More research is needed into a controversial fertility treatment, known as three-parent IVF, before it can be considered safe for clinical use, a review has concluded.

Mitochondrial transfer aims to replace a faulty part of a mother's egg with healthy material from a donor.

This means a baby would have a small amount of the donor's genetic material, and therefore three biological parents.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) carried out the study.

The HFEA is the UK's independent fertility treatment regulator and its conclusions are published in a scientific review of the technique commissioned by the Department for Health.

Inherited disorders

The proposed treatment is designed to help families with rare inherited disorders.

These disorders are due to faulty energy-generating components of cells called mitochondria. Mothers carrying these faulty mitochondria in their eggs are at risk of having children with the inherited disorder.

Under the transfer treatment, the idea is to replace the faulty mitochondria in the eggs or fertilised embryos with those from eggs or early embryos from a healthy, unaffected donor.

The hope is these methods will enable couples to have healthy children and eliminate the disease for subsequent generations, but the technique is controversial because mitochondria carry their own genetic material (DNA).

Labels: abortion, Artificial Reproductive Technology, IVF, more than two parents

VOTE

Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls. ...

Social Implications
The consequences of medically abetted mass feticide are far-reaching and manifestly adverse. In populations with unnaturally skewed SRBs, the very fact that many thousands — or in some cases, millions — of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colors the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavored sex in nakedly utilitarian terms, and indeed signaling that their very existence is now conditional and contingent.

Moreover, enduring and extreme SRB imbalances set the demographic stage for an incipient “marriage squeeze” in affected populations, with notably reduced pools of potential future brides. China’s persistently elevated SRBs, for example, stand to transform it from a country where as of 2000 nearly all males (about 96 percent) had been married by their early 40s to one in which nearly a quarter (23 percent) are projected to be never married as of 2040, less than 30 years from now, according to a 2008 analysis by the demographer Zeng Yi and colleagues in the journal Genus. Such a transformation augurs ill in a number of respects. For one thing, unmarried men appear to suffer greater health risks than their married counterparts, even after controlling for exogenous social and environmental factors; a sharp increase in the proportion of essentially unmarriageable males in a society with a universal marriage norm may only accentuate those health risks. In a low-income society lacking sturdy and reliable national pension guarantees for the elderly, a steep rise in the proportion of unmarried and involuntarily childless men begs the question of old-age support for that rising cohort. Economists such as Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner have hypothesized that mass feticide, in making women scarce, will only increase their “value” — but in settings where the legal and personal rights of the individual are not secure and inviolable, the “rising value of women” can have perverse and unexpected consequences, including increased demand for prostitution and an upsurge in the kidnapping and trafficking of women (as is now being witnessed in some women-scarce areas in Asia, as reported by Mara Hvistendahl in her new book Unnatural Selection).

Finally, there is the speculative question of the social impact of a sudden addition of a large cohort of young “excess males” to populations with sustained extreme SRBs: depending on a given country’s cultural and institutional capabilities for coping with this challenge, such trends could quite conceivably lead to increased crime, violence, and social tensions — or possibly even a greater proclivity for social instability. (For a decidedly pessimistic but studied assessment of these prospects, see Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer’s 2004 book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population.)

All in all, mass sex selection can be regarded as a “tragedy of the commons” dynamic, in which the aggregation of individual (parental) choices has the inadvertent result of degrading the quality of life for all — and some much more than others. ...

Considerations for the Future
There is, however, one country thus far that has managed to return from grotesquely imbalanced SRBs to normal human ratios: South Korea. As explained by Woojin Chung and Monica Das Gupta in 2007 in Population and Development Review, there is still considerable dispute about the factors involved in this turnaround, with many institutions and actors ready to take credit (as the old saying goes: success has many fathers). Available evidence, however, seems to suggest that South Korea’s SRB reversal was influenced less by government policy than by civil society: more specifically, by the spontaneous and largely uncoordinated congealing of a mass movement for honoring, protecting, and prizing daughters. In effect, this movement — drawing largely but by no means exclusively on the faith-based community — sparked a national conversation of conscience about the practice of female feticide. This conversation was instrumental in stigmatizing the practice, not altogether unlike the way in which nationwide conversations of conscience helped to stigmatize international slave-trading in other countries in earlier times. The best hope today in the global war against baby girls may be to carry this conversation of conscience to other lands. Medical and health care professionals — without whose assistance mass female feticide could not occur — have a special obligation to be front and center in this dialogue.

