BackgroundThe proper and ethical inclusion of PWLHIV and their young children in research is paramount to ensure valid evidence is generated to optimize treatment and care. Little empirical data exists to inform ethical considerations deemed most critical to these populations. Our study aimed to systematically review the empiric literature regarding ethical considerations for research participation of PWLHIV and their young children.MethodsWe conducted this systematic review in partnership with a medical librarian. A search strategy was designed and performed within the following (...) electronic databases: Ovid MEDLINE, Embase and CINAHL. We screened titles and abstracts using the following inclusion criteria: (1) a study population of PWLHIV or children under 5 years of age; and (2) collection of qualitative or quantitative data regarding ethics of research participation. Excluded were reviews, commentaries, policy statements, clinical care-related ethics concerns, abstracts, case studies, or studies unrelated to HIV research. Studies were appraised for quality, data were extracted, and studies were qualitatively analyzed using a principle-based ethical framework within the Belmont Report.ResultsOf the 7470 titles identified, 538 full-text articles were reviewed for eligibility and only three articles met full criteria for inclusion within this review. While we allowed for inclusion of studies involving young children born to mothers with HIV, only articles focused on PWLHIV were identified. Within the results of these studies, four themes emerged: (1) adequacy of informed consent; (2) consideration of paternal involvement; (3) balancing risks; and (4) access to research and treatment. A strength of this review is that it included perspectives of international research investigators, community leaders, and male partners. However, only two studies collected empiric data from PWLHIV regarding their experiences participating in researchConclusionResearchers and funding agencies should be aware of these considerations and appreciate the value of and critical need for formative research to ensure clinical trials involving PWLHIV promote ethical, well-informed research participation and, ultimately, improve care outcomes. More research is needed to create a comprehensive ethical framework for researchers when conducting studies with PWLHIV. (shrink)

Pregnant people experience moral judgment in healthcare settings that may be coded into clinical documentation. Stigmatizing language in medical records transmits bias between clinicians, potentially exacerbating disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality. We examined obstetrical records from 100 randomly selected patients who received prenatal and delivery care in an academic hospital system. Qualitative analysis sought to identify linguistic features conveying negative attitudes or moral judgment, revealing themes of epistemic injustice: (1) discrediting patient testimony as incompetent, unreliable, and hysterical; (2) unnecessary (...) details that are objectifying, stigmatizing, or unprofessional; and (3) judgments of maternal fitness, where women are labeled “bad mothers” by emphasizing neglectful, selfish, and debauched characteristics. We conclude by advocating for further validation of our findings, revisiting medical education paradigms, and supporting the development of natural language processing (NLP) technologies to detect and intercept stigma. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate the similarities and differences between the ways we relate to the other in ethics and in love through an engagement with the thinking of K.E. Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas. My point of departure will be a reading of a novel by Maja Lucas, Mother, which brings out the important and complicated nature of the relation between ethics and love. My main concern, however, is to investigate how Løgstrup’s and Levinas’s different conceptions of natural love (...) point to differences in their understanding of the ethical relationship to the other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Falling From the Sky: Trauma in Perec’s W and Caruth’s Unclaimed ExperienceEleanor Kaufman (bio)1 Fear of FallingIt is not surprising to find a link between trauma and falling in an entire strain of postwar literature. It is arguably the case that, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, a new and more aerial form of spatial perception came into prominence, one in which something (...) or someone might reasonably be expected to fall out of the sky. Such a form of perception, vertical rather than horizontal in its orientation, is often experienced as an uneasiness directed at falling in both its physical and its metaphysical senses. That is, there is both a literal fear of falling from a height and a spiritual angst about falling, generally through no agency of one’s own, from one station in life to another.Within the postwar French tradition, 1 the conjunction of these two forms of falling is nowhere better articulated than in Georges Perec’s semi-autobiographical novel W or the Memory of Childhood. W alternates chapter by chapter between two different forms of writing: one a fantastical narrative about the faraway island of W, in which a robust society of athletes devote their lives to an Olympic ideal of sport, and which is organized by a system that first appears like a rational utopia but by the novel’s end devolves into a terrifying concentrationary universe; the other a non-narrative, truncated, and elliptical set of references to Perec’s own Jewish wartime childhood (Perec’s father died fighting for France in 1940; his mother died after being deported to Auschwitz in early 1943; in 1942, his mother placed the young Perec, aged six, on a Red Cross convoy headed toward the French Free Zone). In the autobiographical section of W, Perec gives several versions of his departure from his mother. In what follows are two of these versions, followed by Perec’s subsequent analysis of this memory.Of particular interest is the way that images of falling or suspension, here in the form of the parachute, punctuate this memory and take on their meaning precisely at the later [End Page 44] moment when Perec finds himself parachuting from the sky.The only surviving memory of my mother is the day she took me to the Gare de Lyon, which is where I left for Villard-de-Lans in a Red Cross convoy: though I have no broken bones, I wear my arm in a sling. My mother buys me a comic entitled Charlie and the Parachute: on the illustrated cover, the parachute’s rigging lines are no other than Charlie’s trouser braces.[26]My mother took me to the Gare de Lyon. I was six. She entrusted me to a Red Cross convoy leaving for Grenoble, in the free zone. She bought me a magazine, an issue of Charlie, with a cover showing Charlie Chaplin, with his walking stick, his hat, his shoes and his little mustache, doing a parachute jump. The parachute is attached to Charlie by his trouser braces.[54]A triple trait runs through this memory: parachute, sling, truss: it involves suspension, support, prosthesis almost. In order to be, you had to be propped. Sixteen years later, in 1958, when the haphazard fate of military service made me into a short-lived parachutist, I was able to read, at the very instant of jumping, one of the decoded texts of that memory: I was thrown into the void; all the threads were broken; I was falling, alone and without support. The parachute opened. The canopy unfurled, a fragile and firm suspense before the controlled descent.[55, translation modified]These two memories of Perec’s departure from his mother, as well as the third decoded reading dating from 1958, might be viewed together as the story of a trauma that, with characteristic belatedness, is only readable after the fact. Moreover, the motif of falling, in this instance figured by the recurrence of the parachute, provides the key to deciphering the memory of the trauma. The last—and lasting—memory of the mother is that of her buying Perec... (shrink)

