Why the 'right to die" is fashionable nonsense.
This is why in the Netherlands, the supposedly enlightened pioneer of euthanasia, more than a quarter of “physician-assisted” deaths occur without any request from the patient-victim and people carry cards that read: “Please don’t kill me.” Some persist in calling this “dignity in dying”, but the Dutch health ministry recently admitted that a third of “physician-assisted deaths” had “complications”, such as delays in the poison taking effect, vomiting and even patients waking up afterwards. Dignified, it is not.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence given to the House of Lords came from Dr Bert Keizer, who worked as a geriatrician in Amsterdam for a quarter of a century and carried out many “physician-assisted suicides”– the basis of his book Dancing with Mr D. Dr Keizer told our legislators: “It is useless to worry about the slippery slope. Once a society has decided that euthanasia is allowed in certain cases, one is on it. Thus in Holland we have given up the condition that a patient must be in a terminal situation. Next, mental suffering was allowed [as a reason]. Then one’s future dementia was suggested as a reason for a request for death . . . I believe, on the grounds of the more than 1,000 deathbeds I attended, that euthanasia is a blessing in certain exceptional situations, yet I would rather die in a country where euthanasia is forbidden but where doctors do know how to look after patients in a humane manner.”
Because her late husband made it clear he did not want to father a child posthumously
Widow can't use husband's frozen sperm to conceive.
The court said he and his wife had a loving marriage, with one subject of disagreement: She wanted children and he did not. They nevertheless tried unsuccessfully to conceive a child and went to a clinic to begin in vitro fertilization in June 2005, but had not completed the procedure before his death.
His widow, administrator of his estate, sought custody of the vial of sperm he had deposited with the clinic. A Superior Court judge refused, citing the couple's contract with the clinic in which a box was checked saying the sperm was to be discarded if he became incapacitated or died.
--
But the court said such rights must give way to her husband's stated intent not to father a child after death. Quoting the 1993 California ruling, the court said the husband, as the donor, had "sole decision-making authority as to the use of his sperm for reproduction."
John Cornwell writes about those trapped inside their bodies, apparently switched off to the world, 40% of whom are misdiagnosed in The Undead.
here’s at least one mordantly amusing and true story told to me by a psychologist at Putney’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. “Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: “For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!” That’s about as funny as it gets on a brain-injury ward, but there’s a serious take-home message. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer – and, as the young biker showed, attitude.
--
Cornwell writes about a small group of colleagues, Owen, the Prof, Pickard Menon and Coleman who are collaborating on innovative techniques for brain-damaged patients, the Impaired Consciousness Group.
The biggest, most tragic clinical myth about brain injury today is that PVS can be reliably diagnosed by bedside observation alone. It has in fact been known for at least a decade, ever since a key survey of brain-injured patients, that misdiagnosis of the condition runs at more than 40%, a statistic originally calculated by Professor Keith Andrews, former head of the Putney hospital, and confirmed by recent surveys in Europe and North America.
It's essential that we do the necessary imaging and brain-scanning to get the true information about patients before pulling the plug. The demand for fresh organs for transplant is too great.
According to Steven Laureys, professor of neurology at Liège University, there is constant pressure in many parts of the developed world to withdraw sustenance from vegetative patients in order to allow them to die so that their body parts can be harvested. In a recent study, Laureys reports, “slightly less than half of surveyed US neurologists and nursing-home directors believed that patients in a vegetative state could be declared dead”. His remarks should be set against the background of widespread shortages of organs and body parts for transplantation.
We used to share an idea of what we mean by the word human. Now it's not so clear.
Following the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion, it became acceptable, even politically correct, to call a human embryo, 'a bunch of cells' thus denying the obvious truth that the 'bunch of cells' was a human being at the earliest stage of development. When the clear bright moral line upholding the sanctity of human life was breached, a Pandora's box was opened.
We are seeing the consequences now.
In the past few days, Parliament has pooh-poohed the idea that human beings, artificially bred in a laboratory, need fathers or father-substitutes.
The same law-makers, who see nothing wrong with aborting a child aged 24 weeks in the mother's womb, have also joyfully given the go-ahead to research which will involve the creation of human-animal hybrids in laboratories.
This is a momentous step. A decent society is one in which every man, woman and child is regarded as a sacrosanct individual, but such a belief is untenable if our law is also to allow scientists to tinker with our DNA, the stuff of life itself, and to mix it with the DNA of other species.
A N Wilson imagines What would the world be like without men?
In light of the debates this week in Parliament and elsewhere about embryology, about the very nature of life itself, it seems all too possible that by the time today's children are middle-aged they will be living in a Brave New World more horrible than Aldous Huxley imagined in 1932.
--
People in Huxley's nightmare do not reproduce through sex or family life. Instead, they are bred in Hatcheries, and then divided into castes - the Alphas and Betas running the show, the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons are slaves.
Is this really so far-fetched?
--
A few die-hards insisted on such foolish old mantras as 'everyone needs a dad', but the appendage 'like a hole in the head' was soon tacked on by the rest of society.
After the coup, masculinity became illegal and it became necessary, by humane means, of course, to eliminate males altogether.
In the matter of abortion, for example, agnostics and religious believers all agreed that the foetus was a human being. Such a simple belief is no longer taken for granted, and the human body itself is seen by many scientists as an object in a laboratory with which to be experimented.