Labels: abortion, Asia, China, demographics, gender, girls, Hong Kong, India, population control, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam

VOTE

In a less than promising finding for a country with longtime population woes, Armenia is running short on females, and the rampant practice of selective abortions is to blame, the United Nations Population Fund has announced.

Selective birth control, a practice sometimes termed gendricide, is widespread in the South Caucasus for a mix of economic and cultural reasons. Armenia is believed to have the region’s highest rate of female foeticide. The gender ratio at birth is as high as 120 boys to 110 girls, 20 percent above the accepted norm, according to UNFPA's Armenia office. The ratio is lower, but also skewed in neighboring Azerbaijan and Georgia. ...

The Global Gender Gap report put Armenia in second place after China in terms of the most distorted gender ratios. Azerbaijan and Georgia came only three countries away from Armenia on that list.

Labels: abortion, Armenia, demographics, gender, gender gap, sex selection

VOTE

Labels: abortion, culture, Eve Tushnet, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, women

VOTE

My friend Tim Dalrymple asks just this question over at Patheos. He shared his observation with Fred Barnes, who put it this way:

Foes of gay rights are now seen by the press as fighting the bad war, roughly analogous to Vietnam. Pro-lifers are waging the good war, like World War II. “You get much less grief fighting against abortion than you do fighting to preserve traditional marriage,” says Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List.

I’ve seen this reality on college campuses. Speak to conservative college students and you’ll generally find enthusiastic pro-life support and deep ambivalence about — if not outright hostility to — preserving traditional marriage. Younger conservatives want to talk about life. They don’t want to talk about sexuality. In the larger culture, support for life is growing, with the percentage of Americans identifying as pro-life now in rough parity (and sometimes exceeding) the percentage of Americans calling themselves pro-choice. And while there’s no question that the media has long exaggerated public support for same-sex marriage (marriage amendments keep winning in state after state), there’s also no question that general polling trends are decidedly negative.

In explaining this phenomenon, Tim sees a number of factors at work. First, the life argument is simply easier to make. You don’t have to appeal to scripture or other holy texts to argue that a child should not be dismembered in his or her mother’s womb. By contrast, marriage arguments tend to be more abstract, especially since there’s no readily identifiable “victim” of gay marriage. Second, the media and liberal establishment relentlessly stigmatize supporters of traditional marriage, often labeling its advocates as no better than the white supremacists of the bygone South. This campaign has had a profound effect. As Tim notes:

Consider this little bit of anecdotal information. As an editor and director for a large religion website now, I can tell you: It’s substantially easier to find Christians and evangelicals to write on the abortion issue than it is to find ones who will write on same-sex marriage. Academics in particular are terrified that anything critical of homosexuality or same-sex marriage will come up before hiring or tenure committees. One of the first subjects we addressed in our “Public Square” at Patheos was the same-sex marriage debate, and nearly every person I approached to write on the topic had to ask himself or herself: “Am I willing to give up the next job, the next promotion, the next award, because of my views on this topic?”

I agree with Tim’s explanations, but I’d like to add another. After more than a generation of no-fault divorce, the very concept of “traditional marriage” is seeping out of our cultural DNA, replaced, sadly, by the core conviction that marriage is no longer a covenant, but a contract — specifically a contract for the fulfillment and enjoyment of adults. Our churches not only acquiesced in this cultural change, many of them continue to facilitate it even as they argue against same-sex marriage. There are many taboos in the modern evangelical church, and one of them is “judging” anyone’s divorce. Even wayward and unfaithful spouses will rationalize their betrayals through long lists of real and imagined slights, and church discipline for adultery and divorce is largely a thing of the past.

...When it comes to gay marriage and abortion, regardless of the merits behind the various arguments, I think the gay-marriage advocates have largely won the battle of casting their cause as a rights issue. It is certainly the strongest argument for gay marriage whether you’re ultimately persuaded by it or not.

