An article on birth mothers called, "They never forgot", takes another look at the women forced to surrender babies in the years of the "conspiracy of silence" that followed the end of WWII.

Many women who gave up babies fought depression, developed traumatic stress disorders or turned to alcohol and drugs to numb their chronic grief. Others became super-achievers to prove to their parents that they could have been a fine mother. Some spoke regretfully of how they remained emotionally distant from the children they later had. Others never had another child because they felt it betrayed the baby they surrendered.

Quoting Ann Fessler and many birth mothers from the period, it's an excellent article of love and suffering, and if it encourages some to read "The Girls Who Went Away", it's even more well worth its space and efforts.

Adoptions are down "abysmally" in some parts of Ohio, or at least that's the news from Hamilton County on adoption from foster care.

A 1999 lawsuit that accused the county of racial discrimination in adoptions has apparently resulted in that no longer being an issue, but a recent report blasts the county, nonetheless, calling for reforms and the hiring of more case workers and supervisors to handle adoptions.

A look at one family's open adoption is what this article is about, and it takes a touching and sensitive, if perhaps a bit simplistic, look at infant adoption from the perspective of birth and adoptive parents.

Working moms may or may not want to read this story that asks if a mother's working outside the home led to her son becoming a serial killer.

Overlaid with racial, economic and social issues, this looks at the background of the Columbus Stocking Strangler, Carlton Gary.

Registration is now open for the National Adoption Ethics Conference that is to be held on the 15th and 16th of October in Arlington, Virginia.

One issue that may come up in ethical discussions might be this one about harvesting eggs from young girls. In what's being hailed as a breakthrough, doctors in Israel are removing eggs from ovarian tissue in girls as young as five-years-old facing treatment for cancers and freezing them for possible later use.

"The demand came from their parents, partly because it helps them believe physicians who say their daughters will survive the cancer."

He explained that there was no other option but tissue removal for the girls, unlike older women who can have solely their eggs taken without damage to their ovaries.

He added: "No eggs have been thawed so we do not know if pregnancies will result, but the eggs looked normal in the laboratory.

And it appears that genetic screening in IVF is "ineffective and actually reduces rates of pregnancy", according to a controlled clinical trial in Holland.

Although there's no answer yet at to why this seems to be the case, but it may be that the test itself might hamper the implant.

Another tool ... HIV impact, region-by-region, a click-on map illustrating how the virus has impacted parts of the world.