When I read the news from England, I imagine the bright, shiny coin of the British Empire on which Britannia stood strong to protect the rights of her citizens now falling into the darkness with just her head above water, gasping.
Children no longer have a right to a father or even a male role model since Parliament voted that fertility clinics need no longer consider a child's need for a father when a single woman or a lesbian couple seeks fertility services. The experience of the ages that tells us that fathers are necessary for the stable environment needed to raise healthy and happy children is being tossed aside. Instead human beings are now to be manufactured to suit the selfish desires of the putative parents trumping the needs of those children brought into the world in such a fashion.
We have evidence of "donor-conceived adults who describe the psychological and emotional anguish of being "genetic orphans" who struggle with
powerful feelings of loss of identity through not knowing one or both biological parents and their wider biological families... They believe society was complicit in a serious wrong done to them in the way they were conceived and ask, “How could anyone think they had the right to do this to me?”
Donor-conceived children
know that the parents raising them are also the ones who intentionally created them with a severed relationship to at least one of their biological parents. The pain they feel was caused not by some distant, shadowy person who gave them up, but by the parent who cares for them.
This knowledge brings the loyalty and love they naturally feel for the parents raising them in direct conflict with the identity quest we all must go through. When they ask, "Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here?" they confront a welter of painful uncertainties our culture hasn't begun to understand.
Despite overwhelming evidence that children without fathers are far more susceptible to problems in school and with drink or drugs, the government now takes the official position that creating fatherless families is just fine.
No wonder two million British citizens have left the U.K. in the past decade, in the greatest exodus from the country in almost a century.
"Crossing the ultimate boundary" -human-animal embryos.
Regulators have agreed that 'Human-animal' embryos can be created and used for research. This decision by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority crosses a moral absolute, horrific all the more so because it's totally unnecessary.
Scientists want to create hybrid embryos by merging human cells with animal eggs in a bid to extract stem cells. The embryos would then be destroyed within 14 days.
One conservative MP said
mingling animal and human DNA crossed an “ultimate boundary”. He said that exaggerated claims were giving patients false hope and that the dangers of the research were unknown. “In many ways we are like children playing with landmines without any concept of the dangers of the technology we are handling,” he said.
The United States, Canada and Australia ban the creation of human-animal hybrids. But Britain, the nation that prides itself on its caring for animals, has strict regulation on medical testing of animals, prohibits almost all genetically-altered food (much to the detriment of African farmers working their way out of poverty), where all natural ingredients are a 'must' for their cosmetics, shampoos and lotions, and only organic food will do, seems to have lost regard for the sanctity of human beings.
Human-animal embryos are being "manufactured" to be used to extract embryonic stem cells despite the fact that embryonic stem cell research to date has been a bust.
There are currently 72 therapies showing human benefits using adult stem cells and zero using embryonic stem cells.
Even worse the Gordon Brown, the current Prime Minister from the Labour party is a strong advocate, making "shameless use" of his own son who suffers from cystic fibrosis, as David Warren points out in Down the Slope:
But using his own son, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is "an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions"
This in turn allows such as his unpleasant public health minister, Dawn Primarolo to follow the argument through, and accuse those who are morally repelled by animal/human hybrids of actually willing that humans should suffer from incurable diseases. To be plain: emotional blackmail is being compounded with vile slander.
For Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading "expert" advocate of the government's measures - Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality - has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause "won't fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology." The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Roman Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.
--
We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including all legal codes throughout the western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not.
We do not abandon this "front line" without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.
British scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life resulting in what can only be called Death of the Father.
And if that isn't disturbing enough, other British scientists have created a three parent embryo in a lab.
They experimented on 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment.
Within hours of their creation, the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, was removed from the embryo, and implanted into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed.
The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria - around 16,000 of the 3billion component parts that make up the human genome.
The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed with six days.
One opponent said
Josephine Quintavalle, of the pro-life group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said it was "risky, dangerous" and a step towards "designer babies"
"It is human beings they are experimenting with," she said.
"We should not be messing around with the building blocks of life."
Mrs Quintavalle said embryo research in the US using DNA from one man and two women was discontinued because of the "huge abnormalities" in some cases.
Some good news for those like me who have an occasional nightmare about a radiological dirty bomb set off in an American city.
Cell phone sensors detect radiation to thwart nuclear terrorism
Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological "dirty bombs" and nuclear weapons.
Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach.
--
Long before the sensors would detect significant radiation, the system would send data to a receiving center.
"The sensors don't really perform the detection task individually," Fischbach said. "The collective action of the sensors, combined with the software analysis, detects the source. The system would transmit signals to a data center, and the data center would transmit information to authorities without alerting the person carrying the phone. Say a car is transporting radioactive material for a bomb, and that car is driving down Meridian Street in Indianapolis or Fifth Avenue in New York. As the car passes people, their cell phones individually would send signals to a command center, allowing authorities to track the source."
The signal grows weaker with increasing distance from the source, and the software is able to use the data from many cell phones to pinpoint the location of the radiation source.
[Author's note. For some reason, this entry can't be published using ECTO, so I'm recreating the post on the Moveable Type interface which is a horror to use. I can't use color, upload the wonderful image I have, see the entire entry or make easy corrections. No wonder so many people are moving over to Wordpress. All I can say is Thank God for Ecto]
As a child, whenever I was scrambling around, asking my mother 'where is my whatever, trying to find all the things I was supposed to take, my mother would ask us, "How are you fixed for spit?"
