Iris is an intelligent software assistant and knowledge navigator application (ask it something, and it will answer you). It’s the Android version of Apple’s Siri. My spouse recently got an Android phone, so I thought I would ask Iris a few questions. Here’s what she had to say about abortion. I apologize in advance for the blur, I’m know for being a poor camera operator!
When I asked her if she was pro-choice Iris answered, “I am against it.” When asked if she was Christian Iris said, “I am secular.”
…most women who find they are carrying a fetus with Down syndrome, which causes mild to moderate mental retardation, terminate the pregnancy. [...]
“Will we slowly start to see babies born with Down syndrome disappear?’’ asked Dr. Skotko, who has a sister with the condition.
He and some colleagues recently published the results of a survey in which nearly 99 percent of people with Down syndrome said they were happy with their lives.
There is also an upsurge in efforts to develop drugs to improve the learning ability of those with Down syndrome. One of the drug researchers, Alberto Costa, who has a daughter with the condition, told The New York Times Magazine:
“It’s like we’re in a race against the people who are promoting those early screening methods. These tests are going to be quite accessible. At that point, one would expect a precipitous drop in the rate of birth of children with Down syndrome. If we’re not quick enough to offer alternatives, this field might collapse.’’
If a man commits a rape, then he has, on average, a less than 1% chance of being convicted.
If that’s true, then I hope this new app launched in New Delhi helps not only deter acts of rape but lead to convictions for crimes committed.
The phone app “Fight Back” will be launched in November by a local charity and will function as an SOS alert device – sending out a text message with a GPS location to up to five people, including police, and as a post on Facebook and Twitter.
“Safety for women has become such a huge issue here and we felt that citizens of Delhi, where possibly the problem exists the most, could use this type of technological intervention,” said Hindol Sengupta, co-founder of Whypoll, which created the application.
“Women are harassed and molested everywhere on buses, at metro stations, in markets . . . We believe this is Asia’s first phone application aimed at making women safer.”
I don’t really know what to say about this article. It had to have taken a lot of bad decisions for doctors and scientists to have painted themselves into this corner, all starting with treating human beings as objects.
Tens of thousands of human embryos hang in cold storage in Canada’s fertility clinics, an unknown number of which are “orphans.”
Increasingly, however, clinics are preparing to match these embryos — which could survive for decades in suspended animation — with infertile couples who long for a child of their own. It’s a form of third-party procreation that experts predict will only become more common as the number of surplus embryos grows.
Embryo donation has been called the most humane answer to an sticky ethical situation: How to dispose of leftover embryos that are created by infertility treatments and then literally frozen in time?
Personally, I don’t have a problem with people adopting embryos. It’s better than them living in frozen stasis for 15 years until they can no longer survive, and I don’t see it as very much different from anonymous adoption of children who have already been born. If nothing else, it’s certainly better than the other two options: destruction or using them for science experiments. However, I think it’s incredibly sad that we’ve gotten ourselves into this position in the first place.
I was watching Book TV last night and saw the most amazing presentation. It was award-winning Alexander Tsiaras, creator of Anatomical Travelogue, giving a video presentation at Idea City ’03. He was talking about his company and their “travel” videos inside the human body. Tsiaras and his team collect massive amounts of data and imaging of the human body through all its stages, then “visualize” this data as computer images. His book,From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, is a celebration of the first stages of human life. It opens, “Is anything more fascinating or marvelous than the conception of a human life?” It was amazing to see someone, a scientist, a software developer, simply celebrating the beauty of conception without any perceivable agenda. The Idea City presentation was great, but this was even better:
This news item about the birth of Rufus Wainwright’s daughter is remarkable in that it is actually very confusing but no one is supposed to notice. I gather Rufus and his partner had a baby daughter with a surrogate (the daughter of Leonard Cohen) but she is not the surrogate. She is the mom. And Rufus is “Daddy #1″. My only point is that it’s hard not to read and reread to try and figure it out.
So I did so listening to this. Still love this song regardless of the mess that is his personal life.
Women are born with a finite number of eggs. At birth a woman’s ovaries contain approximately one to two million oocytes — immature eggs; by puberty, the count drops to 400,000. During each menstrual cycle, about 1,000 oocytes begin to develop but only one becomes a mature egg. The others left behind die. Not only does the supply shrink but egg quality decreases over time as well, since the best eggs are used up when young, so that each egg now offers less chance of pregnancy and a higher risk of miscarriage.
By the time a woman reaches age 39, “there aren’t many (follicles) left that have got enough strength to raise their hand,” says Dr. Al Yuzpe, co-founder and co-director of the Genesis Fertility Centre of Vancouver.
“My usual response is, ‘You may not look 40, you may not feel 40 but your ovaries don’t know it,’ ” Yuzpe says. He frequently encounters women who had no idea of the limits of their fertility. “They’re not only shocked, they’re tearful, they’re angry. ‘Nobody told me that I wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant at 48.’ ”
I don’t expect everyone to know every detail about the production of eggs in female humans. And I speak as someone who knows fairly little, beyond the basics. But I always knew that if I waited too long, I wouldn’t be able to have children. What do you mean, nobody told you that you weren’t going to be able to get pregnant at 48? There’s not much point “educating” people who just won’t listen.
Babies born to couples who had fertility treatment have a greater risk of birth abnormalities and doctors should be prepared to warn potential parents about these risks, French scientists said on Sunday.
Clinical geneticist Geraldine Viot said couples considering undergoing assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatment should be told that the risk of birth defects is around twice that of babies conceived naturally.
Question: Once you start treating babies like commodities, where do you stop? I mean, if you’re going to spend a lot of time and effort and money to conceive, you don’t really want to hear about defects, right?
Ultrasound could be used as a reversible contraceptive for men, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina, who say a blast to the testes safely stops sperm production for up to six months. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has provided $100,000 to push head clinical trials, the BBC reports, in hopes of offering a new method of birth control. “We think this could provide men with up to six months of reliable, low-cost, non-hormonal contraception from a single round of treatment,” lead researcher Dr. James Tsuruta said. “Our long-term goal is to use ultrasound from therapeutic instruments that are commonly found in sports medicine or physical therapy clinics as an inexpensive, long-term, reversible male contraceptive suitable for use in developing to first world countries.”
It could be me (I’ve been known to be on the crusty old goat side of things), but I find these kinds of stories drab and depressing. I mean, isn’t sex supposed to be fun?
