Sex-selection, abortion, and the pro-choice movement: Why liberals shouldn't gulp Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images What’s a not-OK reason to get an abortion? Rape and health of the mother, you’re cool with, yes? What about this nice Jewish girl who got one in college? That feels right. And the 26-year-old newlywed who, crap, gets knocked up six months in and isn’t quite ready for kids yet? How does a 35-year-old single woman who wants to focus on her career strike you? Where do you land on the middle-class wife who wants to save up a little more money before starting a family? And the mother of two who is not in the market for number three? This is pretty elementary stuff: The pro-choice movement is not just about protecting the rights of women in the direst situations to control their own bodies. Background: Today, the House of Representatives voted on PRENDA—the Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act, otherwise known as “the sex-selection bill.” By all accounts, gender-motivated abortions are not a big thing in the United States.
'Three-parent babies' cure for illness raises ethical fear | Science Aaron began to stand out at primary school. He was unlike other children in subtle ways that at times were hard to put a finger on. He couldn't hold a pen properly. There is no subtlety to Aaron's condition any more. What was wrong came to light only when Aaron turned yellow and was admitted to hospital. "I don't know what the future holds for my son. Mitochondrial disease runs in families, and more specifically is passed down from mother to child. Though obscure outside specialist hospital units, mitochondrial disease will soon be the subject of a national debate and a matter for parliament. The law as written reflects a line that has never been crossed in medicine. The ethical issues raised by the procedure are clear but for many doctors these are overridden by the chance to prevent life-threatening disease. The debate that is coming will be unusually centred on Britain, because no other country is known to be so close to offering the service to patients. Obesity Safety
Motherhood: Immaculate gestation | The Last Word On Nothing “Mommy, why did you kill me?” was the first line of the comment. It devolved from there into a maudlin, hallucinatory, and occasionally Freudian fantasy of an aborted child’s final message to his mother, and it ended with the little guy playing baseball with God in heaven while the mother burned in hell. The reply was brief and furious: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Another joined in: “When a man can get pregnant, I’ll be happy to listen to his opinions about abortion.” The abortion flamewar I’m describing took place in 1999, and it had the honor of being my first. Anonymous Internet Person #2 was right: men can’t get pregnant. In 1997, a pro-life group called Nightlight Adoptions set up a program called Snowflakes. If only there were some way to extend the concept, transplanting a developing fetus from a woman who found herself accidentally pregnant. But this apparent dead end does leave one intriguing loophole: scoop up the blastocyst before implantation.
Group blogs: Journal of Medical Ethics blog » Blog Archive » Treating the Sex Offender 13 Jun, 12 | by Iain Brassington This is an interesting story picked up by the BBC: drugs are being used to “suppress sexual thoughts and urges” among sex offenders in an experiment at HMP Whatton. It is early days, and the number taking part is small – so far fewer than 60 – but the graphs illustrating such measures as prisoners’ strength of sexual urges, or time spent thinking about sex, all show a downward trend.The Ministry of Justice is pleased with the initial evaluation of the scheme. The treatment will continue to be available to high-risk sex offenders who are assessed as being suitable, it says. There’s all manner of questions raised by the prospect of using drugs to alter, reduce, or otherwise manipulate sex drive. At the same time, there might be questions about the moral difference between having a certain sexual fantasy in the privacy of your own head, and acting it out. The possibility of such procedures ought to be of interest to people working on moral enhancement.
"Biomedicine’s Democratic Revolution" by Stephen H Friend Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space SEATTLE – Very soon, it will be economically feasible to sequence human genomes and collect massive amounts of different types of health data as standard medical practice. Consider the Beery twins, born in 1996 in San Diego, California. Frustrated, their parents had the twins’ genomes sequenced. So why haven’t success stories like that of the Beery twins, together with the Internet’s power and increasingly affordable collection of molecular data, led to the construction of a knowledge network of disease? One possible answer is that there are still technical barriers that block the construction and use of such networks. Cultural barriers are the real stumbling block. Similarly, the example of the Beery twins shows us that an alternative to symptom-based medicine can be realized: the advent of genomics technology can change not just what is known, but, more importantly, how we think of ourselves.
Noninvasive prenatal diagnostic tests, ethics, abortion, and insurance coverage Photograph by Comstock. In 2003, back when such things remained unpredictable, a woman gave birth to a baby boy with Down syndrome. Her family was shocked. The event left a deep impression on Rabinowitz. A scientist in Hong Kong had recently shown that a pregnant woman’s blood contains a small amount of fetal DNA, and the prenatal screening world was buzzing about the potential of that discovery. That test, called Parental Support, is currently in trials funded by the National Institutes of Health. Now insurance companies are getting involved. The potential benefits of NIPD are many: elimination of the risks associated with amniocentesis, the replacement of aggravating probabilities with accurate information, and more time for expectant parents to make difficult decisions. Scientists have known for decades that the blood of a pregnant woman contains a few stray fetal cells. When Lo licensed his technology to Sequenom, he stipulated that it could not be used for sex selection.
Brendan O’Neill - Why society should never institutionalise a "right to die" On 24 April 2012, I gave a speech at St Michael’s Hospice in Yorkshire arguing against the “right to die”. The speech is published below. Over the past month, there have been two interesting and seemingly unrelated news stories about old people – two media stories about pensioners which seem to be quite distinct, but which I think are linked in quite subtle and important ways. The first news story was about the alleged problem of pensioners using up too many of society’s resources. And the second news story was about the importance of the right to die, the importance of assisted suicide, especially at a time when we have more and more old people suffering from dementia. So the first news story was about the alleged problem of pensioner greed and the second news story was about how important it is today to give pensioners who are suffering the right to die if they want it. Now, these stories were not reported in the same breath; they did appear not on the same pages on newspapers.
