More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised, many against their will, as part of a eugenics movement that finished in 1979, aimed at keeping the poor and mentally ill from having children. Now, decades on, one state is considering compensation.

In 1968, Elaine Riddick was raped by a neighbour who threatened to kill her if she told what happened.

She was 13, the daughter of violent and abusive parents in the desperately poor country town of Winfall, in the US state of North Carolina.

While she was in hospital giving birth, the state violated her a second time, she says.

A social worker who had deemed her "feeble-minded" petitioned the state Eugenics Board to have her sterilised.

Labels: class, North Carolina, race, reproduction, sterilization

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What’s the News: Babies with three parents and fewer genetic diseases might soon be possible: A UK national health panel has found that techniques for swapping chromosomes between eggs so offspring don’t inherit disease-causing mutations from their mother’s mitochondria are not dangerous. The techniques, which have been tested in mice, monkeys, and human cells, still need to be studied more before making the transfer to the clinic, though, and as with all genetic engineering techniques, there’s a complex ethical maze ahead of researchers.

What’s the Context:

In addition to the DNA you inherit from your mother and father’s egg and sperm, you also inherit a small amount of DNA that’s contained in the mitochondria of the egg. Mitochondria are cellular structures that produce energy for the cell, thought to be descended from bacteria that moved into cells millions of years ago, and have their own mini-genome. The mitochondria in sperm are destroyed during reproduction, so the only ones you inherit are your mother’s.

One child in 6,500 develops a disease linked to mutations in mitochondria, including type 2 diabetes, deafness, blindness, and neurological problems; as many as 1 in 250 people carry mutations that might cause disease when passed on.

Transferring chromosomes (genetic structures found in the nucleus) from one cell to another is old hat in biology, so it makes sense that researchers would try the same trick to avoid diseases that come from DNA mutations in mitochondria (which are outside the nucleus). If chromosomes removed from an egg carrying mitochondrial mutations are inserted in a healthy egg whose own chromosomes have been discarded, the mitochondria are left behind, and the offspring don’t have the disease. The offspring instead inherits the mitochondrial DNA of the donor egg—hence the “three parent” idea.

Labels: abortion, Artificial Reproductive Technology, donor conception, more than two parents, reproduction

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The fathers weren’t supposed to matter. But in the mid-1960s, pharmacologist Gladys Friedler was making all sorts of strange findings. She discovered that when she gave morphine to female rats, it altered the development of their future offspring — rat pups that hadn’t even been conceived yet. What’s more, even these rats’ grandchildren seemed to have problems. In an effort to understand the unexpected result, she made a fateful decision: She would see what happened when she put male rodents on the opiate. So she shot up the rat daddies with morphine, waited a few days, and then mated them with healthy, drug-free females. Their pups, to Friedler’s utter shock, were profoundly abnormal. They were underweight and chronic late bloomers, missing all their developmental landmarks. “It made no sense,” she recalls today. “I didn’t understand it.”

For the next several decades, Friedler tried to understand this finding, ultimately assembling a strong case that morphine, alcohol and other substances could prompt male rodents to father defective offspring. There was only one problem: No one believed her. Colleagues questioned her results — her former adviser urged her to abandon the research — and she struggled to find funding and get her results published. “It didn’t occur to me that you’re not supposed to look at fathers’ roles in birth defects,” Friedler says. “I initially was not aware of the resistance. I was one of the people who was actually naïve enough to work in this field.”

Over the last half-century, as scientists learned more and more about how women could safeguard their developing fetuses — skip the vodka, take your folate — few researchers even considered the possibility that men played a role in prenatal health. It would turn out to be a scientific oversight of significant proportions. A critical mass of research now demonstrates that environmental exposures — from paints to pesticides — can cause men to father children with all sorts of abnormalities. Drinking booze, smoking cigarettes, taking prescription medications and even just not eating a balanced diet can influence the health of men’s future kids. In the several decades since Friedler started her work, the idea that chemicals in a man’s environment can influence the health of his future children has, she says, “moved from lunatic fringe to cutting edge.”

So why don’t we ever hear about it? ...

“Why would we not look at the paternal side of the equation? To me that’s really a social and political puzzle,” says Cynthia R. Daniels, a political scientist at Rutgers who studies gender and reproductive politics. “We seem to politically be in a place where we overprotect and over-warn women, but where men and fathers remain almost completely invisible. You’re not likely anytime soon to see signs in bars that say, ‘Men who drink should not reproduce.’”

Labels: animal research, children, men, reproduction

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...This month, Miller published a study in the journal Contraception detailing "reproductive coercion," when the male partner pressures the other, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant. According to Miller's research, about a third of women reporting partner violence experienced reproductive coercion, as did 15 percent of women who had never reported violence.