Career development is a lifelong process that starts in infancy and is shaped by a number of different factors during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Even though career development is shaped through life, relatively little is known about the predictors of occupational aspirations in childhood. Therefore, in the present work we investigate how the stereotypicality of a mother’s occupation influences her young child’s communal occupational aspirations and communal orientation. We conducted two studies with young children. Study 1 included 72 (...) class='Hi'>mother–child dyads recruited from childcare centers in Northern Norway. Study 2 included 106 mother–child dyads recruited from Norwegian elementary schools. Results from Study 1 showed that the stereotypicality of mothers’ occupation was related to their children’s communal occupational aspirations and children’s communal orientation. In contrast to our predictions and results from Study 1, the stereotypicality of mothers’ occupation was not significantly related to children’s communal occupational aspirations nor their communal orientation in Study 2. In both studies, we found no relationship between mothers’ gender attitudes or share of child care and children’s communal occupational aspirations. The results are discussed in terms of parents’ influence on children’s development of occupational aspirations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why the Family is Beautiful (Lacan Against Badiou)Eleanor Kaufman (bio)The theory of ethics that can be distilled from the work of Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou bears no resemblance to many commonly received notions of the ethical, especially any that would link ethics to a system of morality. In fact, ethics is not necessarily the central concept in their work, even in Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis or (...) Badiou's recent Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. If anything, it is defined vicariously and in relation to other more central concepts, such as the workings of desire for Lacan and the fidelity to an event—or truth-process—for Badiou. Nonetheless, an examination of the network of concepts held together under the umbrella of the ethical allows for a sharp distinction between the work of Lacan and Badiou, one that Badiou—himself avowedly indebted to Lacan—is hesitant to make. Where Lacan elevates the beautiful over the good in his reading of Sophocles's Antigone, Badiou elevates the truth-process over the evil betrayal of such an event, drawing on examples ranging from National Socialism to the love relation between two people. A truth-process is a situation-specific adherence, or fidelity, to the revolutionary potential of an event that may take place in one of the four realms of politics, art, science, and love. Perhaps Badiou's best example of a truth-process—what I will also refer to as fidelity to an event—is one not described in the text under consideration here: the apostle Paul's proclamation of and fierce loyalty to the event of Christ's resurrection. It is in the particular form in which the ethical fidelity to a truth-process may be hard to distinguish from evil that I will take issue with Badiou, for both his political examples and his evocation of love as one of four conduits to a truth-process reflect a difficult inflexibility in his extraordinarily lucid and provocative system. Lacan, on the other hand, uses Antigone's strange family values to suggest a more flexible model of ethics, one that is focused on the encounter with the inhuman and the fragile boundary between life and death.Lacan's most sustained discussion of ethics occurs in his seminal Seminar Seven from 1959-60, entitled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.1 Not only does this seminar register a gradual shift from an earlier emphasis on desire to a later focus on the real and the drive, but it is also a crucial articulation of what might seem for some to be an oxymoronic conjunction—psychoanalysis and ethics. Such a conjunction, as opposed to a Sartrean or Levinasian model that would situate ethics in relation to the Other,2 takes as its [End Page 135] touchstone Freud's stinging critique in Civilization and Its Discontents of the biblical injunction to love the neighbor as oneself. Here it is not merely a question of understanding why the neighbor may be equally an object of hatred, but of understanding how contradictory sentiments are also to be found at the heart of the self, and hence why a viable system of ethics must take this into consideration.3 In other words, ethics is not to be thought primarily as a relation to the other so much as a nonrelation to the self.4 Thus, when Lacan opposes the good to the beautiful, it is precisely the relational aspect of the good that he denigrates.Lacan links the good to the dialectic and to the power to deprive others, situating it squarely in the realm of morality. The beautiful, by contrast, marks a space of nonrelation where it is not so much a matter of two distinct selves but rather of a single self whose desire is not its own. In Seminar Six from the previous year, Lacan analyzes Hamlet and suggests that the reason Hamlet does not kill Claudius is that he is traversed by his mother's desire. He emphasizes that Hamlet's desire is "the desire not for his mother, but of his mother."5 Between Seminars Six and Seven, Lacan shifts his focus from desire to ethics, from... (shrink)

We examined the course of caregiver motherese and the course of the infant’s response based on home movies from two single cases: a boy with typical development and a boy with autistic development. We first blindly assessed infant CG interaction using the Observer computer-based coding procedure, then analyzed speech CG production using a computerized algorithm. Finally we fused the two procedures and filtered for co-occurrence. In this exploratory study we found that the course of CG parentese differed based on gender (...) and child status. The course of an infant’s response to CG vocalization differed according to the type of speech and child status. Mothers spent more time interacting with infants, and fathers appeared to interact with their child preferentially between 12 and 18 months in the TD boy, but not in the AD boy. The TD boy responded equally well to motherese compared to other speech after 1 year of age. For the AD boy, the responses to both types of speech were lower than in the boy with TD and decreased from the second to the third semester. Keywords: Autism; motherese; early interaction; computational methods. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationship between home, belonging and the maternal in feminist theory and fiction. Feminist discourse isoften typified by its critique of home: analysing the gendered assumptions underlying the depiction of home as nurturing, or exposing the regressive and essentialist connotations of the search for safe homes. A number of recent feminist theorists (Probyn, Bammer, Young) have, however, pointed to thepersistence of ‘retrograde’ desires for safety and belonging, particularly in an era of widespread dislocations. At the same time, (...) feminist critics such as Roberta Rubenstein have re-invoked the contested relationship between home and the maternal by arguing that the desire for home speaks to our earliest needs for security: a desire that ultimately maps on to a longing for the (idealized) mother as the ‘original safe home’ (Rubenstein, 2001). This essay draws upon the work of Rubenstein, Bammer and Young in order to examine the relationship between home and the maternal in a recent Irish novel, Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl. The plot of this novel, dealing with the events surrounding an incident of baby snatching, suggests both the persistence of (the maternal) home as a desire and the impossibility of identifying an original or authentic maternal/home. By exploring how the protagonists of this novel negotiate the demands and appeals of home and motherhood, this essay will ask to what extent it may be possible for feminism to recuperate, or re-envision, the maternal/home as utopian ideal. (shrink)

Two aspects of mothering—using drugs during pregnancy and giving up the rearing of one's children—are the focus of this analysis of 58 addicted Chicana mothers who spent their adolescent years in barrio gangs. From a traditional stance, such women were doubly deviant, since they violated gender-role prescriptions by joining a barrio gang and by becoming involved in heroin and street life. Half of these women added to this deviance by using heroin during pregnancy, and 40 percent relinquished at least one (...) of their children. This article explores what distinguishes these classically “bad mothers” from addicts who maintain some degree of conventionality in their mothering. We found that Mexican gender-role traditionalism is not the only influence on these women. Many came from cholo or underclass families with a tradition of street involvement. In addition, their involvement in gang and heroin worlds may influence their behavior as mothers. We found that women who used drugs during pregnancy were more likely than abstainers to be cholas and to reject traditional gender-role values. However, those who gave up their children were more likely than those who kept their children to be from traditional families. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on deviance and the underclass among Hispanic women. (shrink)

One way in which information about the unknown is socialized to children is through adult testimony. Sharing false testimony about others with children may foster inaccurate perceptions and may result in prejudicially based divisions amongst children. As part of a larger study, mothers were instructed to read and discuss an illustrated story about Arab-Muslim refugees from Syria with their 6- to 8-year-olds. Parent-child discourse during two pages of this book was examined for how mothers used Islam as a talking point. (...) Results indicated that only 50% of mothers and 13% of children shared accurate testimony about Islam. However, while 35% of children admitted uncertainty in their knowledge, only 3% of mothers admitted uncertainty. These results highlight the importance of parents sharing the confidence in their knowledge. If parents teach inaccurate information about other religions, it may create a greater divide between children of different religious backgrounds. (shrink)