If I take that spit and send it in a small vial to 23andMe, the first "personal genome service", they will unlock the secrets of my own DNA.
For $1000, 23andme will run a sample through their gene-reading microchip and identify nearly 600,000 data points on my genome.
Amy Harmon gave her spit and found she became addicted to googling her own DNA using 23andMe's "Genome Explorer."
My Genome, Myself, Seeking Clues in DNA
I had spent hours every day doing just that as new studies linking bits of DNA to diseases and aspects of appearance, temperament and behavior came out on an almost daily basis. At times, surfing my genome induced the same shock of recognition that comes when accidentally catching a glimpse of oneself in the mirror.
Nick Carr at the Guardian looks at 23andMe and another genemapping company in Iceland. Google gives new gene mapping service a bit of spit and polish.
He's a little leery of the fact Google owns a big stake of 23andMe and what's more co-founder Sergey Brin is married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojciki.
As people spit into the vial and sign up to have their genome read, Google
could end up with a database of extraordinary value to pharmaceutical firms, medical researchers and insurance companies..
The privacy statement acknowledges that they will grant outside groups access to their database and allow them to search for correlations between genetic variations and health conditions "without knowing the identities of the individuals involved."
You, however, will be able to connect with others who share your genetic traits in a social network, a sort of DNA Facebook.
Give up your spit and genetically-targeted advertising will follow you all the days of your life.
I predict this won't be the first. A doctor with the power of life and death, prescribe the latter
Surgeon charged with trying to hasten patient's death
A San Francisco transplant surgeon was criminally charged Monday with excessively prescribing drugs to a 25-year-old disabled man last year to hasten his death and harvest his organs more quickly.
The felony charges are believed to be the first against a physician for his role in a transplant.
Using biotechnology, scientists have genetically modified goats to produce milk containing chemicals that protect against deadly nerve agents such as sarin and VX.
Goats make milk to protect from nerve gas.
If the work is successful the drug could be used to protect troops against exposure to nerve agents on battlefields, or stockpiled for use in the event of a chemical weapon attack on a city.
The drug will still have to go through safety trials and gain US government approval.
Sweden has long been ahead of other countries in exploring new ways to insure diversity, support multiculturalism and gender equality with such vigor that British historian called them The New Totalitarians.
So maybe it's not surprising that young boys in pre-school and kindergarten are sometimes forced to wear dresses and use girls' names.
The noted Swedish blogger Fjordman reports a story by Swedish journalist Todd Lundgren who inveighs against recommendations by the Swedish Teachers' Union for pre-school teachers to promote gender and sexual equality among the very very young.
“A three-year-old doesn’t have to learn queer theory, a four-year-old shouldn’t have to be force-fed lectures on gay sex by some sex freak from the Teachers’ Union. Children are supposed to play and discover their roles entirely on their own. Children are defenseless and shouldn’t be exposed to indoctrination, neither regarding sex nor politics.
When Lundgren received a email threatening to report him to the police for what he had written, Lundgren replied
“To give sex education to preschool children, to force them to have an opinion on gay sex and queer (lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuality, fetishism, cross over, sex change etc.) I regard as abuse of children. (…) Little children, we are talking about three to six-year-olds here, cannot in the preschool protect themselves from these sexual assaults. Their parents are not there, the children are totally left to themselves.
One commenter said
“My 13-year-old son had ‘equality day’ [in school] and had to listen to a transvestite. I have myself never encountered or talked to one during my considerably longer life. Why is this important? Today’s children know nothing about the crimes of Communism, but everything about the sexual orientation of transvestites.”
In Britain, it's now okay for fertility clinics to mix human and animal cells together for medical research.
Chimera is the word to describe a being made of the parts of multiple animals, Frankenstein seems to come closer to describe this bastard procedure. Of course, Frankenstein was the creator, the creature he made he described as 'fiend', 'wretched devil', 'vile insect' and 'abhorred monster.'
Supposedly, the human-animal embryos will help medical research which seems to be the rationale that trumps all objections.
Artist Patricia Piccini envisons such a mix
UPDATE: The view from Rome:
"The creation of a hybrid animal-human embryo has been banned by everyone in the biotechnology field, until now -- and not just by religious groups," Bishop Sgreccia said. "This is because human dignity is compromised and offended and monstrosities will be created from these inseminations.
--
Bishop Sgreccia said he hopes that the international scientific community continues to hold the line, to defend "the conservation and respect of the species."
--
"The fact is that there was no reason to do this. If they are looking for stem cells in order to cure Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, there is no need to create a hybrid animal-human embryo, because there are adult stem cells, and stem cells in umbilical cords and those in the adult male to be able to battle these frontiers in faith."
"The scientist who is only worried about advancing his research does not take into consideration the anthropological and philosophical factors, like respect for nature and the natural order.
Chinese men without marriage prospects are called "bare branches." They're bare because of the millions of missing women.
Beijing's bachelor bulge: the unprecedented surplus of boys.
“I'm really eager to have a wife, but it is very hard to find one here,” Mr. Liu says. “I am too old and too poor. I'm just counting the days without desires.”
--
In the past, "bachelor hordes" gave rise to political uprisings that lead to wars.
