Notes of the Quarter

National Health Service hospitals are being forced to turn away women seeking abortions because of an acute shortage of doctors willing to carry out terminations. A third of junior doctors are refusing on moral grounds to conduct the operation, according to research.

The first study into conscientious objection shows that in some hospitals all the junior doctors have exercised their right not to perform abortions. Nearly a quarter of NHS hospital consultants nationwide said that they could not recruit sufficient doctors to meet the demand. (Sunday Times)

Doctors at St Mary's Hospital, Manchester, are starting the first clinical trial of a combined chemical contraceptive for men. The treatment, funded by the Medical Research Council, consists of an implant of the male sex hormone testosterone and daily tablets to inhibit the hormone prolactin. (Sunday Times)

Two thousand births each year in Britain result from the use of donated sperm. Because donors are guaranteed anonymity, these children have no legal right to learn the identity of these donors. There is now a growing campaign, spearheaded by the Children's Society, to enable these children to trace their genetic parents which fertility experts believe will deter future donors. (BBC News)

Parents have always suspected it, but science has now confirmed it: children are bad for your health. Professor Thomas Kirkwood of Manchester University and Rudi Westendorp, of Leiden University in Holland, researched the records of more than 13,000 female aristocrats born between 740 and 1875. They discovered that women who started having children late in life - in their forties - lived longer than those who had their first child when young. Among women who lived beyond 60, those who had the fewest children lived the longest. Almost half the women who lived beyond the age of 80 were childless. The pattern among men who survived beyond 60 was almost identical. Kirkwood and Westendorp wrote: "Records are compatible with the hypothesis that the human life history has a heritable component that involved a trade-off between fertility and longevity." (Sunday Times)