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From the outside, Holly Finn certainly looks fertile.
With shoulder-length dark hair, smooth skin and a slim but curvaceous figure, the San Francisco-area writer could be any young mom with a baby on her hip.
But at 43, Finn says, her ovaries know better — and she would have, too, if not for what she believes is society’s widespread ignorance about infertility.
“I really feel that there are important pieces of information that don’t get passed along,” says Finn, who has now tried for four years to conceive through in-vitro fertilization. “I actually think it’s quite a brutal dishonesty.”
Most women aren’t taught — and don’t learn — basic facts about fertility and aging, says Finn, author of the e-book “The Baby Chase.” Instead, celeb moms the likes of Salma Hayek (a baby girl at 41), Marcia Cross (twins at 44) and Mariah Carey (twins at 41) make being an older mom look easy — and glamorous.
“It’s not that we’re stupid,” she says. “It’s that we’ve been misinformed.”
As proof, she points to a new survey conducted on behalf of RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association, and presented at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine’s recent annual meeting.
The poll of 1,000 women ages 25 to 35 who had talked to doctors about fertility found that participants could correctly answer seven out of 10 basic questions less than half the time. The Fertility IQ 2011 Survey found that women were wrong most often about how long it takes to get pregnant — and about how much fertility declines at various ages.
“We were not at all surprised,” says Barbara Collura, executive director of RESOLVE. “This is what we experience every day.”
Most women simply don’t realize that at 30, a healthy woman has about a 20 percent chance of conceiving and by the time she reaches 40, her odds drop to about 5 percent per month, Collura said.
Instead, many of those surveyed thought that a 30-year-old woman would have a 70 percent chance of conceiving and that a 40-year-old’s chances could approach 60 percent.
They also believed that a 20-year-old woman might get pregnant in less than two months of unprotected sex, rather than the five months that is the average.
“It’s basic biology and basic knowledge of how age impacts your fertility if you’re a woman,” says Collura.
But most women aren’t getting those basics until it’s too late, said Dr. William Schoolcraft, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Denver and two other locations.
“It’s basic biology and basic knowledge of how age impacts your fertility if you’re a woman,” says Collura.
But most women aren’t getting those basics until it’s too late, said Dr. William Schoolcraft, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Denver and two other locations.
“They don’t even come in for fertility treatment until they’re literally in their 40s,” he said. “Some come in and they have run out of time.”
In a country where sex education focuses primarily on avoiding pregnancy and preventing sexually transmitted diseases, most women believe that having a baby is inevitably easy.
But that neglects the reality that infertility affects some 7.3 million women in the United States, or 12 percent of the child-bearing female population, and about 1 in 8 couples, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After about age 35, fertility plummets, Schoolcraft said.
So when women decide they want to get pregnant and can’t, they’re stunned. Some of the shock is because of advances in health and beauty that allow women to look — and feel — younger, even as their reproductive systems march on.
“People kind of think now at 40 what they used to think at 30,” Schoolcraft said. “People do yoga and they run and they do all these healthy things. They assume that means ‘I’m not aging.’ But their eggs don’t know that.”
Part of the disconnect is because of advances in infertility treatment, which have helped boost the rates of births among women in their 40s, even as rates have dropped for younger moms. Between 2008 and 2009, births in women aged 20 to 24 reached a record low, falling 7 percent. At the same time, the rates for women aged 40 to 44 jumped 3 percent and births to women older than 50 climbed 5 percent.
Those numbers are exemplified by a series of high-profile births in older celebrities, including icons such as Kelly Preston (son at 48), Holly Hunter (twins at 47) and Jane Seymour (twins at 44.)
Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized. Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.
“I have to carry these scars with me. I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.
Riddick was never told what was happening. “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”
Riddick’s records reveal that a five-person state eugenics board in Raleigh had approved a recommendation that she be sterilized. The records label Riddick as “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.” They said her schoolwork was poor and that she “does not get along well with others.”
“I was raped by a perpetrator [who was never charged] and then I was raped by the state of North Carolina. They took something from me both times,” she said. “The state of North Carolina, they took something so dearly from me, something that was God given.”