Scholars have pointed to the Nien Rebellion in northern China in the 1850s. After a series of failed harvests, the local inhabitants adopted a policy of infanticide, and eventually 25 per cent of the men were unable to marry because of a shortage of women. About 100,000 unmarried men formed bandit gangs, which merged into armies that tried to overthrow the Qing Dynasty in a war that lasted for years.
--
Many experts predict that the growing surplus of unmarried men will cause an increase in violence, rape, prostitution, crime and the illegal trafficking of women. “The large number of unmarried men will disrupt the normal continuity of human reproduction,” said Zhan Changzhi, a sociologist at Hainan University, in an interview with a Chinese newspaper.
“The population will decrease,” he said. “Huge numbers of single men will suffer from sexual starvation. Many mental disorders will be caused because they cannot enjoy a normal family life and sexual life. Many of them will become criminals. And the trend will damage the economy, since the single men will have no strong desire to improve their economic condition. They'll stay at home and do nothing, and their human resource will be wasted. This is a very severe problem.”
Yet, activists who protest the brutality of forced abortion are kidnapped.
The Business of Life for women in Iran is getting harder every day.
We worry about bad hair days; they worry about stray locks that might land them in jail.
Imagine walking down the street when a police car stops and arrests you for not wearing your veil properly. You're detained and forced to undergo psychological counseling.
Gateway Pundit has posted a shocking video of such a woman pulled off the streets and into a police car. She didn't go without fighting back.
Some 150,000 women have already been arrested or detained because they haven't complied with the strict, new Islamic dress codes.
It's the toughest crackdown in 20 years.
The prospect of all-female conception
The results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cell,..
Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons...
"Theoretically is it possible," Professor Nayernia said. "The problem is whether the sperm cells are functional or not. I don't think there is an ethical barrier, so long as it's safe. We are in the process of applying for ethical approval.
Which brings to mind that old feminist slogan "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." which I always considered a gratuitous form of male-bashing that I've always considered mindless and stupid.
Interestingly, bicycles were considered a symbol of female emancipation, a "freedom machine" for women. Susan B. Anthony said in an interview in 1896,
"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood."
She had no idea what "untrammelled womanhood" could be, 120 years later.
Another case in uncharted legal territory. If a man couldn't marry a man in Florida, does a divorced husband have to pay alimony to his former wife if she undergoes a sex-change operation?
Ex-wife becomes a man; ex-husband seeks to end alimony.
I'm betting the ex-wife will win. Sanctity of contracts and all.
NY Judge rules Lawsuit against the clinic that used the wrong sperm can proceed.
The couple says that they have been forced to raise a child who is "not even the same race, nationality, color ... as they are," the judge said in the ruling.
--
The judge quoted the couple as saying that after their daughter, Jessica, was born Oct. 19, 2004, they knew something was wrong because of her physical appearance.
They say that "while we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her; it is simply impossible to ignore," the judge's decision said.
But what are they going to say to their daughter when she is older? That she is a "terrible mistake?" There are a lot of lawsuits that should never be filed. Even though they have been "wronged", money damages will never right it, while the lawsuit itself will have incalculable damage on the child later on in life
The mind reels at the following:
If homosexuality is biologically determined and a genetic marker is found, will gays protest against women aborting "gay" fetuses?
Would they prefer pregnant women wearing a patch to eradicate her fetus's natural gayness?
The Problem, in a Fundamental Nutshell: "Is Your Baby Gay."
One thing is for certain. Our society is unprepared and unequipped to deal with the biogenetic revolution.
The first GM food crop containing human genes is set to be approved for commercial production.
The laboratory-created rice produces some of the human proteins found in breast milk and saliva.
Its U.S. developers say they could be used to treat children with diarrhoea, a major killer in the Third World.
The rice is a major step in so-called Frankenstein Foods, the first mingling of human-origin genes and those from plants. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture has already signalled it plans to allow commercial cultivation.
Lots of interesting ways to harness, save and generate energy have captured my attention recently.
The Wall St Journal points out some in While You're at it, Why not Generate a Little Electricity
Like using the stairmasters and treadmills at the health club to generate electricity for the lights or flooring materials in subways to generate electricty from the throngs of people walking into subway tunnels and backpacks that generate electricity from the jiggling motion of walking.
There's news from the Science Foundation where they've found that using corncob waste to create carbon briquettes may be the way to store natural gas in clean-burning cars given that they can store 180 times their own volume at one seventh the pressure of conventional natural gas tank.
Now there's a prototype of a pee-powered battery, one that runs on a drop of urine and produces 1.5 volts of electric power (same as AA batteries) for about 90 minutes.
But my favorite is Termite Guts Can Save the Planet.
Termite guts take indigestible cellulose, which makes up the bulk of all plant material grown on earth, and convert it to ethanol, which even today is a versatile and popular fuel.
Nobel laureate Steven Chu is kick-starting the effort at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
If scientists can convert cellulose into liquid fuels like ethanol, the world's energy supply and storage problems could both be solved at a stroke.
This is where the termite guts come in. A billion years of evolution have produced a highly efficient factory for turning cellulose into ethanol, unlike anything which humans can yet design.
As many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India over the past 20 years according to a study in Lancet, the British medical journal.
India's lost daughters: Abortion toll in millions.
