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A new website and iPhone app aim to inform cancer patients and doctors about preserving fertility before treatment. Both were created by a consortium based at Northwestern University. The idea is to let newly diagnosed patients and their physicians know about things like freezing eggs, embryos and ovarian tissue, or banking sperm.

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A mutation of a gene that helps regulate cholesterol also appears to affect a hormone needed for women to get pregnant and bring a fetus to full term, a new study says. Researchers at John Hopkins University in Baltimore have found women who had a mutated "healthy" cholesterol gene — known as SCARB1 — and who had a history of infertility, may not have been able to get or remain pregnant because their bodies weren't producing enough progesterone.

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The fertility rate for mothers in 2009 was 2 children per woman, down 4 percent from 2008, which may be linked to the economy, the U.S. Census Bureau says. However, the women who had the highest fertility rate are those with a graduate or professional degree and by states -- there were 2.6 births per woman in Utah and 1.7 births per woman in Vermont.

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For nearly 30 years, pregnant women who’d had repeated miscarriages jumped at the chance to take a pill that promised a “96 percent chance’’ of delivering a baby with “no gastric or other side effects,’’ as one advertisement from the 1950s read. Then came a landmark paper from the New England Journal of Medicine — published 40 years ago this month — which linked the drug, called diethylstilbestrol or DES, to a very rare form of vaginal cancer in eight young Boston women ages 15 to 22 years old.