Sexual and Reproductive Health with Isaac Eranga

 In our culture, reproduction is often seen as women’s work. From pregnancy to childbirth through nursing a newborn child, women are often expected to take the central role in creating new life by default. Similarly, when problems of infertility arise, the focus is often slanted toward females.  But getting pregnant takes two, as Mike Huang is acutely aware. Huang is the CEO of Glow, a company which nearly two years ago launched an eponymous reproductive health app with help from big-name backer Max Levchin, a PayPal co-founder. Until today, Glow was designed exclusively to help women either avoid a pregnancy or get pregnant. The app offers women insight on good habits to practice while they’re expecting and provides support during difficult times, such as miscarriage and the postpartum period.  Now, after addressing a mother’s journey to parenthood, Huang and his team are rounding out Glow with an essential new component: support for male fertility. “Men’s reprodu...

 It’s happened at the last two parties I’ve gone to in the Bay Area: At a certain point in the evening, a group of women ends up sitting together, forming a slightly closed-off circle. Maybe a single dude is hanging around, standing at the periphery. He’ll interject once in a while, but there’s not much he can add here: It’s time to talk birth control. Those NuvaRing commercials where a gaggle of girl pals trades info about insertion and ease of use come off cloying and cliche, but … man. They’re not totally off the mark. These conversations happen everywhere, and they reflect a big gap in information available about birth control methods. Ninety-eight percent of women in the United States will use some form of birth control during their lives, and with a rapidly expanding field of methods—IUDs and condoms and implants and pills and rings and dear God what is that spongy thing—the pros and cons are becoming much more complicated to parse. But it doesn’t have to be that way. G...

Every morning, I pee in a cup. Before I do anything else pick up my toddler daughter, pet my dog, even fully open my eyes — I collect a sample of urine, soak a swab in it for fifteen seconds, stick the swab in a machine, and wait five minutes for a beep. Nothing can make you more obsessed with science and technology than the biological imperative to reproduce. And nothing makes fulfilling that imperative more difficult than your own body. For the first two weeks of the menstrual cycle, a woman’s ovary grows an egg. When the egg is mature, it leaves the ovary and travels through the fallopian tube to the uterus. This process is known as ovulation.  You’re most fertile in the two to three days before ovulation. But pinpointing that window is a difficult — and, OK, sometimes gross — affair. Methods like my fertility monitor or ovulation predictor kits rely on detecting estrogen and luteinizing hormone in urine. A sudden rise of LH triggers ovulation Nothing can make you more o...

Janet Reno, the first female attorney general of the United States, has died of complications from Parkinson’s disease, relatives told the AP and CNN.   She was 78.    A graduate of Harvard Law School, Reno became attorney general under President Bill Clinton in 1993. She ran the Justice Department during some of the administration’s most prominent controversies, including the raid of a Waco, Texas, cult compound that left over 80 people dead and the decision to return 6-year-old Elián González to his father in Cuba. Reno was also caught in the crosshairs of many of Clinton’s personal legal troubles.  But Reno’s career wasn’t only defined by scandal. The longest-serving attorney general of the 20th century, she was a staunch advocate for women’s rights and pushed Congress to pass stronger laws protecting abortion seekers and providers. “I think we should do everything we can under federal law to protect a woman’s right to choose from physical restraints that ...