Sperm Donation

Around 800 children are born in the UK every year as a result of sperm donation.
Donors must be 18 – 45 and free from any hereditary risks.
Donors are rejected if their family has a history of diabetes, epilepsy, asthma, cystic fibrosis or even cleft palates.
Donors are rejected if they were adopted because they can’t guarantee their family’s medical history.
The sperm isn’t used for six months afterwards as it undergoes genetic testing, and during that time the donor’s family history is examined for potential defects.
A donor’s sperm may be used by up to ten families, although the donor can specify fewer.
Two donations are needed for every potential family, so donors could find themselves going back twice a week for ten weeks.
Prospective parents can decide if they like the sound of the donor.
The donor has to provide details of race, height, weight, religion and occupation.
A child conceived since 2005 can ask to be put in touch with their donor (biological father) when they turn 18.
(If the parents let the child know they are a product of sperm donation).

At Risk Of Being Infertile

A generation of children born using fertility treatment are at risk of being infertile themselves, scientists claim.
A significant number are likely to inherit problems that made their parents unable to have children.
Experts say that couples should be made more aware of the consequences for their children during visits to IVF clinics.

Only 500 Egg Donors

Society must have been transformed over the past couple of generations but women’s biology is still stone age.
Women are meant to have children in their teens and 20s.
After the age of 35, their egg supplies dwindle terrifyingly fast.
By 40, the chance of getting pregnant in any given month is just five per cent, compared to 20 per cent at age 30.

One in six couples in the UK will seek medical advice on infertility.
25 per cent of whom go on to have treatment, with a one in four chance of success.

1,200 couples are thought to be waiting for egg donation.
There are fewer than 500 registered egg donors in the UK.
5,000 babies are known to have been conceived in the UK by egg donation. There may be many more.
An egg donor must be 18 – 35 and in good health, with no family history of genetic or inheritable disease.
After the age of 42, fertility treatment is highly unlikely to work with a woman’s own eggs.

Abandoned Babies

An abandoned baby is classed as a true foundling if it is left without any information about who the birth-parents are.
Approximately 60 babies are abandoned every year in the UK and most of their mothers are never traced.
Mothers who have admitted abandoning their babies are often teenagers in denial about their pregnancy or who have been sexually abused.
Older women who have conceived via an extra-marital affair are thought to be the second largest group, after young girls, who abandon their babies.

Unborn Babies Can Hear Your Voice

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.

Why do babies make adults talk in silly voices?

A new baby is like a second-hand car.
It comes complete with two-lung power, toxic emissions, disposable seat-covers and an easily-flooded carburettor.

There is a question mark and promise and wild possibility that exist in each new born infant.
There are magic and mystery in that frail bundle of flesh.
He has genius in his tiny head.
He can grow and he can learn.
The beauty of the world is in his face.

A baby is born with a need to be loved, and never outgrows it.

Unborn babies begin yawning after eleven weeks in the womb.

There are two things in this life for which we are never fully prepared – twins.

From just 16 weeks, unborn babies can hear your voice and your partner’s too.
By six months, although the womb is buzzing with sounds, they can isolate your voices from all others.

Research by Imperial College, London, found that babies born to depressed mums were prone to unhappiness from birth onwards.

Taste starts to develop in unborn babies at 14 weeks.
What the mother eats passes into the liquid around the baby in the placenta and they take tiny sips.

In a recent study, unborn babies were found to stop their breathing movements for up to 30 minutes after the mother had drunk just one shot of vodka.
Alcohol should be avoided completely while pregnant.

Hello John

John is Britain’s most popular first name of modern times.
It is the only name given to more than two million babies born since civil records began in 1837.
Only five boys’ names and two for girls are recorded more than a million times in England and Wales.
John (2.1 million), William (1.92 million), Thomas (1.28 million), James (1.2 million), George (1.09 million), Elizabeth (1.17 million), Mary (1.13 million).
Ancestry analysed 860 million records and discovered life expectancy has risen from 29 in 1866 to nearly 80 today.

Ear Implants For Babies

About 8,000 people in the UK have Cochlear implants, including most profoundly deaf children.
About 350 children per year are born deaf enough to be considered for an implant.
In November 2009, a nine month old baby girl became the youngest baby in the world to have cochlear implants.
The small, electronic devices do not restore normal hearing, but do give the sensation of hearing by stimulating the auditory nerve, greatly improving a person’s ability to communicate.
Critics have raised ethical concerns about performing such an invasive procedure on babies, yet Mr John Graham, consultant at The Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital, London, says it is essential to operate as soon as possible. “The brains capacity to learn starts to decay almost from birth. The ideal age is before the child is two years old. If the parts of the brain that deal with hearing are not stimulated before a child is four, then speech and hearing will never develop completely”.

Last year (2009), The National Institute for Clinical Excellence recommended that all children born profoundly death be offered bilateral cochlear implants on the NHS.

I Need A Baby

Why are teenage girls having sex so young?
Why are they having it without using precautions?
And why, if they do become pregnant, are they not having the abortions that – for good or bad – are freely available.
These teenage mums are not the bright young hopes of the middle classes. These are girls from the inner-city sink-estates who believe that their future will be as bleak as their past.
At home, in poverty and carelessness, these teenagers won’t be fed the nutrition of books, learning and ambition. At school it won’t be much better.
They will learn that, like their mothers and sisters before them, nothing awaits save failure and drudgery.
A baby gives them a plaything of their very own, which they have been so long without. A baby gives them a reason to get up in the morning, which they have never had before. A baby gives them unconditional love, a luxury beyond their wildest dreams.
We know the misery in store for them and their children, we know that these girls have been let down, time and again, by a system that refuses to invest in a change for their better.
The girls, in their own misguided way, are actually trying to give themselves some simple purpose.

The Execution Of Baby Boys

The story told by Matthew recounts how when King Herod heard from the Magi that the “King of the Jews” had been born, he ordered the execution of all male children in Bethlehem who were aged  two and younger.
Is it possible that such an episode of mass infanticide really took place?
The first non Christian reference to the massacre was recorded four centuries later by Roman philosopher Macrobius. He describes how Herod ordered the killing of all two-year old boys in the whole of Syria, including the King’s own son.
A Byzantine liturgy counts 14,000 child victims.
An early Syrian list states that there were 64,000, while Coptic sources raise the number to 144,000.
The Catholic encyclopedia suggests that, given the estimated population of Bethlehem, probably only between six and twenty were killed, with a dozen or so in surrounding areas.

Our Selfish Society

We are a callous and barbarous society, selfish almost beyond belief
and so twisted that we now regard children as a burden.
If abortion must be legal, then let it at least be despised.
Let us call it what it is, a massacre conducted to suit the selfish.
Let’s not have any rubbish about its supporters being “pro-choice”,
when in fact they’re “pro-death”.
What choice has the poor baby about being murdered?
An abortion can never be better than letting the baby be born and adopted.
There are plenty of caring people who would be only too happy to do the adopting.