    cause infertility including poorly-understood developmental screwups
    that result in the victim having missing, incomplete, or non-functional
    reproductive organs.  Those events are like those that cause someone to
    be born with, oh, a cleft palate:  the problem occurs prenatally, but
    it only effects the one victim and is not passed on to offspring.
    
    						=maggie

    Maggie,
    i know two were genetic, the third i'm not quite sure of...
    i know what the operation was, i'm not exactly sure it would
    be classified as genetic  (i'm also not a genetisist)
    
    Bob
    

    For an interesting SF story that centers on declining birth rates,
    I  strongly  recommend  "Nightmare  for  Future  Reference" in Leo
    Szilard's  book  of short stories "The Voice of the Dolphins". The
    title  of  the  short story is taken from a poem by Steven Vincent
    Benet  (which  is  reprinted  in  the book.) All I can say without
    spoiling  the ending is that Szilard worked on the Atomic bomb and
    in  the  fifties  wrote a book of "future histories" many of which
    deal with atomic war.  I recomend the entire book.

    I seem to remember that sperm counts have been declining for quite
    a while now (40 years?) and that there is no adequate explanation.

--David

    Re .6:
    
    >You are assuming that infertility is hereditary. 
     
    Infertility has been hereditary all along.  Experts say that if
    your parents had no children neither will you...
    
    Elizabeth
    

    the assumption in the basenote is that the world operates
    along Darwinian principals. Until recently, Ive felt
    Darwin's theory was very neat, and made sense, but recent
    developments have shown that cellular adaptation can occur across
    a single generation, without need for natural selection across
    several generations.
    
    just a thought....
    
    of course, if one believed in the CHAOS theory, then the entire
    future of the human race may depend on the death of a butterfly
    somewhere on the other side of the world.

    Considering that the number of people on Earth that use artificial
    means of conception vs. the staggering number (4.5+ billion) of people who
    don't, I think that the point is moot and not worth considering.
    The entire world is so overrun with people that the small percentage
    of people who conceive artificially is a drop in the bucket. The
    only reason any of us know of people who do conceive artificially
    is because we live in a country with enough time/money/technology
    to consider this possibility. But.......don't kid yourself, one
    or two million people conceived artificially won't start to dent
    the gene pool of the human race (The USA or Europe, maybe, but NOT
    the world) because we are still talking of numbers like 
    1 in 5 million. 
    

    Yes, I was thinking along the same lines.  And thinking that the
    discussion had fallen into a very
    American-middle-class-baby-boom-centric feeling. 
    
    If we're talking about the human race, as the previous note pointed
    out, there's not much problem with fertility.  In fact, from what I
    hear, we're still facing a population crisis.  Babies are being born
    and dying all over the globe for lack of food.  In China, they have to
    try to prevent people from having kids.  And if you look at teenagers,
    they certainly seem to be fertile enough! 
    
    Part of the problem, if you want to view things globally (and disregard
    the personal sympathy we feel for our friends) comes from the group of
    people "suffering" from infertility.  We Americans still plunder the
    world of its resources way out of proportion to our numbers.  So fewer
    of us would probably help the rest of the human race to survive! From
    what I can see, we'd take less from the rest of the world, build fewer
    nuclear power plants to disseminate radioactivity, create less
    indestructable plastic gadgets for doing every imaginable ridiculous
    chore, etc. etc. etc. 
    
    Again, talking globally and abstractly and not personally about anyone
    here or anyone I know...  If we're talking about the white-middle-class
    "race," well, maybe as it continues to get richer and more greedy
    --ignoring the poor, the hungry, etc.-- as our society certainly has
    more and more in recent years, maybe it's cosmic justice balancing the
    world by making fewer of them!  I don't usually believe in such things,
    but it kind of makes you wonder.  

    --don't all jump on me at once--
    
    Nina

    
    .0>    When a couple is unable to conceive a child because of one
    .0>    or both partners genetic make-up, and artificial means are
    
    What cosmetics cause infertility?