You can point to the cultural preference for males to secure a heir, the cost of raising a daughter who will eventually belong to her husband's family, and the very expensive cost of a dowry.
Yet, before ultrasound allowed the prenatal determination of sex, abortions were rare.
We are beginning to see the social costs of skewed gender ratios in China where the one-child policy has resulted in an estimated 40 million bachelors who can not find wives. It's not pretty.
One Chinese official said in Facing the Future with 40 million bachelors
China faces a future of crime and instability as a generation of 40 million men is left frustrated by a lack of brides, thanks to the practice of selective abortion of female foetuses, a population official has warned.
Men left on the shelf would resort to prostitutes or pay huge prices for brides, while trafficking in women and girls kidnapped from rural areas and other countries would increase.
--
"Such serious gender disproportion poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation's population and would trigger such crimes and social problems as mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution."
A UN official said the shortage of woman is creating a "huge societal issue", one of the three biggest challenges facing China along with HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation.
Young males who can't find wives are "low status" and prone to improve their situation through violent and criminal behavior.
The growing crime rate in China which is being linked to China's massive "floating" or transient population, some 80 million of which are low-status males
China is beginning to promote the Girl Care Project while India plans to set up a series of orphanages to raise unwanted baby girls.
India To Raise Girls in Bid to Slow Abortions
Here in America, our culture has profoundly changed in the past 25 years. The psychoanalyst Shrinkwrapped writes about the psychic costs on individuals and society in Reverberations and Vicissitudes of Abortion.
Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 Mothers and Fathers: When Does Life Begin?
Part 3 Children of Choice
The idea that your parents have parents decided to abort a potential sibling is a significant issue, made more so when done in a perfunctory manner as a matter of course. Such a "choice" unavoidably conveys the message that a child’s life is hostage to the parent’s desires.
--
Children who experience themselves as commodities whose existence serves the needs of others, have a natural tendency to treat themselves and others as mere "need satisfying objects."
To realize just how far we've come, read Katherine in the comments to Part 3.
Medpundit brings us the news of Kaiser Permanente's plan to put together the mother of all databases to study the interplay of genetics, environmental factors and common diseases.
First step - detailed surveys to its 2 million adult members.
Second step - donated genetic material from same.
Third step - combine with their medical history records.
Mother of All HMOs
Like all blessings this seems mixed. Information good, voluntary participation good, insurance company that sets premiums - well what do you think?
When Kevin Cohen, 20, was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper in 2002, he was single, although he dreamed of a family some day.
His parents sued to gain access to his sperm, a sample of which had been taken 2 hours after his death, because they wanted to continue their bloodline into the future. They wanted a grandchild even if the hospital said only a spouse could have access to the dead man's sperm.
Four years later, an Israeli court ruled that his family can have his sperm impregnated into the body of a woman he never met.
Family Gets OK to Use Dead Man's Sperm.
... soldiers increasingly have been leaving sperm samples, or explicit instructions on post-mortem extraction, before heading to battle.
She said she knew of more than 100 cases of Israeli soldiers who, before last summer's war with Lebanese guerillas, asked to have their sperm saved if they were killed. American soldiers have also begun donating sperm before heading to Iraq, she said.
"I think it is a human revolution," Rosenblum said. "Ten years ago, who would believe that a human being can continue after he has died. I think it is great for humanity."
Rosenblum said the woman who is to act as surrogate mother has requested to remain anonymous.
"She's like family to us," Rachel Cohen told the Tribune. "Cruel and good fate brought us together."
Would you donate half of your liver to keep your father alive?
What if your father were an alcoholic?
What if you had a difficult relationship with him?
Mark Foster faced all these questions and more in The High Price of Keeping Dad Alive (Wall St Journal)
The decision to surrender a piece of a liver can be an affirmation of love and selflessness. As Mark Foster and his parents discovered, it also can be an agonizing choice for the donor and recipient, one that forces families to confront tensions they might have preferred remain dormant.
--
For decades, almost all organs used in transplants came from deceased donors. But as the operations have become more routine, the number of available organs is falling far short of demand. As a result, living donations have tripled in the past decade to about 7,000 a year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees transplants in the U.S.
Liver donations make up more than 300 of that number, with a close relative the typical beneficiary.
Tom Brokaw found the World War II generation astonishingly straight, decent and steadfast. A lot of it had to do with the way they were brought up and the culture in which they lived.
Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian, sends off his father and looks at the life of John Sheridan, an ordinary, extraordinary man of his generation.
It is an intense paradox of our situation that people of my father's generation were routinely much better educated than people today. You couldn't go through the Christian Brothers in those days without reading the great books, learning of the great music and studying the great history. Today we have a surfeit of information points and a dearth of education, a flood of trivial information and a lack of knowledge of who we are or where we come from.
My father tried twice to enlist in World War II but was knocked back on medical grounds both times. But he always did the right thing. Except on occasion of grave illness, he never missed Sunday mass in his entire life. One wife, one family, one profession, one religious faith, one house, his sons at the same school as him: a life as unfashionable in its limits and commitments as anything could be today. And yet a life within those self-imposed limits and commitments of vast, imaginative richness.
--
His son is a baby boomer. My father came from much the better generation, and was much the better man.
The best of a generation via Tim Blair.
Mountains of data are rising with the costs of digital storage so cheap.
