“That woman in Cairo,” I wonder as I stare at the dramatic photo in Washington Post, “the one with the Egyptian flag and the black headscarf… does she have a clitoris?”
Eggs were first. Millions of years before mammals, eggs existed, their hard shells protecting the incubating embryo inside. Egg Mom wanders mobile, light in her anatomy—unlike her mammalian sister that waddles around, heavily crippled with the burden of her womb. Eggs were an evolutionary smart idea.
The morning-after pill known as Plan B is steeped in controversy again. The Department of Health and Human Services has taken the rare step of overruling the Food and Drug Administration and its science advisors and will not allow the pill to be sold over the counter in drugstores unless a woman can prove she is older than 17.
In a poll that was split almost exactly evenly between five different answers, only 40% of respondents said they were in favor of requiring prospective parents to first obtain licenses. Another 40% oppose licensing but would like to see more parental education opportunities, while the remaining quintile says we’re out of line even to discuss the matter.
The American Food and Drug Administration has required the Genetics and IVF Center in Fairfax, Virginia, to stop offering MicroSort for family balancing. Currently, the procedure is available only for “couples attempting to prevent sex-linked or sex-limited disease.”
The 50th Anniversary of the Pill was last year. Lots and lots of people mentioned how good, bad, unimportant, or essential the Pill has been. Our society changed the way it thought about sex, about reproduction, even about love and relationships.
Recently, three emerging technologies made headlines in Washington state and were reported by Tacoma’s paper, The News Tribune. The issues and controversies they stir are examples of the challenges that transformative technologies will face in going mainstream.
Are men expendable? After millennia of vigorously hoisting their species to the top of the food chain, is XY now a barrier to additional progress? Has the ball game for “dudes” expired? Will the future be self-reproducing super-women? With males… extinct?
How is gay marriage in America proceeding down the aisle? This question concerns all transhumanists because persecution of homosexuality is an anti-Enlightenment human rights violation that is rooted in archaic religious superstition and anti-scientific thought. Actively supporting gay marriage is the ethically responsible position for all progressive transhumanists.
British biologist Robert Edwards, who developed the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), has won a Nobel Prize. But the Vatican says the choice of Professor Edwards was “completely out of order.”
We’re now in the first afternoon of the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Today George Dvorsky and I are live-blogging from the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. We’re in the Biomedical Research building with about fifty people in attendance. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Nah, I don’t think so. Nor are they about to tell us everything we want for the development of public policy. The following is edited from an article I published in Quadrant about a decade ago.
Many of the controversies in bioethics and medicine today stem from differing views on life: when it begins, when and how we should protect it, and what our views on life say about our culture and society as a whole.
The whole discussion about what we’ll find immoral in the future got me thinking about that little group often described as our collective “future”: children. We often hear about children as our future when someone says, “Think of the children!” or “We shouldn’t leave this problem for our children to solve!”
British biologist Robert Edwards, who developed the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), has won a Nobel Prize. But the Vatican says the choice of Professor Edwards was “completely out of order.”
How is gay marriage in America proceeding down the aisle? This question concerns all transhumanists because persecution of homosexuality is an anti-Enlightenment human rights violation that is rooted in archaic religious superstition and anti-scientific thought. Actively supporting gay marriage is the ethically responsible position for all progressive transhumanists.
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