Tag: pregnancy

Eight Healthy Babies Born via IVF using DNA from Three People

In the United Kingdom, medical professionals have successfully delivered eight babies using a pioneering fertility procedure that incorporates DNA from three individuals.

This method aims to safeguard children from inheriting severe mitochondrial disorders. The births represent a cautious advancement in assisted reproduction, prioritizing family health and stability.

The mothers involved carried mutations in their mitochondria, risking life-threatening conditions for their offspring. Mitochondria serve as cellular energy sources, essential for bodily functions. Without intervention, these defects could devastate future generations.

The United Kingdom amended its laws in 2015 to permit this technique, reflecting deliberate ethical review. In 2017, regulators issued the initial license to Newcastle University’s fertility clinic. This institution led the development over two decades.

Among the newborns are four boys and four boys, including identical twins, from seven women. All show no evidence of the anticipated mitochondrial ailments. One additional pregnancy continues under medical care.

Professor Doug Turnbull, a key researcher, described the results as reassuring for families and scientists alike. He highlighted the relief in achieving positive outcomes for patients.

Professor Mary Herbert, a senior team member, expressed fulfillment in seeing eight healthy infants. She noted the achievement rewards the extensive collaborative work.

Human genes primarily reside in the cell’s nucleus, totaling around 20,000. However, mitochondria add 37 genes of their own. Faulty mutations here can lead to profound cellular energy deficits.

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Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal Shares’ Sob Story’ About ICE Supposedly Abusing Pregnant Illegal and It Backfires when the Migrant’s Chilling Background Emerges

Far-left Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) ended up red-faced earlier this week after she tried to defend an illegal alien supposedly mistreated by ICE when the horrifying truth regarding her misdeeds was unveiled.

On Wednesday, the Nashville Banner wrote a sob story about a pregnant illegal alien named Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus from Guatemala, who was arrested by ICE in Tennessee in late April and then sent to an ICE facility in Louisiana.

The paper went on to allege Monterroso-Lemus received lackluster prenatal care while in custody and ended up losing her baby.

Look at this biased, so-called ‘reporting’ from the Nashville Banner:

On Mother’s Day this year, Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus found herself alone in Guatemala, a country she hadn’t called home in more than a decade. At 38, the once-vibrant, curly-haired woman seemed withered and shaken.

After she was arrested by ICE in Lenoir City, she ended up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana, where she experienced the unimaginable. After pleading for medical help for days, she lost her mid-term pregnancy.

“I had him inside here for three days, in this Louisiana facility, my baby dead in my stomach, inside my stomach for three days, dead,” she said.

The publication went on to connect this tragic circumstance to President Trump daring to enforce immigration laws.

Monterroso-Lemus’s experience in detention comes amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants and the mounting claims of abuse and discrimination tied to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests across the country. In Nashville, ICE and the Tennessee Highway Patrol officials recently made 588 traffic stops in predominantly Latino neighborhoods as part of a joint operation that led to the arrests of 196 undocumented residents.

Despite claims that ICE was only targeting criminals, fewer than half had prior criminal records. As the Banner reported, in the overnight operation between May 3 and 4, THP made more than twice as many traffic stops as Metro Nashville police did during both days combined, fueling allegations of racial profiling.

Jayapal promptly seized on the story and amplified it across social media.

“A pregnant woman lost her baby after ICE refused to give her prenatal care. She begged for help and was denied,” the congresswoman wrote on X. “She was fed food full of cockroaches. She was forced to sleep on the floor. “

“This is absolutely disgusting, and we should all be outraged.”

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More Fetal Losses Than Expected After Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccination In Israel: Study

A higher-than-expected number of miscarriages and other forms of fetal loss were associated with COVID-19 vaccinations in Israel, a new study has revealed.

Researchers found 13 fetal losses—four more than the nine expected—for every 100 pregnant women who received a COVID-19 vaccine during weeks eight to 13 in pregnancy, according to the study, which was published as a preprint on the medRxiv server.

Most people in Israel, including pregnant women, received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

Pfizer did not respond by publication time to a request for comment.

The team behind the study includes Retsef Levi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher who was recently named to the committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines, and Dr. Tracy Hoeg, who works for the Food and Drug Administration.

The researchers analyzed electronic health records from Maccabi Healthcare Services, one of four organizations that provide health care to Israelis. They looked at 226,395 pregnancies that occurred between March 1, 2016, and Feb. 28, 2022. The primary analysis looked at fetal loss for pregnant women after dose one or dose three of a COVID-19 vaccine, with fetal loss including miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth.

The researchers came up with an expected number of fetal losses based on a model that drew from data before the COVID-19 pandemic, then compared the expected number of fetal losses with those that occurred from week eight of pregnancy onward.

They identified 13,214 fetal losses after the COVID-19 pandemic started, compared with 12,846 fetal losses in the reference period, finding that women who received a COVID-19 vaccine during weeks eight to 13 in pregnancy experienced a higher-than-expected number of fetal losses.

“If you believe this result … every 100 women that you would vaccinate during weeks eight to 13, you are going to see close to four additional fetal losses,” Levi told The Epoch Times.