It wouldn’t be until Riddick was 19, married and wanting more children, that she’d learn she was incapable of having any more babies. A doctor in New York where she was living at the time told her that she’d been sterilized.
“Butchered. The doctor used that word… I didn’t understand what she meant when she said I had been butchered,” Riddick said.
North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program. By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs.
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Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited. To eliminate those society ills and improve society’s gene pool, proponents of the theory argued that those that exhibited the traits should be sterilized. Some of America’s wealthiest citizens of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble fortune and James Hanes of the hosiery fortune. Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists.
It began as a way to control welfare spending on poor white women and men, but over time, North Carolina shifted focus, targeting more women and more blacks than whites. A third of the sterilizations performed in North Carolina were done on girls under the age of 18. Some were as young as nine years old.
For the past eight years, North Carolina lawmakers have been working to find a way to compensate those involuntarily sterilized in the state between 1929 and 1974. During that time period, 7,600 people were sterilized in North Carolina. Of those who were sterilized, 85 percent of the victims were female and 40 percent were non-white.
“You can’t rewind a watch or rewrite history. You just have to go forward and that’s what we’re trying to do in North Carolina,” said Governor Beverly Perdue in an exclusive interview with NBC News.
While North Carolina’s eugenics board was disbanded in 1977, the law allowing involuntary sterilization wasn’t officially repealed until 2003. In 2002, the state issued an apology to those who had been sterilized, but the victims have yet to receive any financial compensation, medical care or counseling from the state. Since 2003, three task forces have been created to determine a way to compensate the victims. Officials estimate that as many as 2,000 victims are still alive.
Riddick was one of several victims to speak at a public hearing this summer. It was the first time that many survivors had told their stories publicly and that others heard of North Carolina’s tarnished past.
“To think about folks who went in…and their doctor told them this was birth control and they were sterilized…the folks who didn’t have the capacity to make the decisions, the uninformed consent,” said Perdue. “Those types of stories aren’t good for America and I can’t allow for this period in history to be forgotten, that’s why this work is important.”
Only 48 victims have been matched with their records, something necessary for them to eventually be compensated. State Representative Larry Womble has been advocating for the survivors of the state’s sterilization program for nearly 10 years. He helped fight for the repeal of the state’s law.
Womble said that if the government is “powerful enough to perpetrate this on this society, they ought to be responsible, step up to the plate and compensate.”
In August, a task force created by Gov. Perdue recommended that the victims be compensated, but they were unsure how much to award the victims. Previous numbers pondered range between $20,000 and $50,000. The task force also recommended mental health services for living victims and a traveling museum exhibit about North Carolina’s eugenics program.
Perdue said it’s a challenge to determine how much money each victim should be given.
“From my perspective, and as a woman, and as the governor of this state, this is not about the money. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay these people for what has been done to them, but money is part of the equation,” she said.
Riddick once sued North Carolina for a million dollars. Her case made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the court declined to hear the case. “I would like for the state of North Carolina to right what they wronged with me,” she said.
Some victims and their advocates have questioned whether North Carolina is procrastinating in compensating them, hoping they’ll die before a solution is reached. “It’s an ugly chapter in North Carolina’s book, we have a wonderful book, but there’s an ugly chapter,” Womble said. “We must step up to the plate and we must realize and take responsibility.”
Perdue, for her part, said that she is committed to helping the victims.
“I want this solved on my watch. I want there to be completion. I want the whole discussion to end and there be action for these folks. There is nobody in North Carolina who is waiting for anybody to die,” Gov. Perdue said.
Despite the state social workers who declared Riddick was “mentally retarded” and “promiscuous”, she went to college and raised the son born moments before she was sterilized. Her son is devoted to his mother and a successful entrepreneur.
Elaine is proud of her achievements.
“I don’t know where I would be if I listened to the state of North Carolina,” she said.
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A turf war between the Hells Angels and a rival motorcycle gang that erupted outside a California Starbucks shop last year has left several men dead, wounded or missing in three states, stirring fears of more bloodshed.
Ranked by law enforcement as the most severe clash of two California-based biker groups in nearly a decade, the spate of violence turned deadly last month when it spilled into Nevada with a brawl and shooting among members of the Hells Angels and Vagos motorcycle clubs.
