Hasta La Gadget!

This month as we celebrate Pride, we also embrace diversity in families. Parents – and parents-to-be – come with all types of backgrounds – partnered, single, straight and gay/lesbian. And, today, the path for building your family is diverse, too, with access to a variety of assisted reproductive techniques (ART) including in vitro fertilization (IVF).

As more people think about building their own family, some employers are meeting the interest or demand by offering “family building” benefits including adoption and fertility services for all. If you currently work for an organization that does not offer such coverage, RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association offers advice on how to talk to your employer about adding fertility benefits.

No matter your individual situation, there are many different fertility treatment options and one – or several – might work for you. For a full description of various techniques plus resources, check out the family building guide from Path2Parenthood. RESOLVE also offers information on options from IVF to surrogacy to adoption, including how to make treatment more affordable and what insurance covers.

The major techniques that may be worth exploring for your unique situation include reciprocal IVF and surrogacy with sperm, egg, and embryo donation. Each involves many different decision points along the way, so and talking to fertility specialists, mental health professionals and lawyers who specialize in family law and family building is recommended. It’s also important to note that state laws may apply if you have a child using these approaches.

There are several options available to lesbian couples. The treatment a couple selects will depend on whether both women want the experience of carrying a baby. Decisions to make include who will go first and how to choose the sperm donor (known or unknown). For example, if both women want to become pregnant, working with the same agency and using the same sperm donor, each using their own eggs, might be more cost effective.

Reciprocal IVF is a popular option if only one partner wants to become pregnant or one woman is unable to get pregnant and lets both women have a biological connection to the child. Also known as partner IVF or co-maternity, one partner provides the eggs and the other partner carries the pregnancy, allowing both women to be physically involved in the pregnancy.

Sperm Donation is required for Reciprocal IVF and other fertility techniques as well as for couples where the man has problems with sperm count or quality. Among the decisions to be made are whether the couple or individual wants to select someone they know to be a sperm donor or whether to work with a sperm bank. Although the cost may be lower when acquiring sperm donated by someone you know – as opposed to purchasing sperm from an agency or bank – most clinics recommend any potential parent or parents meet with the donor and both a mental health professional and an attorney who specializes in family law. Additionally, many states and most physicians, require testing for sexually transmitted infections and often other tests, even for known sperm donors. When selecting an anonymous donor by using a sperm bank, one usually has access to information about medical history.

Egg donation may be needed in family building treatment, too, for any woman who may be having problems becoming pregnant due to the quality of her eggs. A reputable agency can help match patients with egg donors who come from diverse backgrounds. As with sperm, you can decide to have the egg donor be known, anonymous or semi-anonymous. Experts recommend that all donated eggs go through a screening process as this helps select the healthiest to enhance the chance of success.

Embryo donation may be needed by those interested in becoming parents. Women who go through IVF often don’t use all their embryos, so the frozen “leftover” embryos may become available for use by others in need. The medical issues for embryo donation include the need to screen potential donors, medical evaluation of the recipient, and the transfer procedure, among others. There are also mental health and legal considerations. To learn more about embryo donation, RESOLVE offers educational resources including the latest statistics about success rates and a free online webinar.

Surrogacy/Gestational Carrier is an approach often used by gay men and involves either an egg donor or embryo donation, often using their own sperm. The woman carrying the baby has no genetic connection to the child and is compensated for both the risk and service she provides. There are several gestational carrier agencies that can help people find a surrogate by playing an important role in evaluating candidates, in addition to personal interaction with prospective parents.

Adoption is an option for anyone interested in being a parent. From babies to older children, it’s a path some single individuals and couples choose instead of pursuing fertility treatment or select when infertility treatment hasn’t worked as planned. To learn more about adoption, check out the resources from the National Infertility and Adoption Education Non-Profit.

We should be proud that nowadays nearly everyone who aspires to be a parent has an opportunity to pursue their dream through advanced fertility techniques and adoption. As with anyone who pursues IVF, it is important to understand the success rates and know what your insurance will or will not cover. The complexity of the infertility treatment process may seem overwhelming, but there are resources that can help with everything from in-depth details on different medical techniques to arranging financing.

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Mother Nature is a saucy minx. 

In this delightful video from Friday’s Ireland AM show, weatherman Deric Ó h’Artagáin attempted to do his job in the rainy conditions, but was interrupted by whipping winds.

Armed with an enormous orange umbrella, Deric was in the middle of telling viewers what to expect for the day’s conditions when a gust of wind inverted the umbrella and dragged him off-camera in a beautifully comedic moment.

The show cut to Deric’s laughing co-hosts, who quipped “Welcome to Friday!” and “Don’t mess with Mother Nature.” Deric reappeared, unharmed, but the same cannot be said for the umbrella.

Live TV is just the best, isn’t it?

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“If someone wants a gun, they’ll get a gun.”

This is a claim that gun control advocates often hear when they call for stronger laws to prevent gun violence. The argument goes that because it would be possible to circumvent most restrictions on gun purchases, the laws themselves would be pointless.

