integral (e^x) wrote:
not without more wrote:
Pretty much all the lesbian couples I know have had a child "together". I have never inquired as to how they arranged that because that's private. I assume it's likely through IVF. My point is this does not prove that Caster is a man unless they were to actually publicly announce that Caster and Violet "made a baby" though sexual intercourse together.
Note: I do not think Caster should be allowed to race against women, even with lowered testosterone. Just saying this doesn't "prove" anything without more information.
I completely agree with you. IVF would make the most sense. But given the controversy surrounding Semenya, I would think that in the press release they would somehow mention IVF or whatever they did. Strange that you see no mention of it.
LOL, LRC is showing once again how little most of you guys know about female physiology and the nitty gritty details of human reproduction, especially as it occurs in today's world.
Actually, most lesbian couples who have babies do not use IVF - which stands for in vitro fertilization. Most lesbians who eschew PIV sex for assisted or artificial insemination procedures get pregnant via IUI - intra-uterine insemination.
IUI is basically the turkey baster method. Sperm - usually from donors, but sometimes in the case of het couples from the male partner - is introduced or squirted into the vagina at the time in the menstrual cycle a woman is most likely to become pregnant. Then nature is allowed to take its course as would be the case with unprotected PIV intercourse at the same time of the month.
IUI is now often done by doctors in clinics and health care facilities. Sometimes donor sperm is used, but IUI is also often employed using the sperm of a woman's male partner who has male fertility issues that today are commonplace (low motility and low sperm count, for example). But IUI is frequently done at home with healthy men's sperm using disposable syringes ( without the needles) too.
Sometimes IUI is called ICI, meaning intra-cervical insemination. But in ICI, the sperm is put near or on the cervix, not inside or within or through it as the use of the term "intra" might suggest. In other words, the sperm is introduced to the far end of the vagina, not placed inside the cervix/uterus (the cervix is the neck of the uterus that connects it to the vagina).
IUI/ICI poses no threat to the health of the woman involved, nor does it involve hormonal treatments and invasive surgical procedures.
IVF is a very different story. In IVF, a large numbers of eggs are extracted from the ovaries of a woman, then fertilized with sperm in a lab - and if/when the fertilization attempts "take" in the petri dish/test tube and some viable embryos develop, they then are placed into the woman by inserting a needle attached to a slender tube through her cervix directly into the uterus.
Once IVF embryos are introduced into the uterus, they might or might not become properly implanted and lead to pregnancy, which requires the development of a placenta. Three-quarters of the time, IVF does not lead to a viable pregnancy.
IVF not only has very high rates of failure, it also poses considerable risks to the health and wellbeing of the woman (or women) involved. (I say women because sometimes in IVF the woman attempting to become pregnant is the one who provides the eggs, but often eggs of another woman who acts as an egg donor are used.)
The drugs used to cause hyper-stimulation of the ovaries required for IVF have many negative side-effects and can cause a woman to lose her fertility altogether. For young women convinced to become egg donors for humanitarian reasons or as an easy way to make money, the process often turns out to be much more arduous and harmful than they'd been led to believe. (As the documentary "Eggsploitation" shows.)
Similarly, the process of having a needle pierce the cervix to place IVF embryos directly into the uterus is as painful for a/the woman trying to become pregnant as it sounds. Most women who go through the IVF implantation procedure will have to endure it many times before there's a chance of it succeeding.
Regardless of where the sperm came from, Caster Semenya's wife, Violet Raseboya, would have no reason to use IVF unless she had her own health problems that compromised her fertility. As she appears to be a robustly healthy, athletic woman still within her prime childbearing years (she's now 34), I don't think it's fair to assume she must have used IVF.