With all that talk about cancer and toxins and things that are bad for you and your fertility, good news: BAMBOOSA.

I still haven't found any makeup for the rare occasions I need it, but I'm pleased to have discovered the closest things I've found to perfect clothes. Actually, it wasn't I, it was my husband who first got me a few pieces for Valentine's Day. He shares my eco-organic vibe, but we were blown away by how beautiful (and reasonable) the stuff is.

From my persnickety fashion point of view, I love how the fabric... more

I do fear that fertility technology is whizzing along way faster than the ethical issues (and, maybe just plan thinking) will ever be able to catch up.

Let's take a hypothetical example. Remember how Lance Armstrong had his sperm cryogenically preserved when he knew he had cancer and would go through radiation that would leave him sterile? He did indeed retrieve the sperm later and successfully fathered a number of children, then he divorced. Well, let's make it a little more complicated. Say we have some fertilized embryos in storage preceding cancer treatments,... more

image courtesy of the Breast Cancer Fund

I read a really sad breaking story this morning about the death of Dana Reeve, Christopher Reeve's wife, from lung cancer. Besides all the tragedies she had in her life, she also didn't smoke! She was only forty-four, only a few years older than I. That hit home.

Our family has been "involved" with cancer on quite a few occasions, unfortunately. It's odd that in Korea, with my older relatives having... more

Without impinging on my son's privacy toooooo much, I thought I'd finally fill in the back-story of how I've ended up here, fortysomething and thinking of adding to the family, by biology or adoption.

I already had my son late, by the "usual" standards, and I was ancient by Korean standards. All I heard was "advanced maternal age" etc., etc., as everyone was bugging me to have an amnio (which I declined).

Our son is wonderful. He started having grave medical problems at eighteen months. In the stress, it was hard to function. We weren't specifically... more

[Okay, my husband has voted for Adrienne's idea of the drill icon...it's it, for now.]

Many environmental factors can affect maturing sperm, as we've seen, something as simple as using your laptop computer as a laptop computer can have serious consequences for fertility. We'll get into other environmental stresses—lead, cigarette smoke, marijuana, alcohol, radiation, prescription drugs, occupational toxins—in a bit.

The good news is that eating a healthful diet also helps maintain a healthful male fertility. We all have heard about about antioxidants…but... more

An army is only as good as its recruits, so not surprisingly, the main causes of male fertility problems are problems with sperm. The main way these problems manifest themselves are as follows:

motility: speed and movement morphology: shape and quality number: how many recruits in the army

Compatibility with the partner is another one. This is more than toilet seat up/toilet seat down type of thing. It has to do with immune issues, and, interestingly, two people with too similar... more

Adrienne, of the Russian Adoptionblog suggested a drill as the Male Fertility icon, and at least for now, it's the perfect illustration for our first in a series on Male Fertility.

CNN.com has an excellent overview article on male fertility, and there are things you can actually do to promote male fertility. Before we get into that, however, we need to start back at the basics. I know women who can go on and on about luteinizing hormone, the... more

In any earlier post I ranted about all the flowery junk they plaster on books, DVDs, website and other informational resources about fertility. In Korean, there's a proverb about women holding up half the sky... but then, yoo-hoo! Who's holding up the other half? --A-HEM!!!

A little research into infertility reveals that just as men are roughly half the population, they also account for roughly half the problems encountered with fertility (35-45% according to my averaging several fertility... more

As I was speaking about things being hardwired into our brain from prehistoric times in a previous post, I just read something really depressing on the BBC about new genetic research they've done on that "Ice Man" they found in that glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991.

You may or may not remember on the news, when he was unearthed, he was found with all sorts of arrowheads and things sticking in his rib cage--obviously not a peaceful passing away of natural causes. Now scientists have found some DNA indicators... more

I was recently reading an interesting article about personality types: the happy-go-lucky types and the worriers. Apparently, worrying is thought to be hardwired into people. In caveman time, if you were a happy-go-lucky type and came up to a bush with yummy looking berries, you'd say, "What the heck?" and eat them. If you were the worrier, you'd probably bring them back to your cave, maybe see if the birds would eat them, you'd worry and worry before you would put them in your mouth.

Happy guy, unfortunately, is much more likely to some day run into a yummy looking... more