Enjoying Technology's Conveniences, But Not Escaping Its Watchful Eyes
In just one day, Bernard paid eight tolls electronically. She used her credit card four times and sent 20 e-mails. She passed before security cameras at least 50 times.
"Amazing," she said in a follow-up interview. "It's astounding to think that my whereabouts and activities can be tracked by any number of companies and individuals."
With all the anxiety and sense of foreboding at loose in the world, it's refreshing to look back and see how far we've come.
Believe it or not, we're improving as a species.
Appreciating Our Moral and Mental Development by Arnold Kling.
"In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and was slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized."
As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world. This is just one example of the most important and under appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence."
-- Steven Pinker
---
In reality, the human race is changing. The physical improvements in humans have been emphasized by Robert Fogel in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death. He coined the term "technophysio evolution" to describe the phenomenon. He points out, for example, that people have become so much larger and active over the past three hundred years that today's human could not survive on the diet of our recent ancestors.
I would argue that the increases in human longevity, size, and health have been paralleled by increases in cognitive and moral reasoning. One of the most dramatic illustrations of the cognitive improvement is the Flynn Effect, which demonstrates that average IQ has been rising steadily in many countries for most of this century. Average IQ's in Britain may be more than two standard deviations higher than they were a hundred years ago, which says that the average citizen today would have been in the top 5 percent of intelligence early in the 20th century.
--
On the other hand, there is also plenty of evidence that is inconsistent with moral improvement. Examples that come to mind include vulgarity and violence portrayed in movies and video games. Clearly, the abuse of civilians by terrorists is not a sign of moral improvement.
Still, I suspect that if one could examine every human interaction and attach a measure of the moral reasoning involved in that interaction, the average moral "score" would be rising. To put it another way, I would conjecture that on average we see a higher proportion of interactions that follow the Golden Rule today than we did 20 years ago, which in turn is higher than the proportion 50 years ago, and so on.
Robert Godwin, aka Gagdad Bob thinks along the same lines.
my belief that humans have actually continued evolving over the centuries, and that most people and cultures were impossibly cruel, barbaric, and frankly crazy by today's standards. This is an unpopular notion because it doesn't appeal to either traditionalists on the right or contemporary liberals on the left. Traditionalists don't like it because it seems contrary to the idea that human beings were created by God with an unchanging nature: a man is a man is a man, whether 2500 years ago or today. And liberals don't like it for reasons of multiculturalism and moral relativism.
Technology to serve up virtual family dinners for elderly, caregivers.
It sounds like a pretty good idea
The technology consulting company Accenture is developing a system called "The Virtual Family Dinner" that would allow families to get together — virtually — as often as they'd like.
The concept is simple. An elderly woman in, say, California, makes herself dinner. When she gets ready to sit down and eat, the system detects it and alerts her son in Chicago. The son then goes to his kitchen, where a small camera and microphone capture what he is doing. Speakers and a screen — as big as a television or as small as a picture frame — allow him to hear and see his mother, who has a similar setup.
"We are trying to really bring back the kind of family interactions we used to take for granted," said Dadong Wan, a senior researcher in Accenture Ltd.'s Chicago labs.
--
"To physically eat with others, to be able to do that, there are not only social benefits, but health benefits," said Dr. Julie Locher, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, who specializes in eating issues among older people.
--
When a prototype becomes available, possibly in about two years, it likely will cost $500 to $1,000 per household
"The problem with Asperger's," she says, "is you're stupid and smart at the same time."
"I feel people's eyes are always saying something," she says. "It's very intense for one thing, so it's overwhelming. The other thing is I don't know what they're saying."
Nomi Kaim tells the Boston Globe that living with Asperger's syndrome means taking everything one step at a time.
'I didn't know where people like me were'
Kaim's brain is wired differently from most people's. She has Asperger's syndrome, a mild autism recognized as a disorder only since 1994. Those with Asperger's are verbal and as intelligent or more intelligent than average individuals . They have problems processing the myriad cues around them -- trouble understanding social situations and communicating in social settings, trouble distinguishing what's important from what's not, trouble with sensory overload or understimulation, trouble organizing their lives, trouble, as the saying goes, seeing the forest for the trees.
---
Kaim is 23, fast-talking and slow-walking, smart and curious, serious and self-absorbed, bad at multi-tasking and good at pouring herself into whatever she does. She's uncomfortable socially and comfortable, when not depressed, with solitude. She craves structure and resists uncertainty. She longs for human connection but cringes at being touched and balks at the reciprocity of friendship
1 in 500 have Asperger's according to the Asperger's Association and the numbers are growing.
From eMedicine
Individuals with Asperger disorder have normal or even superior intelligence, and they may make great intellectual contributions, while demonstrating social insensitivity or even apparent indifference toward loved ones. Published case reports of men with Asperger disorder suggest an association with the capacity to accomplish cutting-edge research in computer science, mathematics, and physics. .... Persons with Asperger disorder have exhibited outstanding skills in mathematics, music, and computer sciences. Many are highly creative, and many prominent individuals demonstrate traits suggesting Asperger syndrome.
The Assistant Village Idiot has put his finger on something I couldn't articulate when I wrote Radical Life Extension about Joel Garreau's book on Radical Evolution. I was extremely discomfited at the way Ray Kurzweil talked about extending the human life span to 140. It gave me the creeps.
