BACKGROUND Different reasons influence the current low birth-rate and the postponement of the birth of the first child throughout Europe. The aim of this study was to explore how highly educated women and men in Sweden reflect on fertility and postponed parenthood. METHODS We interviewed women (n = 22) and men (n = 18) who had started their professional careers and still had no children. Data...

With the recent emergence of surround sound technology, renewed interest has been shown in the problem of sound field reproduction. However, in practical acoustical environments, the performance of sound reproduction techniques are significantly degraded by reverberation. In this paper, we develop a method of sound field reproduction for reverberant environments. The key to this method is an ef...

Assisted reproduction techniques (ART), in particular in-vitro fertilization and intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, are the most advanced forms of infertility treatment. They involve numerous counseling, medical, surgical and laboratory-based steps. At each step various problems and complications could be encountered that challenge even the most experienced ART practitioners. Moreover, patients...

sperm chromatin integrity has been being recognized as an important factor in male fertility. during normal fertilization, high quality sperm with intact chromatin are selected through natural selection in journey from vagina to fallopian tube. however, using assisted reproductive techniques, particularly icsi, the natural selection is bypassed. therefore sperm with dna breakage have the opport...

Sexual reproduction is both extremely costly and extremely common relative to asexuality, indicating that it must confer profound benefits. This in turn points to major disadvantages of asexual reproduction, which is usually given as an explanation for why almost all asexual lineages are apparently quite short-lived. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that some asexual lineages are ac...

Assisted reproduction techniques (ART), in particular in-vitro fertilization and intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, are the most advanced forms of infertility treatment. They involve numerous counseling, medical, surgical and laboratory-based steps. At each step various problems and complications could be encountered that challenge even the most experienced ART practitioners. Moreover, patients...

A growing body of U.S.-based research demonstrates that reproductive coercion is an important consideration regarding the negative health impacts of intimate partner violence (IPV). However, less work on IPV and reproductive coercion has been done in West African settings. Cross-sectional data of 981 women who participated in the baseline survey of a randomized-controlled trial in rural, Côte d...