Arizona decrees pregnancy starts before conception - health - 20 April 2012 On 12 April, the governor of Arizona approved a bill banning most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. However, the bill marks pregnancy as beginning two weeks before a child has been conceived. On the face of it, this sounds like nonsense, but what does the science say? New Scientist takes a closer look. What does the bill actually say? The bill bans the abortion of a fetus that is at or over 20 weeks of gestation, except in cases of medical emergency. That starts the fetal clock an average of two weeks before the fetus actually exists. Does that definition of gestational age make any sense? More than you might think. "It's been the convention for generations to measure the length of pregnancy from the first day of the last period," says medical ethicist Farr Curlin of the University of Chicago, Illinois. When does a pregnancy actually begin? "It would be absurd to say a woman is pregnant who is having her period," Curlin says. Do similar abortion laws exist elsewhere? Promoted Stories
The Population Control Holocaust Editor’s Note: The essay below is adapted from Robert Zubrin’s Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, the latest in our New Atlantis Books series. Robert Zubrin There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity. The founding prophet of modern antihumanism is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who offered a pseudoscientific basis for the idea that human reproduction always outruns available resources. Better Dead Than Red Who was Dr. His success was remarkable. India Peru
After-Birth Abortion: The pro-choice case for infanticide Photograph by Robin Utrecht/AFP/Getty Images. Just when you thought the religious right couldn’t get any crazier, with its personhood amendments and its attacks on contraception, here comes the academic left with an even crazier idea: after-birth abortion. No, I didn’t make this up. [W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child. Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. Follow Predictably, the article has sparked outrage. Let’s look at some of those assumptions. 1. Furedi accepts birth as the first logical time limit, though not for reasons of fetal development. 2. You may find this statement cold, but where’s the flaw in its logic? 3. 4. 5.
Molecules to Medicine: When Religion Collides with Medical Care: Who Decides What Is Right for You? | Guest Blog San Carlos Church - Vince Alongi The recent presidential candidate debates, fights over insurance coverage for contraceptives, and the Virginia and Texas legislatures’ imposition of intrusive, unnecessary ultrasounds prior to any abortions are highlighting the fundamental issue of the role of religion in health care and the separation of Church and State. While the emphasis has been on reproductive care, the imposition of religious beliefs on access to medical care is far more wide reaching in its deleterious effect on the ability of people to choose their care and have their medical needs met. Since I first started medical school, two principles were inculcated in me as foundations of medicine. I hope to share some historical background on the intersection between medical care and religion, and what happens when we deviate from these central tenets of patient-centric care and then, in a subsequent post, tell more about the impacts of religious beliefs on research and public health. or
Procreation vs. Overpopulation In 1832, Charles Knowlton, a doctor in Ashfield, Massachusetts, published a short book with a long title: “Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a Physician.” Knowlton, who was thirty-one, was a “freethinker” and, by the standards of the Berkshires, an unusually adventurous soul. While attending the New Hampshire Medical Institute (now Dartmouth Medical School), he was too poor to pay for a dissecting class and so had liberated a corpse from a cemetery. In “Fruits of Philosophy,” Knowlton took up the subject of sex, or population growth, which, at the time, amounted to much the same thing. Knowlton’s pamphlet provided his readers with easy-to-follow instructions. “Fruits of Philosophy” once again brought Knowlton into conflict with the law. But a good idea could not be kept down. Then, in 1877, two prominent British reformers, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, decided to reprint “Fruits of Philosophy” to test an obscenity statute.
John Stuart Mill and the Right to Die | Against the New Taboo The consistency of individual autonomy, as Mill outlined, indicates that just as we can live as we wish (with certain constraints), we ought to be able to die as we wish, too. Today is human rights day in South Africa. This piece seems to me appropriate, given that I think the right to die should be the next step in universal human rights. A British man, Tony Nicklinson, wants to die. Killing, whether oneself or others, is obviously a difficult topic. What Mr Nicklinson’s case demonstrates though is the inconsistency of state interventions on individuals’ activities. Destroy your lungs but don’t kill yourself We’ve noted previously that John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle seems to be tacitly in place in Western societies, when we allow others to harm themselves through personally chosen activities: from smoking to rock-climbing. As we noted, we have no good reason to stop him from performing a self-harming act, unless it unnecessarily and excessively harms the lives of others.
ABORTION, INFANTICIDE, HUMANITY, FREE SPEECH Is there no moral distinction between killing a newborn baby and aborting a fetus? And should an academic paper that seemingly advocated the killing of newborns have ever been published? Those are the questions at the heart of a controversy that has erupted after the publication of a paper entitled ‘After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?’ in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The paper, which would normally have been read only by a handful of moral philosophers, was picked by newspapers and websites and caused outrage worldwide. There is, in fact, little new in Giubilini and Minerva’s argument. Since a newborn, unlike an adult, is incapable ‘of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future’, Singer has written, so they do not suffer by being deprived of a life they could never have imagined anyway. Humans are moral beings because we live within a web of reciprocal rights and obligations created by our capacity for rational dialogue.