Jeremy sustained bilateral complete brachial plexus injuries in an auto collision on an icy road a month before his third birthday. The accident rendered both upper extremities completely flail and insensate: he has no motor or sensory function of his shoulders, elbows, wrists, or digits. Jeremy does, however, have normal function of the lower extremities. Physical therapists have worked with the child for over a year with no noted improvement in arm function. Jeremy falls frequently, causing injury to his face (...) and head, and occasionally, his arms get twisted or caught in his crib and his fingers turn blue. Jeremy's mother, who carries the main responsibility for his daily care, believes that his insensate arms are too heavy and “get in his way,” causing the falls. She and Jeremy's father present to the orthopedic clinic at the children's hospital with the request of having both arms amputated. The primary orthopedic surgeon and the orthopedic team disagree with the parents that bilateral upper-extremity amputation offers any medical benefit, but Jeremy's mother tells the surgeon that, if he will not perform the surgery, her family will find a doctor who will. The surgeon, who feels ethically distressed by the parental insistence on this amputation in such a young child, requests an ethics consultation. (shrink)

This article examines arguments concerning the right of an unwed biological father to consent to the adoption of his offspring, and to take custody of the child even against the mother's wishes. The understanding of gender-neutrality that supposedly supports many such arguments is false, and risks diminishing women's decision-making authority under the guise of sex equality. Laws governing unwed parent's rights must emphasize the centrality of parental responsibility in establishing parental rights.

Introduction -- Great Mother Nature -- The gendering of nature as female : from prehistory through the Middle Ages -- Nature and art in the Quattrocento : from pupil to equal -- Technology and the mastery of physical nature : Brunelleschi and Alberti -- Genesis and the reproduction of life : Masaccio and Michelangelo -- The rebirth of Venus and the feminization of beauty : Botticelli -- A balance of power : pictorial metaphors for nature in transition -- Nature's (...) special child : Leonardo da Vinci -- The goddess in Arcady : Giorgione -- Art and nature in the Cinquecento : from competitor to master -- Love and death in Venice : Titian -- Art against nature : Raphael, the early Mannerists, and late Michelangelo -- Natura bound : the later Tuscan Mannerists -- Epilogue. (shrink)

Cresp, Mary; Tranter, Janice Entanglements were part of Julian Edmund Tenison Woods' life from the time of his birth in London on 15 November 1832. His mother, Henrietta Tenison, daughter of a Church of Ireland rector, had several relatives in the Anglican clergy, including Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Edmund Tenison, Bishop of Ossory. Julian's father, James Dominic, was the son of a Cork businessman and studied law in Ireland. He was Catholic, but not practising during his (...) working years. James and Henrietta married in London, raising their family there. James joined 'The Times' as parliamentary reporter; their home was a centre for Irish writers, newspaper men and those in the medical and legal professions. His brother, Nicholas, following duty as surgeon with the East India Company Civil Service, joined the Woods household with his two daughters after his wife's death. Stories of India and his uncle's collections of 'curiosities of various kinds' fascinated Julian and 'served to form [his] taste for natural history'. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PrefaceMary Jacobus (bio)Trauma theory, considered as a branch of psychoanalysis, focuses on the lasting effects on the psyche of events that—whether because of their devastating nature or because the psyche is unprepared or too immature to deal with them—cannot be integrated into the onward movement of patient’s lives. The trauma can never be undone; but perhaps the patient may be helped to live with, even mourn, its aftereffects. Some (...) approaches to trauma emphasize the event itself, along with the difficulty, and the need, to relive or re-present it. Some emphasize the structural nature of a trauma which may even be constitutive of subjectivity (castration anxiety, for instance, or primitive anxieties about separation and object loss). Still other approaches point to the meaning of the trauma to the individual, arguing that only by exploring the preexisting constellation of object relations can the significance of the trauma to that particular individual be understood. Trauma may plunge the survivor into never completed mourning, or replace an ordinary guilt with an unresolvable one. Whatever the different inflection of trauma theory, it derives its contours from psychoanalysis, past and present, and, in particular, from the impact on Freud and his successors of some of the most devastating and momentous historical events of modern times, including modern warfare, the Holocaust, and industrialization. But trauma theory also takes account of events that happen (both chronically and diachronically, so to speak) in the intimacy of the family and in the ambiguously interpersonal and social dimensions of sexuality, where events intersect with issues involving gender, power, and powerlessness as well as with preexisting psychic structures.The essays in this collection arise not only from the continuing engagement with trauma theory on the part of psychoanalysts in their clinical and therapeutic work with patients, but from the surge of interest in trauma theory viewed as a way to invest the study of literature with urgent concerns, at once topical and timeless, and to understand literariness itself. A number of essays included in this special issue focus on the notion of the archive, whether viewed as a form of record which remains in abeyance (Jonathan Elmer’s starting point for considering Jefferson’s encounter with the Native American past) or as the place of a misunderstanding, even destructiveness (the point of departure for Herman Rapaport’s reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever). Appropriately, this issue also includes a photo-essay by Laurie Sieverts Snyder, which represents not only a family archive but a collection of memories that inscribe a larger historical displacement and relocation. The intertwined evolution of trauma theory and war neurosis, and the consequent unsexing of trauma, can give rise to a post-Freudian inquiry into the writing of anxiety (such as we see in Lyndsey Stonebridge’s reading of the war novels of Henry Green, where war “is” sex). At the same time, we can glimpse how the belatedness of trauma not only gets recoded as suspension or “falling” but gives rise to a philosophic discourse of trauma (see Eleanor Kaufman’s reading of Perec’s W together with Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience). Given its centrality to contemporary literary-critical readings of trauma, it is not surprising that a number of essays should address Cathy Caruth’s work directly (many of the essays included here also do so indirectly). Her writing remains central to current literary and theoretical discussions of trauma, whether viewed as a phenomenology of trauma (as it is, for instance, by Eleanor Kaufman) or as a vantage point from which to define the modern predicament of mutually entangled histories, communities, and writings (this is how Petar Ramadanovic links Freud’s diasporic movement to the history of slavery and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). [End Page 3]The final section of this special issue returns trauma to the consulting room. Essays on pain (Mary Jacobus on the place of psychoanalysis “between” therapy and hermeneutics as represented by the writings of Wifred Bion) and melancholia (Angelika Rauch’s Kristevan essay on post-traumatic hermeneutics and problems in contemporary trauma therapy) pay particular attention to the question of interpretation in psychoanalysis. They also shift the discussion in the direction of contemporary post... (shrink)

"Charming, interesting, thought-provoking and a great read." Rosalind Hursthouse The daughter of a pacifist rector who answered "No!" when his congregation asked him "Is everything in the bible true?", perhaps Mary Midgley was destined to become a philosopher. Yet few would have thought this inquisitive, untidy, nature-loving child would become "one of the sharpest critical pens in the west." This is her remarkable story. Probably the only philosopher to have been in Vienna on the eve of its invasion by (...) Nazi Germany in 1938 and dance in Trafalgar Square on VE day seven year later, she studied philosophy at Oxford in the same year as Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, all of whom became close friends. Midgley tells us in vivid and humorous fashion how they cut a swathe through the arid landscape of 1950s British philosophy, writing and arguing - often with each other - about the grand themes of character, beauty and the meaning of rudeness while the spectral figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein hovered in the background. She also charts the highs and lows of philosophy and academia in Britain. On joining the Reading philosophy department on £400 a year in 1949, she doubled its staff complement. But her many years at Newcastle University - where Mike Brearley, who later captained England at cricket, also used to teach - were rewarded with the closure of the philosophy department in the 1980s. The mother of three children, her journey is also one of a woman who in the 1950s and 1960s was fighting to combine a professional career with raising a family. In startling contrast to many of the academic stars of her generation, we learn that Midgley nearly became a novelist and started writing philosophy only when in her fifties, suggesting that Minerva's owl really does fly at dusk. Plainly told like her philosophy, this is an elegiac and moving account of friendships found and lost, bitter philosophical battles and of a profound love of teaching all too rarely acknowledged today. (shrink)

