And now for something less emotional...

This is what I'm talking about! It was in my Washington Post this morning. I've always felt, as a scientist myself, that IVF and ART, in general, offer many research opportunities. Well, evidently, scientists in England have used IVF conceived babies (both natural and donor) to try answer the question of whether children of smoking mothers were more likely to develop behavioral problems. They looked at smoking mothers doing regular IVF and donor IVF and found that regular IVF babies (where the baby is genetically connected to the smoking mother) where more likely than donor IVF babies (where the baby is not genetically related to the mother) to manifest antisocial behavior. Both IVF and donor IVF babies, where, however, born with low birthweight...as expected. So, at the end of the day they concluded that "antisocial behavior was more common only in children who were genetically related to mothers who smoked, indicating that a genetic influence was at work."

This actually brings up an interesting concept that I might write about later on. An "upshot" of donor IVF is that many mothers feel that this is there chance to leave some perhaps unwanted genetic characteristics behind. Infertility provides the, usually unwanted, chance to think a lot about a lot of stuff. For example, do you really want to pass on your genetic predisposition to depression or heart disease or cancer to you child? Well, with donor IVF you don't have to! Silver linings!