Overall, rates of reproductive coercion among family-planning-clinic patients are surprisingly high: about one in five women report their partner having attempted to coerce them into pregnancy. "What we're seeing is that, in the larger scheme of violence against women and girls, it is another way to maintain control," says Miller, who studied 1,300 female patients culled from five family-planning clinics in Northern California. "You have guys telling their partners, 'I can do this because I'm in control' or 'I want to know that I can have you forever.' " This may help explain previous findings of higher rates of unintended pregnancies in relationships with partner violence.

The women in Miller's study were between 16 to 29; Miller will publish a study later in 2010 that finds similar numbers in demographics of older women. That said, younger women may have a more difficult time dealing with reproductive coercion: they have less experience in relationships, and, if they are minors, less access to doctors' appointments and emergency contraception. Particularly for teenagers in relationships with older men, the age difference "may have profound implications for perceived and actual reproductive choices for young adult women," Miller wrote in a 2007 paper on the same subject. "Such factors may also lead to fewer adolescents reporting such reproductive control as abusive, forced, or coercive." Put another way, teenage girls are at greater risk of not recognizing reproductive coercion as problematic, and allowing it to continue.

Labels: contraception, domestic violence, heterosexual couples, reproduction

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HAVING sex without a condom is good for your mental health, according to controversial research conducted by a leading Scottish psychologist.

Professor Stuart Brody concludes that unprotected heterosexual sex can significantly boost men and women's mental wellbeing.

Conversely, Mr Brody claims that heterosexual sex with a condom is associated with poorer mental health, problems with dealing with stress and even conditions such as depression.

The claims were immediately criticised by sexual health campaigners, who warned that unsafe sex leads to unwanted pregnancies and diseases.

Mr Brody, of the West of Scotland University, Paisley, believes that mankind is biologically programmed to enjoy unprotected sex because it gives couples an evolutionary advantage and maximises the chances of reproducing. ...

Mr Brody based his conclusions on a study of the sexual behaviour of 99 women and 111 men in Portugal. They filled in questionnaires about the pleasure they derived from their sex lives and contraception use.

Using a measure of psychological health developed in Canada, Mr Brody concluded that condom use was associated with members of the sample who exhibited problems dealing with stress.

Those that had unprotected sex appeared to be able to deal with stress in a more mature way by taking effective action. They also had better mental health.

"The more often people are using condoms independent of age, independent of the nature of their relationship, the greater use of immature defence mechanisms against stress.

"In contrast, the more often they have sex without condoms, the better their mental health and the more mature their mechanisms."

Labels: contraception, Portugal, reproduction, sex

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Earlier this week, members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were told by the White House that their services were no longer needed. President Obama’s decision was made and implemented in his typical style—gracious, pragmatic, and imprudent. According to the New York Times, the council was disbanded because it was designed by the Bush administration to be “a philosophically leaning advisory group” that favored discussion over developing a shared consensus. The new bioethics commission appointed by Obama will have a new mandate to offer “practical policy options.”

In other words, the Obama administration already knows where it stands on all those pesky moral issues like human cloning, chimeras, and euthanasia, and just needs a group to provide advice on how to implement its preferred policies. Whereas the previous councils wrestled with such questions as “What is the nature of human dignity?” the new one will most likely be addressing more practical policy options, such as “How much should we pay women to harvest their eggs for cloning?”

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, reproduction

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In the new Canadian film The Baby Formula, opening later this week, two lesbians become pregnant using sperm derived from each other's stem cells.

The premise of the mockumentary may be fictional, but with the speed at which stem cell research is evolving, could same-sex human reproduction one day become reality? And should it?

Scientists have already taken the first baby steps toward realizing this brave new, and some would say controversial, world of conception. ...

In 2006, Karim Nayernia of Newcastle University generated sperm from male embryonic stem cells that fertilized female mice and produced offspring. A year later, his team was able to derive primitive sperm from stem cells taken from the bone marrow of human men.

Since then, Dr. Nayernia's group has been working on creating sperm from women's bone marrow stem cells and is expected to report its findings within weeks.

“We are now publishing a paper describing the producing of human sperm in the laboratory,” he says. “It is male, but we have had some success with female.” ...

But Toronto stem cell scientist Andras Nagy isn't so sure.

There would be several biological hurdles to overcome, he says. First and foremost, women's DNA contains two X chromosomes, but no Y (male) chromosome.

“Without the Y chromosome, it's just simply not possible,” Dr. Nagy says. “The other issue here is that females have two X chromosomes and the presence of two X chromosomes in a cell again [blocks] the sperm formation.”

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, Fathers, reproduction

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A controversial fertility doctor claimed yesterday to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women who had been prepared to give birth to cloned babies.

The cloning was recorded by an independent documentary film-maker who has testified to The Independent that the cloning had taken place and that the women were genuinely hoping to become pregnant with the first cloned embryos specifically created for the purposes of human reproduction.

Labels: reproduction

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