Published in 1982, Carol Gilligan's _In a Different Voice_ proposed a new model of moral reasoning based on care, arguing that it better described the moral life of women. ____An Ethic of Care__ is the first volume to bring together key contributions to the extensive debate engaging Gilligan's work. It provides the highlights of the often impassioned discussion of the ethic of care, drawing on the literature of the wide range of disciplines that have entered into the debate. _Contributors:_ Annette (...) Baier, Diana Baumrind, Lawrence A. Blum, Mary Brabeck, John Broughton, Owen Flanagan, Marilyn Friedman, Carol Gilligan, Catherine G. Greeno, Catherine Jackson, Linda K. Kerber, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Zella Luria, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Linda Nicholson, Bill Puka, Carol B. Stack, Joan C. Tronto, Lawrence Walker, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler. (shrink)

The world’s first living donor liver transplant from an HIV-positive mother to her HIV-negative child, performed by our team in Johannesburg, South Africa (SA) in 2017, was necessitated by disease profile and health system challenges. In our country, we have a major shortage of donor organs, which compels us to consider innovative solutions to save lives. Simultaneously, the transition of the HIV pandemic, from a death sentence to a chronic illness with excellent survival on treatment required us to rethink (...) our policies regarding HIV infection and living donor liver transplantation. Although HIV infection in the donor is internationally considered an absolute contraindication for transplant to an HIV-negative recipient, there have been a very small number of unintentional transplants from HIV-positive deceased donors to HIV-negative recipients. These transplant recipients do well on antiretroviral medication and their graft survival is not compromised. We have had a number of HIV-positive parents in our setting express a desire to be living liver donors for their critically ill children. Declining these parents as living donors has become increasingly unjustifiable given the very small deceased donor pool in SA; and because many of these parents are virally suppressed and would otherwise fulfil our eligibility criteria as living donors. This paper discusses the evolution of HIV and transplantation in SA, highlights some of the primary ethical considerations for us when embarking on this case and considers the new ethical issues that have arisen since we undertook this transplant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Gene TherapyMary Carrington Coutts (bio)On September 14, 1990, researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) performed the first approved gene therapy procedure on a four-year-old girl named Ashanti DeSilva. Born with a rare genetic disease, severe combined immune deficiency (SCID), Ashanti lacked a healthy immune system and was extremely vulnerable to infection. Children with SCID usually develop overwhelming infections and rarely survive to adulthood; even a (...) common childhood illness like chicken pox is life-threatening. Ashanti led a cloistered existence, avoiding contact with people outside her family, remaining in the sterile environment of her home, and battling frequent illnesses with massive amounts of antibiotics.In Ashanti's gene therapy procedure, her own white blood cells were genetically modified and then infused back into her bloodstream. Laboratory tests show that the therapy has strengthened Ashanti's immune system. She no longer has recurrent colds, has been allowed to attend school, and has been immunized against whooping cough. This gene therapy procedure is not a cure, however. The genetically-treated white blood cells only survive for a few months and must then be replaced, but Ashanti's future is much brighter because of the new therapy (VI, Thompson [The First] 1993).Although this simplified description of Ashanti's gene therapy procedure sounds like a happy ending, it is little more than an optimistic chapter in a long story. The road to the first approved gene therapy procedure was rocky and fraught with controversy. The biology of human gene therapy is very complex, and there are still many techniques that need to be developed and diseases that need to be understood more fully before gene therapy is well established. The public policy debate surrounding the possible use of genetically engineered material in human subjects is equally complex. Major participants in the debate come from the fields of biology, government, law, medicine, philosophy, politics, and religion, each bringing different views to the discussion.In studying the ethics of gene therapy, one should draw a distinction between [End Page 63] therapy on somatic (non-reproductive) cells and germ (reproductive) cells. Only the germ cells carry the genes that will be passed on to the next generation. Reactions to gene therapy have varied widely. Some commentators on gene therapy object to any form of genetic manipulation, no matter how well-intentioned (VI, Rifkin 1983). Another reaction is to allow the use of somatic-cell therapy, but not to approve the use of germ-line therapy, which could have unforeseeable effects on future generations. A different stance is that, with proper regulation and safeguards, germ-line gene therapy is a logical extension of the progress made to date and that it is an ethically acceptable procedure.TechniquesTo date, 43 research protocols have been approved for somatic-cell gene therapy in the United States. The techniques employed in each protocol vary, but in general a virus is used as a "vector" to insert the desired gene into the DNA of the patient's cells, in order to compensate for a defective gene. For Ashanti's gene therapy, this technique involved obtaining white blood cells and introducing properly functioning genes into as many of the cells as possible. The normal genes were delivered through the use of a specially-engineered virus.Although similar techniques are used in germ-line gene therapy, the procedure is more difficult. There are two basic ways to perform germ-line gene therapy: (1) to treat a preimplantation embryo that carries a serious genetic defect before its implantation in the mother, which necessitates the use of in vitro fertilization techniques; or (2) to treat the germ cells (sperm or egg cells) of afflicted adults so that the genetic defects would not be passed on to their offspring, which requires the technical expertise to delete the defective gene and insert a properly functioning replacement. Because of the complexity of the procedures involved and the attendant ethical controversy, germ-line therapy is not currently performed.Candidate Diseases for Gene TherapyAt present, gene therapy is likely to be most successful in treating diseases that are caused by single-gene defects and has been approved for treating diseases such... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 319-328 [Access article in PDF] Introduction Mary-Kay Gamel Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai (Women at the Thesmophoria Festival) takes its title from an important three-day religious festival celebrated by women in honor of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. In this play, the playwright Euripides learns that the women of Athens plan to use the occasion of this women-only gathering to put him on (...) trial for the negative depictions of women in his plays. Euripides convinces a relative of his to dress in female costume, infiltrate the festival, and find out what the women are up to. The plot is quickly uncovered and the intruder captured. After several rescue schemes based on scenes from Euripides' tragedies fail, the playwright wins his relative's freedom by agreeing never to slander women again.Thesmophoriazousai has strong characters, a lively plot, and themes significant and timely both then and now—the relation between gender and performance, the representation of women in the media, an artist's responsibility. Yet it has received little attention from scholars and realized even fewer productions. The most obvious reason for neglect is the play's lack of explicit political commentary. Dover, for example, thinks it "leaves us with nothing difficult to think about... it has nothing to say about making peace" (1972, 169). The play contains considerable literary and dramatic criticism, in the form of both explicit commentary and parody, but this aspect has been far less studied than the contest between the tragedians in Aristophanes' Frogs. Some critics think the play weak compared to other plays of Aristophanes. Lever, for example, finds the conflict "not so clear-cut" since "the idea at stake... is only the stepping-off point for the fun that follows" (1956, 120). There are exceptions to this neglect. Norwood ranks Thesmophoriazousai far above Lysistrata: "for dazzling wit and irresistibly laughable farce combined this play is perhaps the world's finest masterpiece... glorious foolery suffused by a thrice-refined intellectual virtuosity that never misses a point, never overstresses it" (1931, 253-54). Rau (1967) gives the tragic parodies their due; in his substantial chapter on Thesmophoriazousai, Moulton declares it "skillfully composed and unified" (1981, 142); Bierl (2001) provides a detailed study of the role of the chorus. Yet the inattention continues: [End Page 319] Harriott (1986), Reckford (1987), and Segal (2001) mention the play only briefly.The years 2000 and 2001 seemed like a promising time to reconsider Thesmophoriazousai. The play's obscenity, which Norwood thought the only cause of its neglect, is no longer an obstacle. Recent scholarship on the religious and ritual context of Athenian drama helps us understand the role of the Thesmophoria and women's ritual in the play. And the rise of feminist criticism offers new perspectives on its portrayal of gender relations. Whitman unambiguously uses gender to denigrate the play: "These women are scarcely the warm wives and mothers of the Lysistrata, but rather a pack of vengeful furies... Femininity, whether real or assumed, is under a somewhat morbid cloud; by contrast, there is something genuinely refreshing about the masculinity of Mnesilochus [as he calls the Kinsman]... Comedy is virile, like Mnesilochus, and essentially truthful; tragedy is at best a hermaphroditic affair" (1964, 223-24). In a ground-breaking article first published in 1981, Zeitlin instead sees the play's connections between gender conflict and genre conflict—"the equivalence between intertextuality and intersexuality"—as the source of its power (1996, 375-416).Some feminists, however, question the function and effect of women's portrayal in Athenian plays written by males for male actors and possibly for an all-male audience. Zeitlin has argued that in Athenian tragedy, women are figures of male self-representation: "the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other... functionally women are never an end in themselves, and nothing changes for them once they have lived out their drama on stage... they play the roles of catalysts, agents, instruments, blockers... and sometimes helpers or saviors for the male characters"... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 319-328 [Access article in PDF] Introduction Mary-Kay Gamel Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai (Women at the Thesmophoria Festival) takes its title from an important three-day religious festival celebrated by women in honor of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. In this play, the playwright Euripides learns that the women of Athens plan to use the occasion of this women-only gathering to put him on (...) trial for the negative depictions of women in his plays. Euripides convinces a relative of his to dress in female costume, infiltrate the festival, and find out what the women are up to. The plot is quickly uncovered and the intruder captured. After several rescue schemes based on scenes from Euripides' tragedies fail, the playwright wins his relative's freedom by agreeing never to slander women again.Thesmophoriazousai has strong characters, a lively plot, and themes significant and timely both then and now—the relation between gender and performance, the representation of women in the media, an artist's responsibility. Yet it has received little attention from scholars and realized even fewer productions. The most obvious reason for neglect is the play's lack of explicit political commentary. Dover, for example, thinks it "leaves us with nothing difficult to think about... it has nothing to say about making peace" (1972, 169). The play contains considerable literary and dramatic criticism, in the form of both explicit commentary and parody, but this aspect has been far less studied than the contest between the tragedians in Aristophanes' Frogs. Some critics think the play weak compared to other plays of Aristophanes. Lever, for example, finds the conflict "not so clear-cut" since "the idea at stake... is only the stepping-off point for the fun that follows" (1956, 120). There are exceptions to this neglect. Norwood ranks Thesmophoriazousai far above Lysistrata: "for dazzling wit and irresistibly laughable farce combined this play is perhaps the world's finest masterpiece... glorious foolery suffused by a thrice-refined intellectual virtuosity that never misses a point, never overstresses it" (1931, 253-54). Rau (1967) gives the tragic parodies their due; in his substantial chapter on Thesmophoriazousai, Moulton declares it "skillfully composed and unified" (1981, 142); Bierl (2001) provides a detailed study of the role of the chorus. Yet the inattention continues: [End Page 319] Harriott (1986), Reckford (1987), and Segal (2001) mention the play only briefly.The years 2000 and 2001 seemed like a promising time to reconsider Thesmophoriazousai. The play's obscenity, which Norwood thought the only cause of its neglect, is no longer an obstacle. Recent scholarship on the religious and ritual context of Athenian drama helps us understand the role of the Thesmophoria and women's ritual in the play. And the rise of feminist criticism offers new perspectives on its portrayal of gender relations. Whitman unambiguously uses gender to denigrate the play: "These women are scarcely the warm wives and mothers of the Lysistrata, but rather a pack of vengeful furies... Femininity, whether real or assumed, is under a somewhat morbid cloud; by contrast, there is something genuinely refreshing about the masculinity of Mnesilochus [as he calls the Kinsman]... Comedy is virile, like Mnesilochus, and essentially truthful; tragedy is at best a hermaphroditic affair" (1964, 223-24). In a ground-breaking article first published in 1981, Zeitlin instead sees the play's connections between gender conflict and genre conflict—"the equivalence between intertextuality and intersexuality"—as the source of its power (1996, 375-416).Some feminists, however, question the function and effect of women's portrayal in Athenian plays written by males for male actors and possibly for an all-male audience. Zeitlin has argued that in Athenian tragedy, women are figures of male self-representation: "the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other... functionally women are never an end in themselves, and nothing changes for them once they have lived out their drama on stage... they play the roles of catalysts, agents, instruments, blockers... and sometimes helpers or saviors for the male characters"... (shrink)