Abortion’s a tougher case to cast as a straightforward rights issue, even if the “reproductive rights” forces insist it’s crystal clear. The right to life trumps the right to choose, at least for many people.

I also enjoyed David French’s post, but I think it amounts to an attempt to puzzle out why young conservatives are more troubled by the fact that millions of human beings have been killed than by the fact that a few hundred human beings have gotten married. Perhaps it’s not that difficult to understand? ... Let me phrase it as follows: Do some people make the case that the undermining of social cohesion by the redefinition of “marriage” poses a threat of comparable gravity to the undermining of the right to life by the redefinition of “person”?

Labels: abortion, culture, divorce, gay marriage, Marriage, religion

VOTE

A dozen nurses in New Jersey have rekindled the contentious debate over when health-care workers can refuse to play a role in caring for women getting abortions.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court Oct. 31, 12 nurses charge that the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey violated state and federal laws by abruptly announcing in September that nurses would have to help with abortion patients before and after the procedure, reversing a long-standing policy exempting employees who refuse based on religious or moral objections.

“I’m a nurse so I can help people, not help kill, and it just doesn’t seem right to me,” said Beryl Otieno-Negoje, one of the nurses. “No health professional should be forced to choose between assisting abortion or being penalized at work.”

The University Hospital issued a statement that “no nurse is compelled to have direct involvement in, and/or attendance in the room at the time of, a procedure to which she or he objects based on his/her cultural values, ethics and/or religious beliefs.” ...

“The pre- and post-operative care provided to these patients is the same nature as that provided to patients who have undergone other surgical procedures,” Edward B. Deutsch of McElry, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter of Morristown, N.J., wrote in the e-mail.

Bowman argued that requiring the nurses to get involved before and after an abortion violated their right to refuse based on their conscientious objections.

“Federal and state law explicitly prohibits requiring nurses to assist in abortion against their moral and religious convictions,” Bowman said. “All these nurses are asking is that they not have to assist in any part of an abortion case.”

One of the nurses, Fe Esperanza R. Vinoya, said a manager told her: “‘You just have to catch the baby’s head. Don’t worry, it’s already dead.’ ”

Labels: abortion, New Jersey, religion, religious liberty

VOTE

A few months ago, I was late. You know what I mean: My usual period day came and went without a spot, and suddenly every wave of exhaustion, every twinge of anxious nausea, became a harbinger of a very unintended pregnancy, a sign that my NuvaRing had failed me. I’m married, happily at that. And I’m a mother, happily as well. But our family feels “complete,” as demographers put it, at one child. And so my husband and I had to make a choice—or so we thought, for a very tense week before my body made the choice for me. As we lay awake at night whispering pros and cons for continuing the pregnancy, stopping only when our daughter padded in to snuggle under our covers in the predawn hours, I wondered if our mere deliberating might call into question my soundness as a mother. If I, already happily immersed in parenting, chose to terminate, wouldn’t I be unusual for doing so, maybe even stigmatized as a sort of prenatal Medea?

I was wrong. Women who are already mothers have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. When Guttmacher Institute researchers last ran the numbers in 2008 [pdf] they found that 61 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy in this country already have at least one child. That was before the recession, though—before the poverty rate rose to swallow 40.7 percent of women who head families, many of whom know they can’t afford another child.* So I asked the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, to run the numbers on the women visiting their clinics and calling their hotlines in the past few years. The resulting figures shocked NAF President Vicki Saporta, who called to tell me that every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed.

But while the typical abortion patient is a mother, very few people seem to realize it. ...

For her part, Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute, thinks that public perceptions of who aborts and why are skewed mostly as a result of all the political heat around late-term abortions and adolescent abortions (minors have only 7 percent of all abortions). In other words, she argues, mothers who abort are invisible not because anyone is conspiring to keep them that way, but because so much attention is focused on other women.