In Your New Masters Will Have Asperger's , AVI writes about the rigid and childish assumptions exhibited by Ray Kurzwei and others like him that all new technology will be good, bringing us a Heaven on earth. But such men lack the width and breadth of human experience or apparently recourse to any religious or philosophical thought and so they have trouble understanding the implications for society as a whole.
In the chaotic aftermath of Katrina, 3 state troopers and 7 Illinois conservation officers, using flat-bottomed boats, rescued nitrogen tanks filled with 1400 embryos from a sweltering hospital.
On January 16th, Rebekah Markham will give birth to one of them, nine months after being implanted with one of the rescued embryos.
UPDATE: It's a boy! Noah Benton Markham.
Named after the most famous flood survivor of all
From Fifty Things We Know Now (That We Didn't Know This Time Last Year), these are my favorites
The part of the brain that regulates reasoning, impulse control and judgment is still under construction during puberty and doesn't shift into autopilot until about age 25.
Blue light fends off drowsiness in the middle of the night, which could be useful to people who work at night.
Scientists have discovered that certain brain chemicals in our tears are natural pain relievers.
Ancient humans from Asia may have entered the Americas following an ocean highway made of dense kelp.
Red wine contains anti-inflammatory chemicals that stave off diseases affecting the gums and bone around the teeth.
A substance called resveratrol, also found in red wine, protects mice from obesity and the effects of aging, and perhaps could do the same for humans.
Women gain weight when they move in with a boyfriend because their diet deteriorates, but men begin to eat more healthy food when they set up a home with a female partner.
DNA analysis determined the British descended from a tribe of Spanish fishermen who crossed the Bay of Biscay almost 6,000 years ago.
One of the most effective ways for athletes to recover after exercise is to drink a glass of chocolate milk.
Researchers from the University of Manchester managed to induce teeth growth in normal chickens - activating genes that have lain dormant for 80 million years.
Katrina Clark's story, My Father Was An Anonymous Sperm Donor, broke my heart.
...a whole other part of me was a mystery. That part came from my father. The only thing was, I had never met him, never heard any stories about him, never seen a picture of him. I didn't know his name. My mother never talked about him -- because she didn't have a clue who he was.
---
I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.
Never did think of the children mean so much.
When did adults' rights to have children trump the needs of the children?
We have jumped into this brave new world with little thought of the consequences. Now, we are seeing the results. Some women are buying sperm online and exploring made-to-order embryos.
The donors aren't off the hook like they once thought. Some are facing compulsory child support for the donor, Buffalogirl who blogs at Whosedaughter? reminds us that one person's DNA is another person's 'dad'. Donor-conceived children demand the right to search for their biological fathers much as adopted children do.
What is sure is that such children will be genetically bewildered with a "life debt" leaving them feeling confused, alienated and 'experimental' with little understanding of what a real family is.
This is the future being created before our eyes.
Why do I say more?
Because I told my own story about cow flatulence in Five Things You Don't Know About Me over at Legacy Matters but no way could I ever be as funny as James Lileks even if "cow-whiffs" - our family's term for passing gas - always struck me as hilarious.
We have met the enemy and it mooos
Apparently the beasts of the field do nothing but wander around all day asking their brethren to "pull my hoof." Every time a cow feels a small sense of relief, a polar bear goes through the ice.
Or will, eventually. So livestock give off more greenhouse gases than cars. Eliminate the internal combustion problem, and you'd still have to deal with numberless tons of ruminant redolence floating into Gaia's celestial nostrils. We're off the hook: If global warming is organic, doesn't that make it OK?
That follows the UN Report from the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) calling Livestock a major threat to the environment. contributing more to greenhouse emissions than all transportation combined.
The BBC reports that
Gas emissions from flatulent cows could soon be restricted by a EU quota system as penal as that imposed on milk production, an agricultural expert has predicted.
Cows again. It's all about the gassy bossies.
Flatulence and belching by cows derive from a process known as enteric fermentation which leads to a build up of methane gas in the guts of these animals, pressure which is relieved by emission.
If flatulence can ground an airplane, we can all thank God that cows don't fly.
I didn't know that the Ukraine was the stem cell capital of the world, maybe even harvesting live babies to keep its top spot.
The BBC reports that healthy new-born babies may have been killed to feed a flourishing trade in stem cells.
Ukraine babies in stem cell probe
The BBC has spoken to mothers from the city of Kharkiv who say they gave birth to healthy babies, only to have them taken by maternity staff.
--
One campaigner was allowed into the autopsy to gather video evidence. She has given that footage to the BBC and Council of Europe.
In its report, the Council describes a general culture of trafficking of children snatched at birth, and a wall of silence from hospital staff upwards over their fate.
The pictures show organs, including brains, have been stripped - and some bodies dismembered.
Horrific.
Update. Not just for stem cells, for beauty treatments as well
Will we all be happily implanted with microchips in the future where our every move is monitored?
Kevin Haggerty writes in the Toronto Star that the technology exists; the only barrier is society's resistance to the loss of privacy.
Most people anticipate such a prospect with a sense of horrified disbelief, dismissing it as a science-fiction fantasy. The technology, however, already exists. For years humane societies have implanted all the pets that leave their premises with a small identifying microchip. As well, millions of consumer goods are now traced with tiny radio frequency identification chips that allow satellites to reveal their exact location.