The president of the Hells Angels’ San Jose, California, chapter, Jeffrey “Jethro” Pettigrew, 51, was shot to death, and one Vagos member was wounded in the melee at John Ascuaga’s Nugget hotel and casino in Sparks. A second Vagos member was wounded in a drive-by shooting the next day at the site of a nearby motorcycle rally in town.
The Pettigrew killing — coming 11 months after a gunfight between the two gangs in Arizona that left five people wounded — in turn sparked tensions within the Hells Angels’ ranks that led to yet another slaying in California, authorities say.
“There have been concerns about this rivalry for some time,” said Graham Barlowe, resident agent in charge of the Sacramento office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The last California biker feud of similar proportions grew out of a 2002 casino riot in Laughlin, Nevada, between the Hells Angels and another group known as the Mongols, Barlowe said. At least three bikers died as a result of that conflict
DEAD OR ALIVE
The latest casualty of the Hells Angels’ recent battle against Vagos actually was inflicted by one of their own.
At Pettigrew’s funeral in California weeks after he was slain in Nevada, his close friend and sergeant-at-arms of the San Jose chapter, Steven Tausan, 52, was shot and killed by a fellow Hells Angel in an apparent quarrel among club members.
A police source familiar with the investigation said Tausan and others confronted the accused gunman, Steve Ruiz, over his perceived failure to have protected Pettigrew during the Nugget casino brawl, prompting Ruiz to pull a gun on Tausan.
A group of bikers then pounced on Ruiz as thousands of mourners streamed out of the cemetery, preventing police officers at the funeral from making an arrest, San Jose police spokesman Jose Garcia said.
In the end, it was unclear whether the bikers who descended on Ruiz did so to subdue him, beat him or help him escape, but witnesses said he was whisked away in a car, Garcia said.
Suspecting that Ruiz may have been killed at the scene and his body dumped into Pettigrew’s grave, police later obtained a search warrant to dig up the burial site, but they found no trace of Ruiz, Garcia said.
CAFFEINE FOR BIKERS
Tensions boiled over in January 2010, when members of the rival gangs, some wielding ball-peen hammers, fought outside a Santa Cruz Starbucks before scattering as police arrived.
“It was all about who would be allowed to hang out at the Starbucks downtown,” Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark said. “The Vagos brazenly came in and tried to cement their presence. It was a pretty strong play on their part to establish themselves as the premiere club.”
He added: “Only in Santa Cruz would you have biker wars over who’s going to control pumpkin spice lattes.”
Seven months after the Starbucks ambush, violence between the two groups flared again in a gunfight in August 2010 that left five people wounded and led to 27 arrests in the northern Arizona town of Chino Valley.
The U.S. Justice Department has classified both the Hells Angels and Vagos as outlaw gangs deeply involved in drug and weapons trafficking, as well as extortion, money laundering, theft and various violent crimes.
The Hells Angels, by far the larger and better known of the two, was founded in 1948 in Fontana, California, and has since established over 230 chapters with an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 members worldwide, the government says.
The organization denies its involvement in criminal activity and argues the club should not be blamed for the illegal actions of individual bikers.
Members insist the overwhelming majority are law-abiding citizens who share a love of powerful motorcycles, especially Harley-Davidsons and choppers, and point to their prominent role in certain charity events as evidence that their outlaw reputation is exaggerated by the media.
Karen Snell, a San Francisco-based lawyer who has represented a number of Hells Angels members, said Pettigrew and Tausan, for example, were “family guys.”
It looks like the freaky deaky community is going to have to tone down the freak or the deak in their activities if they want to stay cancer-free. A new study has found that men are contracting throat cancer at an alarming rate from simply pleasing their mates.
The new study from the Journal of Clinical Oncology has uncovered a very good reason to take oral sex out of the sexual equation. The study found a surge in the number of cases of men who have come into contact with human papillomavirus (HPV); a sexually transmitted virus that takes the form of warts and can lead to cancer in men and women’s genitals.
