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[talestra]

Hurrah!!! I did it. I couldn't check LJ for a week and then it took me another week to catch up.  I did manage to leave few comments here and there, but finally I'm updating

Had busy days lately.  On Tuesday I went to Bio - Tech conference Israel 2004. We had rather ugly discussion prior to it with our director. When Yona (my immediate superior)

Comments

[prozaicnotions]

We are just getting through discussing beginning of life issues in my Bioethics class, and some of what we've had to read is the use of IVF. I guess one of the reasons why people consider IVF is to avoid abortion and the "destruction of human life" issues; for example, they would rather find out pre-implantation that the embry has a serious "defect" (even that term is hard to define) and just not implant it than find out while already pregnant and then have to abort. The idea that even those embryos are a potential for human life and so it would be immoral to destroy them is very conservative (the view of the Catholic Church, I know that). For most states in the U.S. I think the line is drawn at viability, at least in terms of abortion. Unless the Evil that is Bush gets his way. But we won't get into that here

[talestra]

Heh, on the subject (although a little bit late). I've read sci-fi story about world overpopulated with males (because they were able to select gender of babies), where women were in high demand. Each one of them had harems of males, and their male relatives and families were guarding them with tanks.
Anyway, the hero of the story, some guy from Earth, falls in love with girl from this planet, and manages to take her with him back to Earth. Where we, readers, find out that Earth is overpopulated with females. Because once the gender selection became available, there was overpopulation of males, so gender selection was forbidden. And the backlash was explosion of girls births.
Oh, the female relatives of the hero was very disappointed with him :).

[cruelandunusual]

Ah the stem cell debate. As someone who's spent more than 15 years of her life trying to immortalise differentiated cells to use as model systems rather than animal models it drives me crazy that we can't use unwanted foetal/embryonic tissue to drive forward medical science.

I'm delighted to discover that Israel has an enlightened view, even though it's still for religoius reasons (i.e. the fact that Judaism promotes a matriachal society). So it then beggars belief that the same society has such illogical abortion laws. How the heck do they reconcil the two?