But why do mothers have so many abortions in the first place? Jones co-authored a qualitative study titled "I Would Want To Give My Child, Like, Everything in the World: How Issues of Motherhood Influence Women Who Have Abortions," which found that most mothers who abort say they are doing so to protect the kids they already have. As Jones points out, that rationale is tough to demonize politically, especially when you consider that most women making this choice are contending with some combination of low income, unemployment, and a lack of health insurance, or are struggling to raise kids on their own.

Labels: abortion, culture, economics, motherhood, poverty, single parenting

VOTE

For as long as I have debated topics of grave social concern, a particular sort of argument has been insouciantly tossed about by those who just want the conversation to end. It frequently takes the following form: “How will legalizing X harm me? I’m not being forced to do X. I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing. Therefore I support the legalization of X.” ...

The most common way to answer this question is to concede that X will not harm me personally, but to appeal to other considerations against X—based on the nature of human persons, ethical principles, the nature of law and society, and the overall institutional degradation that will follow the enactment of the policies in question. In this essay, however, I want to concentrate on the claim that such public policies do not harm me personally.

First, such a claim is self-serving. It only considers the harm done to me, while discounting as irrelevant the harm done to millions of other human lives; and the evidence of the harm caused to so many people by these two legalized atrocities is incontrovertible.

Second, such a claim is self-congratulatory. It assumes that when the change happens, harm may happen to other people, but it certainly will not happen to me. One therefore views oneself as superior to others, above the harm these practices cause.

Third, such a claim conveniently accounts for only that kind of harm that the arguer is thinking about at the moment, such as serious and obvious physical or psychological harm, while passing over less serious but no less real harms, and discounting the reality of moral and social harm.

Fourth, such a claim juxtaposes “no harm at all” with “irreparable damage” as the only two outcomes in a situation where one might be harmed. There are other possible states of affairs. One can be harmed, but choose to accept it for the sake of some other good. One can be harmed without realizing it. One can also be harmed, yet survive or even recover.

Labels: abortion, culture, divorce, gay marriage, Marriage

VOTE

A group of abortion clinics, doctors and pro-choice groups are suing to block a North Carolina law that would require a pregnant woman to have an ultrasound and receive information about her fetus before she can obtain an abortion.

It is unethical to force health professionals to deliver “state-mandated ideological speech to patients” and force patients “to allow their bodies to be treated as the source for government-mandated speech,” Dr. Gretchen S. Stuart and other plaintiffs said in the lawsuit, filed Sept. 29 in U.S. District Court in the Middle District of North Carolina.

The lawsuit is the latest filed this year against new state laws seeking to regulate abortion.

North Carolina’s “Woman’s Right to Know” law goes into effect Oct. 26. Its goal is to ensure that women are fully informed about abortion before it is performed.

A key section of the law says that at least four hours before an abortion, and before any anesthesia is given, a doctor must provide “an obstetric real-time view” of the fetus for the woman.

The doctor must give a medical description of the image, and display the screen so the woman can see it, although she is not required to look at the image. She must also be offered the opportunity to hear the fetal heart tone. ...

During the hearings, lawmakers heard from women who said they didn’t fully understand what was happening to them when they had an abortion. Danielle Hallenbeck said that when she went to a Planned Parenthood clinic in 1993, no one talked about post-abortion health risks, and she wasn’t even introduced to the doctor.

The only words she heard him say during the operation were when “he said, ‘You’re further along than you thought.’ Those words haunt me to this day,” Ms. Hallenbeck testified.

Labels: abortion, North Carolina

VOTE

Regardless of your moral stance, deciding whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy must surely rank as one of the most difficult dilemmas a woman can face.

At a time when a woman feels at her most confused and vulnerable, it is vital she has access to clear, impartial advice, so that she can reach a decision which, either way, will stay with her for the rest of her life.

For years, campaigners have expressed fears that pregnant women have only been able to seek advice from abortion providers, who are running profit-making businesses, or from pro-life groups, who tend to encourage keeping a baby, no matter what the circumstances.

The issue is due to come before Parliament this week, when Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries will ask for the biggest shake-up of abortion laws for 20 years. Under the proposed changes, abortion clinics will be told to offer free access to independent counselling run on separate premises by a group which does not carry out abortions.