In Michigan this week, however, a relatively non-controversial federal firearms law appears to have prevented a shooting at an airport. The law worked as intended ― in the process exposing the weakness of the “criminals don’t follow laws” argument that opponents of gun control frequently employ.

Amor Ftouhi, a 51-year-old citizen of Canada and Tunisia, walked into Flint’s Bishop International Airport on Wednesday and allegedly stabbed a police officer. The officer is now in stable condition, Ftouhi is in custody, and the incident is being investigated as an act of terrorism.

In the days before the attack, Ftouhi tried to purchase a gun. The sale was denied because Ftouhi is not a U.S. citizen. Instead of spending the extra time, effort and money to get a gun illegally, he bought a knife, which he allegedly then used to injure a single person before being subdued.

It’s impossible to know what would have happened if Ftouhi had been able to obtain a gun ― and with more than 300 million firearms in civilian hands and plenty of ways to buy them illegally through private sales or the black market, he probably could have done exactly that. But the outcome in this case is a reminder that just because someone can get a gun doesn’t mean they will. 

For those who view gun violence as a public health issue, this basic equation helps explain the effectiveness of many gun restrictions. 

“The fundamental law of economics and psychology is that when you make things harder to do and to get, fewer people do them,” David Hemenway, a professor at Harvard School of Public Health, told HuffPost. 

“After the Oklahoma City bombing [in 1995], we made it a lot harder to get the ingredients for those enormous bombs, so fewer people could get them,” Hemenway said. “It doesn’t mean that nobody does, but it means that when we had the Boston Marathon bombing, they weren’t able to use as high-intensity explosives, so many fewer people died than you might have expected.”

The 2013 Boston Marathon attackers detonated a pair of pressure cooker bombs at the race’s finish line, killing three people and injuring hundreds of others.

Gun laws keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous individuals on a daily basis, but it’s hard to point to clear-cut examples of these laws’ effectiveness. Premeditated instances of violence, in which perpetrators are dead set on getting a gun and inflicting as many casualties as possible, are not the norm. What generally happens is that gun laws force criminals to make calculated decisions about how much they’re willing to pay, or risk, to get access to an illegal firearm, according to Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. 

“Is it completely impossible that they could get a gun? Well, of course not,” Webster told HuffPost. “But it’s really about how easy and with what degree of risk, and if they’re willing to incur it. All the data suggests that some significant share of people do care about that cost and risk, and they behave accordingly.”

But it usually doesn’t make headlines when a gun law works as intended. The high-profile incidents are the ones where people manage to bypass restrictions and inflict carnage.

“On an incredibly regular basis, the public sees people doing bad things with guns, and they virtually never see something in their news feed that says, ‘Breaking news, dangerous person does not get a gun and does not shoot somebody,’” Webster said. “It’s not something we can observe directly.”

All of this has made people “wired to be skeptical” that it’s possible for gun laws to prevent gun violence, Webster added. 

But a large body of research has shown that strong gun laws do correlate with lower levels of gun violence ― even if the results only appear slowly over time and the effects of specific laws are hard to pinpoint.

“Any individual law, it’s much harder to say it has an effect, because it depends on what all of the other laws are and how well they’re enforced,” Hemenway said.

Gun restrictions in Massachusetts or Chicago, for example, would likely be more effective if the surrounding areas didn’t have relatively weak gun laws, which make it easier for legally purchased firearms to be used in an illegal context.

Of course, part of the reason many Americans doubt the effectiveness of gun laws is because the government has actively tried to make that information unavailable. For over two decades, Congress has blocked dedicated federal funding for research on the health effects of gun violence, largely forcing academics to take matters into their own hands. 

“One of the big problems in the gun area is we don’t have as good data as we should have, and we haven’t had very much money for research,” Hemenway said. “So we don’t have nearly as many research articles that are enough to be convincing on very many issues.”

But even if this longstanding trend were to be reversed ― which seems unlikely under President Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress ― Hemenway isn’t sure a stronger factual argument would necessarily persuade everyone that gun laws work.

“What I’ve figured out in life oftentimes is that if people want to believe something, they’ll believe it no matter what the evidence shows,” he said. “And you’re just trying to get the people in the middle to believe.”

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Plainly stated, fashion as we know it today would not exist if not for the creativity and influence of people in the LGBTQ community. LGBTQ stylists, designers and fashion personalities alike make up the heart of the industry. 

As a result, many of our very favorite moments in pop culture, film and even political happenings would simply have not been possible without the LGBTQ community’s contributions. 

The history of fashion and its intersection with queerness goes far beyond this small sampling. The 25 moments we’re highlighting below, while iconic, just barely skim the surface.

Could you imagine living in a world without Madonna’s cone bra, debuted in 1990 and designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier? Or what about any single thing Sarah Jessica Parker wore as Carrie Bradshaw on “Sex and the City?”

Behold, in honor of Pride Month, 25 of the many epic moments in fashion history for which we should thank the LGBTQ community. 

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— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

It would seem that Twitch marathons of classic shows are the hot new thing. What originally began with a marathon of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross later led to marathons for both Power Rangers and Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. Today Twitch announced its next marathon, and if you happen to be a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, this … Continue reading