Paving the way for modern feminist thinking, Mary Wollstonecraft dared to challenge traditional eighteenth-century attitudes towards women. First published in 1787, this book discusses how girls can best be educated to become valuable wives and mothers. It argues that women can offer the most effective contribution to society if they are brought up to display sound morals, character and intellect, rather than superficial social graces. Wollstonecraft later developed her ideas in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which (...) she attacked the educational restrictions imposed upon women. Her writings formed a cornerstone of the battle for women's rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prompting deeper reflection upon the role and status of women in modern society, the present work remains an instructive and provocative read for those seeking to learn about the roots of feminism in its social and historical context. (shrink)

Background: Confidentiality lies at the core of medical ethics and is the cornerstone for developing and keeping a trusting relationship between nurses and patients. In the wake of the HIV epidemic, there has been a heightened focus on confidentiality in healthcare contexts. Nurses’ follow-up of HIV-positive women and their susceptible HIV-exposed children has proved to be challenging in this regard, but the ethical dilemmas concerning confidentiality that emerge in the process of ensuring HIV-free survival of the third party – the (...) child – have attracted limited attention. Objective: The study explores challenges of confidentiality linked to a third party in nurse–patient relationships in a rural Tanzanian HIV/AIDS context. Study context: The study was carried out in rural and semi-urban settings of Tanzania where the population is largely agro-pastoral, the formal educational level is low and poverty is rife. The HIV prevalence of 1.5% is low compared to the national prevalence of 5.1%. Methods: Data were collected during 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork and consisted of participant observation in clinical settings and during home visits combined with in-depth interviews. The main categories of informants were nurses employed in prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV programmes and HIV-positive women enrolled in these programmes. Ethical considerations: Based on information about the study aims, all informants consented to participate. Ethical approval was granted by ethics review boards in Tanzania and Norway. Findings and discussion: The material indicates a delicate balance between the nurses’ attempt to secure the HIV-free survival of the babies and the mothers’ desire to preserve confidentiality. Profound confidentiality-related dilemmas emerged in actual practice, and indications of a lack of thorough consideration of the implication of a patient’s restricted disclosure came to light during follow-up of the HIV-positive women and the third party – the child who is at risk of HIV infection through mother’s milk. World Health Organization’s substantial focus on infant survival (Millennium Development Goal-4) and the strong calls for disclosure among the HIV-positive are reflected on in the discussion. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent research suggests that impaired emotion regulation may play an important role in the development of youth psychopathology. However, little research has explored the effects of ER strategies on affect in early adolescents. In Study 1, we examined if early adolescents are able to use distraction and whether the effects of this strategy are similar to talking to one’s mother. In Study 2, we compared the effects of distraction, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, and rumination. In both studies, participants received instructions (...) on how to regulate their emotions after a standardised negative mood induction. In general, the results indicated that distraction, but also cognitive reappraisal and acceptance, had promising short-term effects on positive and negative affect in early adolescents. These findings suggest that targeting adaptive ER skills, such as distraction, acceptance, and cognitive reappraisal, may be an important strategy to prevent or treat psychological pro... (shrink)

In recent works, Luce Irigaray offers arguments for the establishment of sexed rights that rely upon certain presuppositional accounts of the development of relational sexuate identity and difference. The paper advances a series of objections to these accounts, in addition to examining some of Irigaray's proposals concerning women's indefinition, the category of the neuter, and female genealogy. Supplementing Luce Irigaray's argument that mother-daughter genealogy is under-symbolized in present Occidental cultures, it suggests, for reasons consonant with Irigaray's general project, additional (...) corrective representation of paternal genealogy in terms of father-daughter relations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Basic Resources in Bioethics*Mary Carrington Coutts (bio)OrganizationsKennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057 National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature 800-MED-ETHX or 202-687-3885The Hastings Center 255 Elm Road Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510 914-762-8500Society for Health and Human Values 6728 Old McLean Village Drive McLean, VA 22101 703-556-9222NOTE: There are numerous organizations in the United States and abroad that deal with bioethical issues. For a more comprehensive listing (...) of those organizations, see:American Hospital Association. Directory of Biomedical Ethics Organizations. Chicago: American Hospital Association, 1989.National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. International Directory of Bioethics Organizations edited by Robert Iosco. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 1986.Encyclopedia and DictionaryDictionary of Medical Ethics. Edited by A.S. Duncan, G.R. Dunstan, and R.B. Welborn. New rev. ed. New York: Crossroad, 1981. [End Page 75]Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Edited by Warren T. Reich. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan-Free Press, 1978; or 1982 reprint in 2 volumes available to members of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics through the membership office, 202-687-8099.Online DatabaseBioethicsline. Produced by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics for the National Library of Medicine. Searchable through the MEDLARS system. Focuses on questions of ethics and public policy in the fields of health care and biomedical research. Searches available upon request to the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. For information on securing a personal access code from the National Library of Medicine, call 800-638-8480.BibliographiesBibliography of Bioethics. Edited by LeRoy Walters and Tamar Joy Kahn. Washington, DC: Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. Issued annually since 1975. Corresponds to the BIOETHICSLINE database. Provides references to resources on ethical and public policy issues in medicine and biomedical research. Includes abstracts; arranged by broad subject categories.Ethics in Nursing. Edited by Terry Pence. 2nd ed. New York: National League for Nursing, 1986. An annotated bibliography of nursing ethics. Includes author and subject indexes.Goldstein, Doris M. Bioethics: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. A selected, annotated bibliography to the literature of bioethics.The Hastings Center's Bibliography of Ethics, Biomedicine and Professional Responsibility. Compiled by the staff of the Hastings Center. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984.Medical Ethics: An Annotated Bibliography. Edited by Mark Siegler, Peter A. Singer and David L. Schiedermayer. Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 1988.Current Awareness ServicesNOTE: Several journals have sections where they highlight new publications. See, for example, the "In The Literature" section of the Hastings Center Report, or the "Medicolegal Reference Shelf" section of Law, Medicine and Health Care. Other services include:BioLaw. Edited by James F. Childress and Ruth D. Gaare. Frederick, MD: [End Page 76] University Publications of America, 1983 to present. Annual with bimonthly updates. (Previous title: Bioethics Reporter.) A compendium of articles and legal documents on ethical and legal issues in medicine, health care administration and human experimentation. Includes the text of important legal decisions in the Resources section.New Titles in Bioethics. Edited by Luanda Fitch Huttlinger. Washington, DC: National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. Published monthly 1975-1989; quarterly 1990—present. List of acquisitions by the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. Organized by subject categories. Includes ordering information for difficult-to-find items. Annual cumulation available.Scope Notes Series. Washington, DC: National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. A series of issue briefs including annotated bibliographies on the following popular bioethical topics:No 1. Dangerousness, September 1982, 5 p.No 2. Living Wills and Durable Powers of Attorney: Advance Directive Legislation and Issues, Revised February 1990, 15 p.No 3. Ethics Committees in Hospitals, Revised June 1989, 12 p.No 4. Diagnosis Related Groups and the Prospective Payment System, June 1984, 11 p.No 5. Baby Fae, January 1985, 19 p.No 6. Surrogate Mothers, Revised January 1988, 12 p.No 7. Withholding or Withdrawing Nutrition or Hydration, Revised September 1988, 12 p.No 8. AIDS: Law, Ethics and Public Policy, April 1988, 12 p.No 9. Bioethics Audiovisuals 1982 to Present, September 1988, 12 p.No 10. Ethical Issues in... (shrink)

_How does the image of the succubus relate to psychoanalytic thought?_ _Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine_ explores the idea that the image of the succubus, a demonic female creature said to emasculate men and murder mothers and infants, has been created out of the masculine projection of shame and looks at how the transformation of this image can be traced through Western history, mythology, and Judeo-Christian literature. Divided into three parts areas of discussion include: the birth of (...) civilization and the evolution of the succubus the image of the succubus in the writings of Freud and Jung the succubus as child killing mother to the restoration of the eternal feminine. Through a process of detailed cultural and social analysis, the author places the image of the succubus at the very heart of psychoanalytic thought, highlighting its presence in both Freud’s Medusa and Jung’s visions of Salome. As such, this book will be of great interest to all those in the fields of analytical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