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Rates of successful conceptions according to COVID-19 vaccination status: Data from the Czech Republic

Abstract

Background

Adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccination on human menstrual cycle characteristics have been observed, but limited data are available on the relationship between COVID-19 vaccination status and birth rates.

Objectives

Therefore, we used nationwide data from the Czech Republic to examine rates of successful conceptions (SCs), that is, conceptions leading to live births 9 months later, for women who were either vaccinated or unvaccinated against COVID-19 before SC.

Methods

Summary monthly COVID-19 vaccination and birth data for women in the Czech Republic aged 18–39 years were retrieved for the period from January 2021 to December 2023. The numbers of SCs per month per 1000 women were calculated for preconception-vaccinated or unvaccinated women, respectively, as well as the number of SCs per month per 1000 women for all women aged 18–39 years.

Results

During the study period, there were approximately 1,300,000 women aged 18–39 years in the Czech Republic, and the proportion of COVID-19-vaccinated women increased from January 2021 until reaching a steady state of around 70% by the end of 2021. At least from June 2021, SCs per 1000 women were considerably lower for women who were vaccinated, compared to those that were unvaccinated, before SC. Furthermore, SC rates for the vaccinated group were much lower than expected based on their proportion of the total population.

Conclusions

In the Czech Republic, SC rates were substantially lower for women vaccinated against COVID-19 before SC than for those who were not vaccinated. These hypothesis-generating and preliminary results call for further studies of the potential influence of COVID-19 vaccination on human fecundability and fertility.

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FDA, CDC advisers say lost pregnancies higher than expected following early mRNA vaccination

President Trump’s second-term agenda has been careful not to cast doubt on his signature first-term achievement, the development of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, which congressional Republicans continue to laud and even claim was sabotaged by Pfizer to deny Trump a consecutive term despite his base souring on the therapeutics.

A new preprint study on mRNA COVID vaccines in early pregnancy, coauthored by top advisers to Trump’s Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may fuel the splintering of the Make America Healthy Again movement as the jabs’ opponents ramp up pressure on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ban them.

Not yet peer-reviewed, the study analyzed hundreds of thousands of Israeli medical records on pregnant women in the three years before and after SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China, finding 43% more “observed-to-expected” fetal losses per 100 pregnancies — 13 instead of nine — when the first mRNA dose is taken between 8-13 weeks’ pregnancy.

Pregnant women who took a booster between 8-13 weeks lost an additional two pregnancies per 100, a “potential dose-response relationship,” the study said.

By using pregnant women who got flu vaccines between 8-27 weeks and women who received either vaccine before their pregnancy as “comparative controls,” the authors said they were able to show the association is unique to COVID vaccines. 

The former had a “consistently lower-than-expected observed number of fetal losses, likely the result of healthy vaccinee bias” – in which people with overall better health tend to have higher vaccination rates – while the latter had “according-to-expected or lower-than-expected numbers of fetal losses,” the study found.

It said “almost all” mRNA doses were made by Pfizer, whose own 2021 report to the FDA – which the agency hid for 16 months until a court made it public – shows 44% of women in Pfizer’s clinical trial lost their pregnancies.

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Miscarriage and Pregnancy Loss Rates 43% Higher Than Expected After Covid Vaccination, New Study Finds

Dear readers, I am delighted to share with you the fruits of a massive research project I’ve been working on, which is the reason why you haven’t heard from me in a very long time.

I quickly realised after I started working on it that I would have to prioritise it at the neglect of posting here. I got so swept up in it that I didn’t even have time to post about my Process 1 vs Process 2 work. I hope you will agree it was worth it.

I will start with the key findings and then try to explain the methodology in plain language. The paper is based on analysis of electronic health records (EHR) from one of Israel’s largest health insurance funds. For those of you who would rather read the paper itself, here’s a PDF.

Key findings

Here are the key findings (as summarised in a post on X).

Women vaccinated in early pregnancy (weeks 8-13) had a higher-than-expected number of foetal losses:

  • Dose 1 = 3.9 more per 100 women [43% higher than expected: 13 vs 9]
  • Dose 3 = 1.9 more per 100 women [19% higher than expected: 12 vs 10]

Late pregnancy losses were a big part of the signal.

Among all women, 1.1% lost their pregnancy after week 24, compared to 2.7% of women who received dose 1 in early weeks, and 1.8% of women who received dose 3 in early weeks.

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‘Genetic optimization’: Embryo ranking treats children as marketable goods, critics warn

An embryo screening service is drawing sharp criticism from scientists, ethicists and faith leaders who say the technology turns parents into shoppers and children into products.

Manhattan biotech startup Nucleus Genomics is marketing its Nucleus Embryo platform as a tool for genetic “optimization.” It allows couples undergoing in vitro fertilization to upload and rank DNA from up to 20 embryos based on potential intelligence, anxiety, addiction risk and more.

Embryos can come from whichever egg and sperm sources were used in that cycle.

For a minimum of $5,999, parents can receive “polygenic risk scores” estimating the likelihood that their future children will develop diseases such as Alzheimer’s or diabetes or possess traits such as high IQ, low BMI, anxiety resistance or a particular eye color.