The journal’s researchers found that out of 271 cases of throat tumors the percentage linked to HPV had jumped from 16 percent in 1994 to 72 percent by 2004. The recent vaccine for HPV has been controversial because it has been recommended to girls starting at age 11.
Men, the term “guard your grill” is taking on a completely different meaning. Read more here and proceed with caution the next time you’re “active.”
Sunday’s Show – “MEN AS FATHERS & SINGLE FATHERS”
Call in and lets discuss the dynamics of being a Father in today’s world.
Faminly dynamics, finances, education, relationships, health.
All ages are welcome to participate from teenager Father to Grandfathers.
Sunday October 9, 2011 at 4pm to 5pm 646-727-2914 PST
Thank you all in advance for your participation.
For Libby Smith, 65, it was the frustration that her political involvement didn’t seem to influence anyone.
For Andrew Tuttle, 23, it was the homeless family living in the bus stop near his Wallingford house.
Garth Donald, 27, was inspired by protests in the Middle East where young people sparked revolutions through protest.
The 50-or-so individuals who turned out for an Occupy Seattle protest against corporate control of government had different motivations but agreed that taking to the streets was necessary to change the country.
The local protest at Westlake Park Saturday morning was one of dozens echoing across the country in response to weeks-long protests in New York City by a youth movement called Occupy Wall Street.
Like those in New York, Seattle protesters were largely young. A few wore dollar bills taped across their mouths.
Those who helped organize the protest said it drew all kinds of people who want more control over their own government.
“It’s amazing the diversity and the singular voice that we have,” said Albert Postema, of Snohomish.
He and his daughter traveled to New York to participate in protests there, and he helped bring the cause back to Seattle. On Saturday, he wore a noose around his neck, taping and un-taping a dollar-bill across his face as needed so he could arrange the protesters into a circle.
“Banks got bailed out, you got sold out!” they chanted.
Jon Ramer, 53, said he wanted to show protesters on Wall Street that they aren’t alone, though their protests are most visible.
“A lot of people feel as if we’ve lost a legitimate way to govern ourselves,” he said.
Older people in the group said they wanted to show that it was more than just a young person’s movement.
Smith has been politically involved for years, she said, but the last time she joined a protest was during the Vietnam War.
Lately, we’ve been reporting on similarities of race relations in this country today as opposed to that of old. But, now there are reports that interracial marriage between African Americans and whites are on the rise. Other minority groups aren’t seeing a significant difference in their rate of marriage to whites.
USA Today reports that the study, published in the October edition of the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that in 2008, that of all black marriages, 10.7% were, in the past year, married to whites. The measure they use to show a significant increase is that in 1980, there were only 3% of said marriages.
But, Roderick Harrison, a demographer at Howard University and the Joint Center for Political and Economical Studies pointed out that we are still the least “assimilated.” The numbers show that Asians in 2008, married whites at the rate of 34% and Hispanics to non-Hispanics at 28%.
But none of this so-called benchmark of integration has done anything to remedy the lack of opportunities for black America. As the director of the Cornell Population Center and the study’s co-author, Daniel Lichter, put it, “This doesn’t imply that we’ve moved into a post-racial society.” The number of black and white marriages still remain very low.
The lead author on the interracial marriage study, Zhenchao Qian, a sociology professor at Ohio State University, suggests that the more opportunities African Americans experience by way of “higher levels of education” and in the workplace, the more interaction they have with whites on those levels, thus suggesting that African Americans have made more economical and social progress since 1980.
But as Harrison stated in the report, it still suggests ”that the divide in this country remains between blacks and everybody else.” There has not been a major exodus into opportunity for African Americans. The majority of interracial marriages between blacks and whites, by Qian’s admission, in at least the last 10 years, can probably be found between the more wealthy of the two groups.
The insinuated element of the report is that integration shows more progress, but we’re still watching the first African American President be told on the Congressional floor during his speech that he lied, we watched Troy Davis be put to death based on speculation, and our children still lag behind in educational resources.
The interracial marriage shouldn’t be weighed against opportunity and/or integration, but the report’s significance in those areas is insinuated. We are happy for those who can find happiness with anyone. That’s the hot commodity of the day. Who cares who you’re married to as long as you’re happy.