The move is designed to give women a breathing space before going ahead with a termination. Pro-life organisations say it could cut the abortion rate in the UK by 60,000 a year (nearly a third). But abortion charities say the move would simply lead to thousands of delayed terminations, which are more risky for mothers.

But can the current situation really be that bad? To find out, I posed as a terrified pregnant young woman unsure of what to do, and sought counselling.

Labels: abortion, United Kingdom

VOTE

What's worse than an abortion? Half an abortion.

It sounds like a bad joke. But it's real. According to Sunday's New York Times Magazine, demand is rising for "reduction" procedures in which a woman carrying twins keeps one and has the other aborted. Since twin pregnancies are generally safe, these abortions are largely elective.

Across the pro-choice blogosphere, including Slate, the article has provoked discomfort. RH Reality Check, a website dedicated to abortion rights, ran an item voicing qualms with one woman's reduction decision. Jezebel, another pro-choice site, acknowledged the "complicated ethics" of reduction. Frances Kissling, a longtime reproductive rights leader, wrote a Washington Post essay asking whether women should forgo fertility treatment rather than risk a twin pregnancy they'd end up half-aborting. ...

For some, the issue seems to be a consumer mentality in assisted reproduction. For others, it's the deliberateness of getting pregnant, especially by IVF, without being prepared to accept the consequences. But the main problem with reduction is that it breaches a wall at the center of pro-choice psychology. It exposes the equality between the offspring we raise and the offspring we abort. ...

That's the anguish of reduction: watching the fetus you spared become what its twin will never be. And knowing that the only difference between them was your will.

Labels: abortion, culture

VOTE

Here’s a telling passage from this Sunday’s Times Magazine story on “selective reduction” — the increasingly commonplace practice whereby twin pregnancies are “reduced” to single babies via abortion:

Dr. Mark Evans, an obstetrician and geneticist, was among the first to reduce a pregnancy. He quickly became one of the procedure’s most visible and busiest practitioners, as well as one of the most prolific authors on the topic. Early on, Evans decided the industry needed guidelines, and in 1988, he and an ethicist with the National Institutes of Health issued them. One of their central tenets was that most reductions below twins violated ethical principles.

Two years later, as demand for twin reductions climbed, Evans published another journal article, arguing that reduction to singletons “crosses the line between doing a procedure for a medical indication versus one for a social indication.” He urged his colleagues to resist becoming “technicians to our patients’ desires.”

But of course, 20 years later …

In 2004, however, Evans publicly reversed his stance, announcing in a major obstetrics journal that he now endorsed twin reductions. For one thing, as more women in their 40s and 50s became pregnant (often thanks to donor eggs), they pushed for two-to-one reductions for social reasons. Evans understood why these women didn’t want to be in their 60s worrying about two tempestuous teenagers or two college-tuition bills. He noted that many of the women were in second marriages, and while they wanted to create a child with their new spouse, they did not want two, especially if they had children from a previous marriage. Others had deferred child rearing for careers or education, or were single women tired of waiting for the right partner. Whatever the particulars, these patients concluded that they lacked the resources to deal with the chaos, stereophonic screaming and exhaustion of raising twins.

...

The liberal camp includes many thinkers I admire, and it has produced some of the more eloquent reflections on biotechnology’s implications for human affairs. But at least in the United States, the liberal effort to (as the Goodman of 1980 put it) “monitor” and “debate” and “control” the development of reproductive technologies has been extraordinarily ineffectual. From embryo experimentation to selective reduction to the eugenic uses of abortion, liberals always promise to draw lines and then never actually manage to draw them. Like Dr. Evans, they find reasons to embrace each new technological leap while promising to resist the next one — and then time passes, science marches on, and they find reasons why the next moral compromise, too, must be accepted for the greater good, or at least tolerated in the name of privacy and choice. You can always count on them to worry, often perceptively, about hypothetical evils, potential slips down the bioethical slope. But they’re either ineffectual or accommodating once an evil actually arrives. Tomorrow, they always say — tomorrow, we’ll draw the line. But tomorrow never comes.