“Every parent wants to give their children more than they had,” Nucleus Genomics posted on X alongside a promotional video showing a dashboard where users can sort embryos by projected traits.

To some critics, however, the premise behind the tool is less about love and more about control.

“For some parents, it looks for things like the potential for diabetes, the potential for deafness, conditions that are treatable or healable with today’s modern medicine,” Emma Waters, policy analyst for the Center for Technology and the Human Person at The Heritage Foundation, told The Washington Times.

“But in many other cases, the ones that are equally if not more disturbing, parents are actively using this technology to select children that are the smartest, have a certain personality, are the right sex or otherwise fit their model image of what a child should be — whether that’s blue eyes or blond hair or something else,” Ms. Waters said.

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Federal Employee Charged With Capital Murder For Slipping Abortion Pills Into Girlfriend’s Coffee

A 38-year-old Texas resident and federal employee was arrested and charged for killing his preborn child by feeding his girlfriend abortion-inducing drugs without her knowledge.

The Austin-American Statesman reported that Justin Anthony Banta was arrested June 6 and charged with capital murder and evidence tampering. In September 2024, he allegedly snuck abortion pills into his girlfriend’s drink at a coffee shop at about six weeks of pregnancy after she rebuffed his offer to buy “Plan C” for her, saying she wanted the baby.

The girlfriend, who remains anonymous, told police that she began experiencing severe fatigue and bleeding the next day, requiring an emergency room visit, and ultimately lost her baby on October 19.

Police confiscated Banta’s phone during the course of the investigation, accusing him of tampering with it remotely to delete evidence, allegedly using his skills as an IT staffer for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

“Sheriff Authier expressed his gratitude to the owners and staff of the coffee shop … for their full cooperation, along with the efforts of Parker County Sheriff’s Office investigators, the Texas Rangers, Benbrook Police, Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Digital Forensic and Technical Services, the U.S. Secret Service, the Regional Organized Crime Information Center (ROCIC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for their support and resources throughout this extensive investigation,” the Parker County Sheriff’s Office said.

In Texas, capital murder is punishable at a minimum of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, though it is possible prosecutors could seek the death penalty.

Despite the abortion lobby’s framing of abortion as a matter of “choice,” it has long turned a blind eye to abortion coercion.

Live Action’s “Aiding Abusers” series draws on news reports, eyewitness testimony, and undercover video to expose Planned Parenthood employees’ willingness to offer abortions to girls as young as 12 without reporting signs of statutory or forcible rape to law enforcement. This enables the men who brought the girls in for appointments to bring them home and continue abusing them.

In 2023, the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute released a study that interviewed 1,000 American women and found that 61 percent of women who undergo abortions do so due to pressure from “male partners, family members, other persons, financial concerns, and other circumstances.”

“Forcing a woman to have an abortion, including a minor, is illegal in all 50 states of the United States of America,” according to the Justice Foundation’s Center Against Forced Abortions, which offers a variety of information resources to help those who are being pressured into killing their babies.

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Top FDA Official Admits She Refused the Covid-19 Vaccine While Pregnant

One of the most powerful figures at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has admitted she refused the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine while pregnant—even as her agency promoted it as “safe and effective” for all pregnant women.

Dr Sara Brenner’s explosive disclosure, made on 15 May 2025 at the MAHA Institute Round Table in Washington, DC, is as revealing as it is troubling.

A preventive medicine physician, Brenner has worked at the FDA since 2019. As the FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner—and briefly its Acting Commissioner—Brenner was at the centre of decision-making.

Prior to that, she was Chief Medical Officer for diagnostics and was detailed to the White House to support the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response. She didn’t just participate in the pandemic response, she helped shape it from within.

“Knowing what I knew—not only about nanotechnology, about medicine, about the medical countermeasures—but also having a very strong and firm grounding in bioethics…there were many things that were not right,” she told the audience.

That someone with her seniority and access to internal data privately rejected the vaccine, while her agency promoted it to millions of pregnant women, presents a profound ethical dilemma.

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Three More States Diverge From CDC On COVID-19 Vaccine Recommendations

Officials from three states said on June 12 that pregnant women should still be able to receive COVID-19 vaccines, diverging from updated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health officials with California, Oregon, and Washington state said in a joint statement that they “continue to recommend all individuals age 6 months and older should have access and the choice to receive currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines, with an emphasis on protecting higher risk individuals, such as infants and toddlers, pregnant individuals, and others with risks for serious disease.”

The CDC in May updated its immunization schedule for adults, removing a COVID-19 vaccine recommendation for pregnant women. Insurers typically only cover vaccines that are on immunization schedules, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians and other organizations.

The CDC also removed a recommendation for healthy children to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, although the childhood immunization schedule states that “where the parent presents with a desire for their child to be vaccinated, children 6 months and older may receive COVID-19 vaccination, informed by the clinical judgment of a healthcare provider and personal preference and circumstances.”

Officials have for several years been directing vaccine manufacturers to update their formulations on an annual basis. The CDC had been advising people to receive a shot each year, regardless of prior vaccination and infection.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the changes were made because there is no clinical data to support a “repeat booster strategy.”

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