_Objective:_ The aim of the current study was to investigate associations, unique and interactive, between mothers’ and children’s histories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and children’s psychiatric outcomes using an intergenerational perspective. Further, we were particularly interested in examining whether maternal reflective functioning about their own trauma (T-RF) was associated with a lower likelihood of children’s abuse exposure (among children of CSA-exposed mothers). _Methods:_ One hundred and eleven children ( M age = 9.53 years; 43 sexual abuse victims) and their (...) mothers ( M age = 37.99; 63 sexual abuse victims) participated in this study. Mothers completed the Parent Development Interview (PDI), which yielded assessments of RF regarding their own experiences of abuse, and also reported on their children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. _Results:_ Children of CSA-exposed mothers were more likely to have experienced CSA. A key result was that among CSA-exposed mothers, higher maternal T-RF regarding their own abuse was associated with lower likelihood of child CSA-exposure. Mothers’ and children’s CSA histories predicted children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms, such that CSA exposure for mother or child was associated with greater symptomatology in children. _Conclusion:_ The findings show that the presence of either maternal or child CSA is associated with more child psychological difficulties. Importantly in terms of identifying potential protective factors, maternal T-RF is associated with lower likelihood of CSA exposure in children of CSA-exposed mothers. We discuss these findings in the context of the need for treatments focusing on increasing T-RF in mothers and children in the context of abuse to facilitate adaptation and reduce the intergenerational risk. (shrink)

Through the work of Julia Kristeva, this paper challenges Freud's laws that everyone is always already gendered, that the mother is feminine and every infant masculine, and that one cannot love the same (gender). The figure of the Madonna, seen through the paintings of Giovanni Bellini, is used to theorize the time in the life of a child before Oedipus and to undo the conceptual knot with which Freud has bound the feminine to the maternal.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"To make a difference...":Narrative Desire in Global MedicineByron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio GoodIf, as Arthur Frank (2002) writes, "moral life, for better and worse, takes place in storytelling," this collection of narratives written by physicians working in field settings in global medicine gives us a glimpse of some aspects of moral experience, practice, and dilemmas in settings of poverty and low health care resources. These essays are (...) written from the midst of practice, in diverse settings in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The majority of the writers are practitioners of contemporary 'global medicine'—physicians from North America or Europe who spend part of their lives flying into settings of poverty or special need to practice medicine and work with on-going collaborative clinical and public health systems—while a smaller number are working in the societies in which they were born. Although a few work for classic humanitarian organizations or have developed their own local NGO's, the great majority are engaged in the 'hybrid life' described by Robert Riviello and noted by Renée Fox, moving between academic medical centers and distant health care systems that are supported by local governments, major international organizations and funding agencies, and international NGO's like Partners in Health. These diverse forms of practice have become a common model for contemporary clinicians engaged in what has emerged as a new discipline of global health or global medicine, and these narratives give us a glimpse of some of the enduring, as well as newly emerging, forms of moral practice and ethical dilemmas characteristic of today's global medicine.Many of these stories are filled with the tension and pathos that makes clinical narratives powerful to read. Physicians are forced to make unfathomable decisions about whether to resuscitate and keep a baby alive, using all means available, or to let the infant die, whether to carry out a procedure that will save an infant in birth but would put the mother at risk, about how to deal with a cancer found in a very advanced state. However, virtually all of the stories transcend these classical stories of the decisions physicians are forced to make by being placed in settings of great scarcity of resources, which stand in particular contrast to the academic medical settings in North America or Europe where many of these global medicine specialists have trained and many continue to practice. The unspeakable inequality of resources emerges throughout these narratives as a kind of master theme, as the underlying moral, as opposed to plot, which gives meaning and sense to the stories. For those who practice medicine in such settings, global inequalities and scarcity of medical resources are deeply felt. They produce the rage that Jeffrey Deal describes. ("I learned to despise American churches during that time, a time when my world encompassed a dying newborn in Sudan, as well as the air conditioned padded seats [End Page 121] of our affluent suburban church.") They produce the distinctive experiences of helplessness and pain felt by clinicians who cannot separate how they would be able to treat such a patient at home from how they have to practice in these settings. For those clinicians working in their own societies, scarcity of resources often produces deep anger at the corrupt governments that fail to support basic human services for the great majority of their population. ("We were temporary actors performing in the cynical play of scarcity on permanent display in Port-au-Prince," writes Haitian physician Paul Pierre about his experience prior to joining Partners in Health.)But for those who regularly travel back and forth across the divide between rich and poor, whether across national boundaries or within their own society, the challenge to live a moral life is unendingly complicated. While becoming a part of a struggle for global justice with colleagues and advocates from both sides of the divide, few of the narrators can avoid personal feelings of ambivalence and guilt at being able to easily move from one side of that divide to the other back home. Many fantasize about giving up their lives in the north to devote themselves... (shrink)

We should not investigate facts by the light of arguments, but arguments by the light of facts.Myson of Chen, one of the Seven Sages ca. 600 B.C.To settle scores as well as problems, to shake things up, to make people think about what they said and wrote, to be provocative without being unjust...Kingsley AmisIn their critique of Wisconsin's revised child protection Statute, Kenneth De Ville and Loretta Kopelman argue rightly that “words matter.” Word mongering infects most political dialogue and is (...) nowhere more virulent than in the American abortion debate. Dichotomies such as “ unborn child” and “fetus,” expectant mother” and “pregnant woman,” “anti-choice’’ and “pro-choice,” “pregnancy termination” and “murder” symbolize the polarity of the abortion argument and the importance of language as a powerful conceptual weapon. The debate over reproductive rights is a war often fought on a linguistic battlefield. There, combatants forgo rules of engagement. Mal-intentioned illiteracy, ranging from the puerile to the vituperative, is always strategic. (shrink)

Public trust of conventionally produced food is now a pivotal issue for the Canadian food supply chain as consumers are increasingly demanding traceability, transparency and sustainability of the agri-food system. To ensure that Canadians understand what farmers do, how they do it, and why—there has been significant human and financial investment by both the agri-food industry and government over the last decade. Farmers, civil servants, and non-farming agricultural professionals alike are being encouraged to join the national conversation promoting the legitimacy (...) of conventional agriculture. As part of this large-scale effort, women in agriculture are advocating, in gendered ways, for the safety and legitimacy of the agri-food system and its conventional farming practices. This is being done by utilizing their motherhood capital. This motherhood capital legitimizes the authority granted to mothers as expert decisionmakers regarding their children’s food consumption. Through the usage of their motherhood capital, women are being positioned—and are positioning themselves—as an important voice in re-narrating the story of conventional agriculture through the circulation of their maternal foodwork experiences. Using their authority as mothers they are advocating for the safety, necessity, and trustworthiness of conventional agriculture to counter narratives of mistrust and risk. (shrink)

The thought of Edith Stein on woman brings out the fuller sense of the metaphysical notion of the being of woman. Stein’s position is that woman’s nature as biological mother affects her whole being. Woman has two essential characteristics: attraction to the personal and attraction to wholeness. It is woman’s emotions that account for these distinctly feminine traits. Woman is distinguished by her empathetic perception of persons, an intuitive grasp of a person’s being and value as “person”. Stein describes (...) empathy as a clear awareness of another person, not simply of the content of his experience, but of his experience of that content. In empathy, one takes the place of the other without becoming strictly identical to him. One does not just understand the experiences of the other, but takes them on as one’s own. Stein reinterprets traditional readings of woman, challenging claims to the woman as the “weaker sex” and to the emotions as inferior to reason. (shrink)

SummaryThis study seeks to investigate what influences intelligence in early childhood. The Singapore Cohort Study of the Risk Factors of Myopia is used to assess determinants of childhood IQ and changes in IQ. This longitudinal data set, collected in 1999, includes a wealth of demographic, socioeconomic and prenatal characteristics. The richness of the data allows various econometric approaches to be employed, including the use of ordered and multinomial logit analysis. Mother's education is found to be a consistent and key (...) determinant of childhood IQ. Father's education and school quality are found to be key drivers for increasing IQ levels above the average sample movement. (shrink)

In the Terry Achane case, a birth father who was in the military was not notified when his child's birth mother put up their child for adoption. Birth fathers are often stereotyped as uninvolved and irresponsible, especially when they are not married to the birth mother. Terry Achane was married. The adoption agency made little effort to contact him, raising ethical issues about the roles played by the race, economic status, and perhaps religious beliefs of the adopting parents.