A select group of people are already "chipped" with devices that automatically open doors, turn on lights, and perform other low-level miracles. Prominent among such individuals is researcher Kevin Warwick of Reading University in England; Warwick is a leading proponent of the almost limitless potential uses for such chips.
It will start in distant countries, criminals first, then terrorists, then carriers of contagious diseases. How soon after that before other groups, say for example, ethnic groups.
What might Hitler, Mao or Milosevic have accomplished if their citizens were chipped, coded, and remotely monitored?
Miss Kelley has a fine discussion on Kids, Marriage, Mothers and Fathers, Wealth and Poverty wherein she quotes
First, Claudia Anderson writes at The Weekly Standard about a report produced by the Commission on Parenthood's Future, an independent, nonpartisan group of scholars and leaders. From the report:
“The two-person mother-father model of parenthood is being changed to meet adults’ rights to children rather than children’s needs to know and be raised, whenever possible, by their mother and father,” according to the report, The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs."
then Kal Hymowitz who has written that the marriage gap is increasingly responsible for the growing divide between economic classes.
When the mass consumer culture is so sexualized and the chastity of young women not only devalued but derided, it's only a few wrong steps and they're trapped in the culture of poverty where having children without a husband is a rite of passage.
Last quote from Miss Kelley -
The Brookings Institute has determined that if people 1) graduate from high school, 2) get married, 3) don't have kids until after they're married, and 4) have small families, they're virtually guaranteed to avoid poverty. I don't know how we shift ourselves back to committing to marriage and bringing back a social stigma to single parenting, but we need to swing that pendulum back.
A young blogger, donor-conceived, writes about the psychological and emotional anguish young adults like her experience as they try to craft their adult identities. Whosedaughter? does not look kindly on adults who try to re-engineer the family. In this post she quotes a Canadian ethicist Margaret Somerville
Evidence is starting to come in: “Donor conceived adults” describe powerful feelings of loss of identity through not knowing one or both biological parents and their wider biological families, and describe themselves as “genetic orphans”. They believe society was complicit in a serious wrong done to them in the way they were conceived and ask, “How could anyone think they had the right to do this to me?”
We now need to recognise in law what, traditionally, we have simply assumed: that children’s fundamental human rights include knowing who their biological parents are and if at all possible being reared by them, and being conceived with a natural biological heritage – untampered with biological origins – in particular, a right to be conceived from an untampered-with-sperm from one, living, adult, identified man and an untampered-with-ovum from one, living, adult, identified woman.
Spengler on Jihadis and whores.
Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.
It's not just Europe that has a plummeting birth rate, so does Iran.
As the most urbane people of Western Asia, the Persians grasped the hopelessness of circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors. That is why they have ceased to bear children. Iran's population today is concentrated at military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers will be pensioners, and there will be no one to replace them.
---
it is one thing to read the statistics, and quite another to consider the millions of intimate decisions that together sum up to national suicide.
--
What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish...
--
The proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the country's population trends.
--
Ot is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are whoring in Tehran alone.
--
Along with Albanian, Chechen and Bosnian women, Iranian prostitutes are living evidence of the dissolution of the traditional Muslim society that purports to shield women from degradation.
--
Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists......The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.
Foreign tourists who pay more that native Chinese are given preference for organ transplants with the vast majority of organs coming from executed prisoners.
This week, at a summit for transplant doctors held in Guangzhou, the once-denied practice was confirmed by government officials.
"Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners," said Vice Health Minister Huang Jiefu, according to English-language China Daily newspaper. "The current organ donation shortfall can't meet demand."
Do the recipients understand cellular memory?
It is not uncommon for memories, behaviors, preferences and habits associated with the donor to be transferred to the recipient along with the transplanted organ.
Madeline Bunting writes a provocative column on "anti-adulthood", the latest and pernicious way of marketing to children.
She argued that marketing to children has boomed over the past decade, and its content has been characterised by anti-adultism. Cool is of the ultimate symbolic importance, and what is cool is usually anti-adult, oppositional, rebellious. Adults are never cool - they are boring, often absurd, sometimes stupid - and when they try to be cool they are pathetic. Even popular cartoons such as Rugrats are aping the format. The universe conjured up is one of "kids rule", in which children are "empowered into an adult-free space".
--
Why listen to your parents when they are so uncool? Meanwhile, for the child the evidence of failing, frustrated parents gives the cruel edge of experience to those lighthearted comedy sketches of incompetent adults.
Even more worrying, the experience instils in children a powerful uncertainty about whether adulthood is a desirable state to achieve at all.
--
the much more important question is the state of adulthood. Why are parents of this generation so uncomfortable about projecting the kind of authoritative certainty of adulthood with which many of us grew up, and against which we framed our own sense of identity?
--
We need to be able to answer the question of what is successful adulthood
HT Normblog.
Now that gender has become a personal choice in New York, can height be far behind?
Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate.
Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanen
While in England, scientists have applied for permission to create chimera embryos, to be more specific human-cow embryos.
Calum MacKellar, from the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, said the research undermined the distinction between animals and humans.
He said: "In the history of humankind, animals and human species have been separated.
"In this kind of procedure, you are mixing at a very intimate level animal eggs and human chromosomes, and you may begin to undermine the whole distinction between humans and animals.
"If that happens, it might also undermine human dignity and human rights."