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Two mothers, really?

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Today’s papers are reporting that two-mother embryos may help to end hereditary diseases. Nice headline but not quite true. Before you jump to conclusions and set your hair on fire, be aware that women are not about to start self-reproducing and vote men off the island. This two-mother gig still starts with a sperm-fertilized egg. So really, the embryos are mother-father-then-add-another-mother fertilized. Read on, from the National Post:

The scientists take a fertilized egg from a mother with malfunctioning mitochondria, and extract the healthy part of its DNA that contains all the information on how her child will develop. Then, they take a fertilized egg from a donor mother which is stripped of almost all of its DNA, leaving just the shell containing its healthy mitochondria “battery.”

And it should probably be added that the touted elimination of hereditary diseases is for that particular egg only. Granted, if enough babies are fertilized in petrie dishes without hereditary diseases, the diseases will eventually be uprooted. But my uneducated feeling — watching music videos and listening to pop radio and occasionally browsing entertainment news and teen pregnancies stats — tells me that there is still plenty of sex happening the good ole’ fashioned way.

Trust your gut

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I’m a cerebral sort of gal, who, in the past has felt I should subjugate feelings to reason. Which, sometimes, I should. A good time to exercise this might have been before eating a second bowl of frozen yoghurt last night.

Anyhoo, here we have a study showing that those who follow their gut reactions make more ethical decisions. I don’t know how science comes to these things, but I see this as a vindication for conscience. I.e. we all have one, so use it.  

Although it’s widely believed that ethics engage reason, free from passion, a forthcoming study in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly finds gut instincts are more principled than logical thinking.

Back to my deep philosophizing though. We have feelings, logic and the gut/conscience competing for our attention. So on the matter of the frozen yoghurt, for example, my feelings told me to eat more. Logic would say a second bowl of frozen yoghurt for a girl who doesn’t tolerate milk well is a bad idea (and it is). But my conscience aka my gut, did not speak. So there are clearly some issues that fall outside of the moral domain.

This pertains to the whole ProWomanProLife thing because I think most women have a conscience on abortion, but they subjugate that to all those other reasons, very logical ones, on why abortion is suitable in their particular situation. I believe they pay for this in the long term, when the conscience they subjugated comes back to haunt them.

I believe we would increase our personal freedom, freedom that is not defined by government or people or any tangible source, if we followed our gut more often. We would then live in the freedom of knowing we had done the right thing. This is an idea that is hard to get at when we talk about abortion–the provision of which is generally viewed in mainstream culture as offering more freedom, not curtailing it. I, of course, have to be difficult and view things in precisely the opposite way, struggling to find a way to describe what it is I believe. And then eating too much frozen yoghurt when I am disappointed that I can’t do so adequately.

Back to kidneys for a moment

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Rod Bruinooge started it:

The bottom line is that people like myself are not going to stop until, at the very least, unborn children have more value than a Canadian kidney,” he said.

Dr. Sneddon went on about kidneys, too, as he argued the pro-choice side of things.  (see the comments section)

[He] relied heavily on an analogy of a mother whose son needs her kidney to survive, and that she has the right to deny her son her kidney as her rights to her body part trumps his.

Now back to embryonic stem cell research.  Contrary to what Bill Clinton thinks, the embryo is a fertilized egg, and the the earliest form of human life.  How do their rights get trumped in the name of scientific research?  Even if there had been any sort of success story regarding embryonic stem cell research — and I’ve been looking, believe me — how would one person’s, say, cerebral palsy treatment justify destroying an embryo to harvest its stem cells?

Clinton really kills me when he suggests that using those embryos which would otherwise stay on ice indefinitely for medical research is a pro-life position.  Running scientific experiments on human beings is what Hitler did!  Should we then say that it was more noble that these humans — the Jews — be used for the advancement of science rather than be sent straight to the gas chamber? That is, in fact, how the doctors in Auschwitz justified experimenting on human beings.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC0cxE-BX4c]

It was really a way of exploiting a human resource which they deemed to be already lost.  They thought. “Well, they’ll be dead tomorrow, so let’s use them today.” (2:32 into the film)

But I don’t want to be an engineer

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The poster back when I was in high school said “I want to be an engineer, just like my mom.”

Well I didn’t, and my mom isn’t one either. Shockingly, new research shows the lack of women in science-related fields may be because we don’t want to.

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women – highly qualified for the work – stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

I am sure, however, that the government can find some way to force us: You will like math. You will do math. You are good at math. Repeat.
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Brigitte adds: Ha-ha! Adds. Get it? 

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Andrea adds, subtracts and multiplies: but isn’t so good at division or percentage increases. Hardy har har. (Keep your day job, Brigitte, keep your day job.)

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