Photo storage and repurposing site Shutterfly is in a bit of hot water with customers today, after sending an email to many female users congratulating them on the "amazing" accomplishment of "bringing a new life into the world" and dishing out etiquette tips about when it's appropriate to send Thank You cards to…

Over 61,000 babies were conceived via IVF in 2012, which means 1.5 percent of America’s 3.9 million births that year were ushered in that way. It was the biggest year for IVF on record, and those numbers are the culmination of a rising trend over the last ten years.

There's a popular perception that, in this day and age, infertility treatments like IVF are as common as can be—thanks in no small part to our much-lamented desire to have it all and delayed baby-making. That's not quite the case, though: The number of women seeking help for infertility has actually dropped.

This morning on the Today show, viewers met Robin Young, a pretty, athletic, 28-year-old woman who has donated eggs three times and is getting ready for a fourth procedure. Robin, a dancer who reads Back Stage, was recruited for egg donation via a very specific ad in the magazine.

Being a woman means that making permanent decisions about reproduction must occur within a time frame that, for many of us, predates a time frame when we can be trusted to responsibly select an appropriate paint color for the living room (not terra cotta. It makes being in the living room feel like slowly going insane…

Visiting the websites of fertility clinics could bring up pages of smiling babies, happy families, and convincing statistics of the "miracles" provided by those clinics. But a new report—that studied the websites of 372 fertility clinics in the United States registered with the Society for Assisted Reproductive…

A recent overview of websites aimed at recruiting women to donate their eggs to those with fertility problems has revealed that almost a third of such sites do not follow ethical guidelines, which include not offering potential donors higher sums of money for a Gattaca baby and informing donors about the potential…

If your first period signals the official "start" of your usefulness as a baby vessel, then menopause is the long, slow death wail of your fertility. No matter how much money you throw at your uterus, if your ovaries go menopausal it's all systems no on mission pregnancy. Or, at least, it used to be. Everything might…

We often talk about the problems religion brings upon women by forbidding the use of birth control, but, oddly enough, there's a phenomenon in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community which is causing the exact opposite problem. Their strict religious rules, known as halacha, govern many aspects of women's lives, including…

File this under "Future Very, Very Rich People Problems" — a British medical panel ruled today that a method of in vitro fertilization that seeks to eliminate inherited genetic diseases by introducing a third set of DNA to the mix is ethical as long as it's safe and effective. And as long as all parties agree on…

Well, thank goodness that's settled. The Supreme Court ruled today that children conceived via in vitro fertilization after the death of a parent aren't automatically entitled to that dead parent's Social Security benefits, as they're not technically "survivors," because they're not "natural children" as defined by…

Even when they end in the desired outcome of pregnancy, fertility treatments are complicated and carry certain risks. No, we're not talking about the risk of creating your own version of John & Kate Plus 8, though that is a possibility; we're talking about the fact that babies conceived using in vitro fertilization…

Are you a pretty Asian girl who is good at math? Your eggs might be worth about a downpayment on a decent condo. Are you black, white, or Hispanic? Sorry, but the best egg donation centers can give you for your reproductive cells is enough to buy a sort of decent used compact car with about 75,000 miles on it. Also,…

Being famous and struggling with infertility has got to be hard, but at least when you're a celebrity human, you can more or less keep the details of your experience to yourself. That's not the case for celebrity pandas Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, who have lived together at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., for 10…

If you were asked to think of the man who has fathered the most children in the world, who'd be your pick? Jim Bob Duggar? Or the anonymous man who fathered 150 children? Both good guesses, but it's more likely Bertold Wiesner, who is likely the father of some 600 children. How exactly did he come to be so prolific?…

While our manufacturing sector's kind of in the toilet, mining is giving people cancer and causing earthquakes, and our tech industry is running out of ideas for one-button devices to sell to yuppies, at least one sector of the American economy is running full steam — or rather, full balls — ahead: the sperm…

People are comfortable sharing almost any kind of news on Facebook these days—from "I am so wasted right now" (good to know, bro) to "My dog/father/hairstylist/favorite physicist died today"—but there's one area that remains complicated, difficult to navigate Facebook territory: miscarriages.