Labels: abortion, Artificial Reproductive Technology, bioethics

VOTE

With an easy laugh and ample charm, Charmaine Yoest doesn't at all appear to be Public Enemy No. 1 for the pro-abortion rights community. But the foundation of her rising influence – the accessibility of her approach – becomes clear when she settles in for an unexpectedly frank conversation about the stunning 2011 antiabortion legislative juggernaut that she has helped orchestrate.

This mother of five – who is not a physician, attorney, or lawmaker – has set the stage for sweeping antiabortion victories at the state level on the strength of her seeming candor, warmth, and camera-ready smile.

And so, she engages on the question of what animates her interest in advocacy like any smart girlfriend might. She says it was a miscarriage – which came early in her first pregnancy – that rocked her world. The intensity of her sadness caught her by surprise. It rained as she and her husband drove home from her physician's office, and Ms. Yoest says she felt that heaven wept with her. The experience made her wonder anew how anyone would opt to terminate a pregnancy voluntarily. And it stoked her already fervent belief that a society that presents abortion as an option is putting women in harm's way.

"We were so excited because it was my first pregnancy," she says. "I told everybody instantly. And within a few days I miscarried. And it was so awful, the whole physical process of going through that."

Yoest, the president and chief executive officer of Americans United for Life, a group that offers 39 pieces of model legislation for state lawmakers and advocates, is one of the key actors pushing a wave of highly restrictive – the other side would say dangerous and illegal – initiatives limiting access to abortion. AUL's goal is to eat away at the underpinnings of the protections provided by Roe v. Wade – the landmark United States Supreme Court decision that extended the right to privacy to a woman's decision to have an abortion – not necessarily to challenge it outright. At least not yet.

So far this year, AUL and other like-minded groups have caught their adversaries flat-footed; some 22 states have enacted a record 86 new measures in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexual and reproductive health and supports abortion rights.

Labels: abortion, culture

VOTE

The New York Times Magazine explores the "stigma" (undeserved? archaic? regrettable?) surrounding the emerging trend of eliminating one fetus when IVF results in twins. This is a very sad paragraph, among many:

Jenny’s decision to reduce twins to a single fetus was never really in doubt. The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children. Even the twins would be robbed, because, at best, she could give each one only half of her attention and, she feared, only half of her love. Jenny desperately wanted another child, but not at the risk of becoming a second-rate parent. “This is bad, but it’s not anywhere as bad as neglecting your child or not giving everything you can to the children you have,” she told me, referring to the reduction.

I don't mean to minimize the hardship that can accompany multiple births, but this excerpt reflects an unfortunate (though increasingly common) view of parental love: a limited commodity that, when extended to one child, necessarily reduces its availability to another child. Not to mention the underlying premise that non-existence is preferable to existence in a household with "too many" kids.

Labels: abortion, Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, family size, IVF, motherhood, parenting

VOTE

Seeking to stem what they call misleading advertising, San Francisco officials on Tuesday began a two-pronged attack on “crisis pregnancy centers,” which are billed as places for pregnant women to get advice, but often use counseling to discourage abortions.

The first element was a bill introduced to the city’s Board of Supervisors that would make it illegal for such centers to advertise falsely about their pregnancy-related services, something already more broadly covered by a state law barring deceptive advertising. But the bill’s author, Malia Cohen, said the law was necessary to protect low-income women who are drawn into the centers, which often offer free services.

“As a city, we have a responsibility to protect our most vulnerable residents,” said Ms. Cohen, who accused the centers of pushing “anti-abortion propaganda and mistruths on unsuspecting women.”

At the same time, Dennis Herrera, the San Francisco city attorney, said his office had written to a local center, First Resort, about its advertisements, which he said “appear to be designed to confuse or mislead consumers.” In a letter to the center’s chief executive, Shari Plunkett, Mr. Herrera asked that the ads be corrected to make clear that the center does not perform abortions or make referrals for them.

Mr. Herrera, a Democrat and a candidate for mayor, was also explicit in his distaste for the centers, calling them “right wing, politically motivated” institutions whose mission was “to dissuade women from seeking their constitutionally protected rights.”

