Revisions for RTLU

Women who undergo fertility treatments may find the situation so distressing that they develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new study says. In the study, close to 50 percent of participants met the official criteria for PTSD, meaning they could be diagnosed with the condition.

We're both happily married law professors who followed the same trajectory. We graduated from college, became established in our professions, got married, and had children. Our children and most of our friends have followed the same pattern. Our family experiences might be typical of the college-educated professionals around us - but not at all typical for large segments of the American public.

Single people, we are having a moment. That happens sometimes. The culture takes a collective break from its raucous and tiresome matrimania, long enough to notice that single life - wow, there's something to that! - before doing an about-face to rush headlong back to the latest episode of "The Bachelor."

Everyone knows about the everyday sexism project, yes? Started by feminist Laura Bates, it's become a worldwide phenomenon: women (and men) can log in to the site and register their daily encounters with sexism in all its insidious and subtle (and less subtle) forms (http://everydaysexism.com/). It's spawned a book, as well.

Here's a recipe for an economic armageddon: Take a rapidly aging society and a younger generation that's not having kids. The result? An incredible shrinking economy that's also burdened by huge costs to its Social Security and tax systems. That's the grim future for countries such as Japan, where the population is forecast to decline by one-third through 2060, thanks to a sharp drop in birthrates and an elderly population.

by Miriam Cosic Years ago, when Steve Bracks was premier of Victoria, I found myself interviewing him for a news magazine story. Our conversation was long and wide-ranging, but I was increasingly irritated by his repetition of those politicians' tropes, "families" and "Australian families". I called him on it.

"We have been very effective at teaching teenagers how not to get pregnant," Prof Geeta Nargund says. "Now, we need to start teaching them about fertility as well, so they can get pregnant when they choose to." Nargund knows more than most about the vagaries of our national fertility.

If you're nearing an age where you want a child, but whatever stars you imagined aligning in your favor to do so have not, there is a very good piece exploring the reality of going it alone by choice-AKA, "choice moms"-and how great it can be if you cook it just right.

This piece originally appeared on DAME. A few weeks ago, I had brunch with three friends, all single women over 40. We sipped coffee outside on the first beautiful spring Saturday, and my friends discussed various aspects of their lives, including but not limited to: raising a 1-year-old, preparing a business for a trade show, teaching English abroad, setting proper freelance rates, campaigning for a city mayoral candidate, and getting started on the garden.

Proudly (yes, proudly!) passing on our infertility experience "This possibility was never mentioned" my husband would often mutter in the days and months after we lost our children. Shaking his head, he would go on to point out that the fact some of us do not get to have children is nowhere in our collective...

Some people seem to have a hard time conversing with single people. All they can think of to ask is whether the single person is seeing someone. Even worse, researchers can be just as flummoxed. A survey claiming to be "the most comprehensive" about single life asked only about 1 question of 128 that was not about becoming unsingle.

Over the past 10 years the offices of France's National Institute for Demographic Studies (Ined) have seen a steady stream of Korean policymakers and Japanese academics, determined to crack the mystery of French fertility. Scientists present their birthrate graphs and explain the broad lines of French public policy.

Harriet Minter writes (2 June, theguardian.com), of my campaign to see fertility issues added to the secondary school curriculum, that "the last thing we need is more scaremongering". I am delighted that my call for fertility education has provoked such a widespread response.

Sometimes, when other people behave badly (or when we think they do), it is just so tempting to try to shame them. It can feel good - like righting a wrong or putting someone in their place who deserves to be taken down a few notches. But what are the costs?

"Stress doesn't always lead to fight-or-flight, says Kelly McGonigal. It can also activate brain systems that help us connect with other people." In this article, McGonigal summarizes the social science research that explains how a certain response to stress changes the brain's biochemistry in surprising ways.

Now all of us single people are pathetic, not just the straight ones. "Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there," writes Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Earlier this week, Slate's "Dear Prudence," Emily Yoffe, featured a letter from a young attorney who was seething with resentment because many co-workers in her law firm regularly left the office early. Their explanation? They had children and needed to tend to them. "These co-workers often acknowledge that they're being...

As in most of the western world, marriage, monogamy and the nuclear family have been the social mainstay mostly because of religious, and especially Judaeo-Christian, values. We still automatically assume monogamy is "normal", but this is contrary to our essential nature, says human sexual scientist Christopher Ryan, author of a groundbreaking book, "Sex At Dawn".

Reposted from Rebelle Society "What if we never 'get over' certain deaths, or our childhoods? What if the idea that we should have by now, or will, is a great palace lie? What if we're not supposed to? What if it takes a life time...?"

One girl explains that she won't be allowed to "rescue anybody" - because in the books she reads and films she watches, it's only the male characters that get to be the heroes. All of this would be fine if it were just a question of semantics. But it's not.

It can take more than two years to deal with bereavement, new research has revealed. People grieve on average for two years, one month and four days after losing a loved one, but talking through emotions can help people to feel better sooner.

by Maria Popova "We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel." The equilibrium between productivity and presence is one of the hardest things to master in life, and one of the most important.

by Maria Popova From teenage rebellion to self-reliance, how we learn to be alone. "All of humanity's problems," the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654, "stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Birth rates may be plummeting in these economic times, but it's not stopping a phenomenon that happens to women in particular -- the time that comes in every woman's life when an uncontrollable "urge" comes over her and she feels a calling from deep within to become a mother.

If you have ever experienced a dark hour of the soul in the middle of a dinner party, where the men seemed to be talking about something intriguing at the end of the table, while you were deeply immersed in a women's conversation about how to transition from the bottle...