F ive hundred BC pharmacists are preparing to dispense the " morning after pill " without a prescription, in part to help reduce the amount of violence against physicians who perform abortions. Three Canadian physicians who have performed abortions, including one from Vancouver, have been wounded in sniper attacks since 1994. (Arrest warrants have been issued in Canada and the US for an America...

The incidence of ectopic pregnancy has been increasing over the last few years, reaching a value of 1 case in 80 pregnancies, and it continues to be the main cause of maternal death during the first trimester in the United States. The main causes of tubal ectopic pregnancy, which generally results from damage to or dysfunction of the fallopian tubes, are salpingitis, previous tubal surgeries, a...

Emergency contraception (EC) has come a long way since the days when Family Planning clinics and other services provided cut-up sections of pink oral contraceptive pill strips and a dose or two of an antiemetic in tiny sealed plastic bags to women who were lucky enough to know about this option. When evidence demonstrated the superiority of the progestogen-only regimen in 1998 1 , these plastic...

traception as part of their routine services.4 In Brazil, where 26% of births in the early 1990s were unplanned and 22% were unwanted,5 emergency contraception could play an important role by averting pregnancies attributable to contraceptive failure, nonuse of contraceptives, lack of knowledge about or access to methods, or coercive sex. It also could reduce levels of unsafe abortion. In 1991,...

SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND A large proportion of women of reproductive age in Germany use various methods of pregnancy prevention (contraception), among them various hormone-based methods. Hormonal contraceptives may be divided into combined estrogen-progestogen contraceptives (pills, skin patches, vaginal rings), progestogen-only contraceptives (pills, injections, implants, hormone spirals) and eme...

1998,1 it was clear that progestogen-only emergency contraception (POEC) causes less nausea-related side effects than the Yuzpe regimen. The study also showed a reduction in effectiveness of both treatments with time. Although the effectiveness of the Yuzpe regimen was lower than in other studies, which caused some debate, it was clear that POEC was no less effective. POEC has gradually become ...

ICSI was ®rst applied in cases of severe male factor infertility in which conventional IVF would be expected to fail or to give poor outcomes (Van Steirteghem et al., 1993). More recently, however, ICSI has been increasingly used in cases in which conventional IVF would not necessarily be inef®cient. In such cases, ICSI is often preferred because of its reliability in terms of achieving high fe...