Labels: abortion, California, culture

VOTE

Editor's note: The names of all doctors and patients mentioned in this article have been changed.

"The first thing she said to me was, 'I know it's a girl, and I need your help to get it out of me.' "

Dr. Carpenter's brow furrowed as she told me about the first time she met Priya. Carpenter was an OB-GYN resident at the time. Priya was a recent immigrant from India who worked as a manager in a retail store and had come to the central California clinic on her lunch break. Punctuating her story with glances at her watch, she told Carpenter how, one week earlier, she had used another lunch break to go to a private ultrasound clinic, where she learned that she was pregnant with a girl. With her arms tightly crossed along her abdomen, she explained that her husband and his parents expected a boy, and that Carpenter's help could change her life. ...

Unlike their Chinese and Indian counterparts, who cannot legally offer sex selection, American doctors are left to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to perform these procedures, without any consistent ethical guidelines. The reasons American women undergo them are complex, from situations that don't seem particularly troubling (the upper-middle-class woman who wants a daughter to "balance out" her three boys) to those that are deeply concerning (the immigrant woman who wants a son to avoid emotional abuse by her in-laws).

Sex selection is openly advertised everywhere from mainstream parenting magazines to Indian community newspapers, and patients are requesting it more often, according to the physicians I interviewed. A 2007 study found that 42 percent of American fertility clinics surveyed had helped patients conceive a boy or a girl by implanting them with the appropriate embryos. Yet despite sex selection's growing profile in the United States, many physicians remain deeply ambivalent about the emotional and ethical dimensions of what they're being asked to do. ...

And it's not just immigrant women whose requests are ethically challenging. Dr. Daniels, based in Northern California, felt uncomfortable when a middle-aged, white patient of his wanted a daughter "for the pink and the malls," as he told me. "She seemed to think of this kid as a mail-order product." But what if this girl ended up being a tomboy, he wondered—or gay? How would this woman treat her child then? Other doctors at his practice insisted that he "keep his own beliefs out of it." Daniels ended up referring this case to one of those colleagues and has since stopped offering sex selection services completely. Parents pursuing it may presume a child will turn out a certain way based solely on its gender, with poorly understood consequences for the child, mother, and family if the child doesn't. A shortage of women, Daniels believes, is not the only harm sex selection may cause. It's just what has gotten the most attention. ...

Dr. Carpenter could have used this kind of support. She ultimately performed two more abortions for Priya, who adamantly refused to have another daughter. Eventually, Priya did have a son, and Carpenter was thrilled, hoping that she would finally find peace and acceptance in her family. She was shocked when Priya returned two years later, saying she was pregnant with another girl that she needed to terminate. Priya had provided her in-laws with a son, only to discover that they still didn't want any more daughters.

Labels: abortion, children, culture, gender, girls, parenting, sex selection, women

VOTE

President Obama this week used his health care law to hand a lucrative special favor to two industries that have ardently supported his party: Planned Parenthood and the drug industry.

The largesse came in the form of a rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services that would require all new insurance plans to cover the entire cost of all forms of prescription contraception -- including those that also act as abortion drugs.

This free-pills-for-all proposal embodies two dark themes of the Obama era: cronyism and trampling on the freedom of conscience.

Once again, Obama, who pretends to be battling the special interests, is rewarding powerful lobbies that support him. Even worse, the federal rule, which would effectively force everyone to purchase insurance that covers abortifacient contraceptives, also reveals the true shape of the Culture War in America: The Left uses the brutal tool of the government to impose its morality on everyone, forcing religious conservatives to act against conscience, all the while howling about imminent "theocracy."

Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, religious liberty

VOTE

A strong socio-cultural preference for boys in conservative Asian societies is blamed for most of the sex selection. In overwhelmingly patriarchal India, dowry makes daughters expensive. China's one-child policy is thought to be a trigger as women abort girls to have a single boy.

But the story of sex selection in Asia is not as simple as it looks from the outside, writes award-winning science journalist Mara Hvistendahl in her startling new book Unnatural Selection.

Hvistendahl points a finger at the West for encouraging the epidemic of sex selection which has gripped Asia since the early 1970s.

