owlectomy

Last week's bread held out pretty well.

Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari).

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, 50:50% strong white/einkorn flour, perhaps a little lacking in the mace department.

Today's lunch: (this ran into several difficulties including oven problems and a pyrex plate going smash on the floor, but got there in the end) salmon fillets baked in foil with butter, salt, pepper and dill, served with baby Jersey Royal Potatoes boiled and tossed in butter, garlic-roasted tenderstem broccoli, and white-braised green beans with sliced baby red pepper.

One in 32 births in 2023 [in the UK] were the result of in vitro fertilisation, up 34% from one in 43 in 2013, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)

I admit this sounds rather startling, but then, being a historian of reproductive health among other things, I think of the fact that though we sometimes think our poor ancestresses were popping out progeny pretty much nonstop until death or menopause arrived, in actuality, fertility and subfertility were A Thing, historically. (Let us consider certain famed historical examples and a plethora of folktales on this theme.)

I have remarked heretofore about the assumption that Wo Unto The Sperms of the Modern Man, They Are Weak and In Decline, when I cannot see that there is any sound baseline of what the average male's average sperm count was and whether the little swimmers were even in prime condition at that even a very few decades ago. One assumes that any samples preserved in sperm banks (if they are and supposing they have not themselves deteriorated over time) would have been prime stuff from healthy young specimens. (Though given some of the stories that have come out about dodgy fertility docs, perhaps not.)

So this is not necessarily a story of Wo Wo Fertility B Declining, with side-order of Wymmynz B selfishly waiting Too Long to progenate, but of a problem which used to exist and was at the very least Not At All Easy To Fix (hopes and prayers, mostly, and try to relax....) has some chance of being resolved.

Okay, some percentage is presumably LGBTQ+ couples/constellations forming families.

And some of it is Older Mothers though again, historically, women have gone on Havin Babbyz well into their 40s and (Journal of Anecdotes Told to Me By Committee Members of Reproductive Health Charities) these days a significant % of abortions in the UK involve women who have misleadingly supposed from media myth that At Their Advanced Age their ovaries have shrivelled up and their fertility fallen off a cliff.

Though this is interesting:

The number of women freezing their eggs also increased sharply, with cycles up from 4,700 in 2022 to 6,900 in 2023. Egg freezing increased most among women in their 30s, but the number using their stored frozen eggs remained low, the report said.