Amniocentesis tests and ultrasound scans have led to more than 160 million girls being aborted in Asia alone since then, according to one widely quoted 2005 estimate.

It had to do, Hvistendahl writes, with the West's paranoid population control movement during the Cold War - a growing fear that more hungry babies would grow up and turn to communism. The "monster of sex determination in Asia" lead to vastly skewed ratios in countries like India, China and South Korea.

Western money, she writes, was used to set up an extensive network of family planning advisers and doctors that encouraged women to opt for amniocentesis.

That's not all. Throughout the late 1960s and early 70s, writes Hvistendahl, influential US experts supported sex selection in academic papers and government-sponsored seminars - "a disturbed sort of technological sexism".

In 1969, sex determination was included as one of the 12 new strategies for global birth control at a US workshop. Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state under Richard Nixon, signed a classified memo stating that "abortion is vital to the solution" of population growth in the world.

Labels: abortion, girls, India, population control

VOTE

President Dmitri A. Medvedev has signed into law the first steps intended to restrict abortion since the collapse of communism, the latest salvo in what is beginning to resemble the fierce divide over abortion in the United States.

The changes require abortion providers to devote 10 percent of any advertising to describing the dangers of abortion to a woman’s health, and they make it illegal to describe abortion as a safe medical procedure.

Tighter restrictions on abortion may follow after Parliament considers a separate health bill in the autumn. ...

Mr. Medvedev has made the fight against Russia’s falling birthrate and plunging population, now at just under 143 million, a feature of his presidency, offering incentives like payouts for a third child and land plots to encourage women to give birth.

Official statistics placed the number of abortions at 1.3 million in 2009, a significant drop from the 1990s. Russia’s increasingly vocal anti-abortion activists, some in Parliament, say it is perhaps many times higher, and Mr. Medvedev’s wife, Svetlana Medvedeva, has taken up the cause. ...

The campaign was tied into the “Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness,” a holiday created by Mrs. Medvedeva and the Russian Orthodox Church and centered around Pyotr and Fevronia, a couple who ruled the Murom region northeast of Moscow in the late 12th century and were later declared saints. The president and his wife went to Murom to extol family values and encourage childbirth.

Meanwhile, Valery Draganov, a member of Parliament from United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party, reintroduced a legislative package for consideration in the lower house that would place strict limits on abortion.

Labels: abortion, demographics, natalism, Orthodox Christianity, Russia

VOTE

While so many of my friends were enjoying the congenial company of like-minded scholars last weeks at the Law and Religion Roundtable, I spent two days last week with mostly other-minded scholars at the AALS's Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality, presenting some thoughts on the gender theory of complementarity on a panel entitled "Theorizing Gender." (A glance at the program [pdf] for this workshop will give you some sense of how well-receive was my suggestion that many women's religious faith will be an important influence on their views on gender theory.)

That experience caused me to appreciate even more getting the announcement yesterday of the posting of a truly extraordinary article on SSRN: Erika Bachiochi's just-published Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights, 34 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 889 (2011). It's a tour de force of pro-life feminism -- a creative and powerful piece of scholarship. This article is truly an invaluable resource for anyone teaching Con Law or feminist legal theory who wants to do justice to all sides of these arguments. ...

[from the article abstract:] I thus challenge the assumptions underlying the idea that pregnancy and motherhood necessarily undermine equality for women. I argue instead that abortion rights actually hinder the equality of women by taking the wombless male body as normative, thereby promoting cultural hostility toward pregnancy and motherhood. In a legitimate attempt to get beyond the essentialist idea that women’s reproductive capacities should be determinative of women’s lives, pro-choice feminist legal scholars have jettisoned the significance of the body. In rightfully arguing that pregnancy is more than just a biological reality, they discount the fact that pregnancy is a fundamental biological reality. I will show that acknowledging this biological reality—that the human species gestates in the wombs of women—need not necessitate the current social reality that women are the primary (and, too often, sole) caretakers of their children or the social arrangements in which professional and public occupations are so hostile to parenting duties.

Labels: abortion, feminism, gender, law, men, pregnancy, women

VOTE