We analyzed the patients’ perception of prenatal diagnosis of fetal cardiac pathology, and the reasons for choosing to continue with pregnancy despite being eligible to receive a medical termination of pregnancy. We also identified the challenges, the motives interfering in decision-making, and the consequences of the decisions on pregnancy, child and mother. This descriptive, prospective and longitudinal study was conducted in France, amongst pregnant women who wished to continue their pregnancy despite an unfavorable medical advice. Socio-demographic data were collected (...) through a questionnaire. Such questionnaire covered information assessing the parents/mother’s perception of prenatal diagnosis, and medical termination of pregnancy, their interpretation of the established diagnosis and their motives for not considering pregnancy termination. 72 eligible patients were analyzed over one year: mean age 33 ± 6.89 years, 47 patients had already given birth to ≥1 healthy child. Mean gestational age at the detection of fetal cardiac pathologies was 30 ± 4.37 weeks of amenorrhea. Patients decided to keep the child after 3 ± 1.25 consultations. 56 patients made their decision with their husbands and 16 made their decision alone. Reasons for declining the medical termination were culpability and responsibility, ideologies and convictions, mistrust and hope. Newborns of 67 patients died with a mean survival duration of 38 days. Patient informed consent should be sought before any decision in neonatology, even if conflicting with the medical team’s knowledge and the pregnant mother’s benefits. Decisions to accept or decline pregnancy termination depend on the patients’ psychological character, ideologies, convictions, and mistrust in the diagnosis/prognosis, or hope in the fetus survival. (shrink)

Proceedings of a forum held in Austin, Tex., on Mother's Day, 1996.

The medical model of childbearing assumes that a pregnancy always has the potential to turn into a risky procedure. In order to advocate humanized birth in high risk pregnancy, an important step involves the enlightenment of the professional’s preconceptions on humanized birth in such a situation. The goal of this paper is to identify the professionals’ perception of the potential obstacles and facilitating factors for the implementation of humanized care in high risk pregnancies. Twenty-one midwives, obstetricians, and health administrator professionals (...) from the clinical and academic fields were interviewed in nine different sites in Japan from June through August 2008. The interviews were audio taped, and transcribed with the participants’ consent. Data was subsequently analyzed using content analysis qualitative methods. Professionals concurred with the concept that humanized birth is a changing and promising process, and can often bring normality to the midst of a high obstetric risk situation. No practice guidelines can be theoretically defined for humanized birth in a high risk pregnancy, as there is no conflict between humanized birth and medical intervention in such a situation. Barriers encountered in providing humanized birth in a high risk pregnancy include factors such as: the pressure of being responsible for the safety of the mother and the fetus, lack of the women’s active involvement in the decision making process and the heavy burden of responsibility on the physician’s shoulders, potential legal issues, and finally, the lack of midwifery authority in providing care at high risk pregnancy. The factors that facilitate humanized birth in a high risk include: the sharing of decision making and other various responsibilities between the physicians and the women; being caring; stress management, and the fact that the evolution of a better relationship and communication between the health professional and the patient will lead to a stress-free environment for both. Humanized birth in a high risk pregnancy is something that goes beyond just curing women of their illnesses. It can be considered as a token of caring, and continued support, which positively consolidates the doctor-patient relationship. As yet, it has not been described as a practiced guideline, due to its ever-changing complexities. (shrink)

When I heard that a laboratory in China had cloned two long‐tailed macaques, I thought of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. When academics write about the novel, many point out that the reason the creature becomes a “monster” is not that he has any inherently evil qualities but that Victor Frankenstein, the creature's “mother,” immediately rejects him. All later problems can be traced to the fact that Frankenstein does not take responsibility for his creation. While I do not disagree (...) with this, we need to think beyond (or before) Frankenstein's rejection to the reason he rejects it. I would like to suggest that this reason reveals something about how bioethics judges new biological technologies. I suggest that what causes Frankenstein to feel revulsion toward his creation is its unsettling mix of the beautiful and the ugly. (shrink)

Scholars consider Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist political theorist for two reasons: her explicit commitment to educational equality, and her implicit suggestion that the private‐sphere role of motherhood holds political import. My reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Womanuses Wollstonecraft's works and draws upon recent claims made by Sandrine Bergès inThe Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft to connect these points: educated women are better at performing motherly duties and, therefore, of greater benefit to (...) society. Although many scholars have read Wollstonecraft's arguments for educational equality as a starting point for greater equality, Bergès does not. In this article, I further Bergès's claims and argue that Wollstonecraft's project is limited and likely to reinforce inequality between the sexes. Specifically, I show that Wollstonecraft's educational reforms incentivize women to become nothing more than highly educated housewives. In the process of fulfilling their social and political duty to instill public spirit and private virtue in future citizens, women are re‐entrenched in domestic affairs instead of being freed for public pursuits. This realization, I contend, should cause us to be wary of panaceas for women's subordination that rest on increasing their education. (shrink)

Women's Power To Be Loud: The Authority of the Discourse and Authority of the Text in Mary Dorcey's Irish Lesbian Poetic Manifesto "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" The following article aims to examine Mary Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear," included in the 1991 volume Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers. Apart from being a well-known and critically acclaimed Irish poet and fiction writer, the author of the poem has been, from (...) its beginnings, actively involved in lesbian rights movement. Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" is to be construed from a perspective of lesbian and feminist discourse, as well as a cultural, sociological and political context in which it was created. While analyzing the poem, the emphasis is being paid to the intertwining of various ideological and subversive assumptions, their competing for importance and asserting authority over one another, in line with, and sometimes, against the grain of the textual framework. In other words, Dorcey's poem introduces a multilayered framework that draws heavily on various sources: the popular culture idiom, religious discourse, the text even employs, in some parts, crime and legal jargon, but, above all, it relies upon sensuous lesbian experience where desire and respect for the other woman opens the emancipating space allowing for redefining of one's personal and textual location. As a result of such a multifarious interaction, unrepresented and unacknowledged Irish women's standpoints may come to the surface and become articulated, disrupting their enforced muteness that the controlling heteronormative discourse has attempted to ensure. In Dorcey's poem, the operating metaphor of women's silence, conceived of, at first, as the need to conceal one's sexual identity in fear of social ostracism and contempt of the "neighbours," is further equated with the noiseless, solitary and violent death of the anonymous woman, the finding of whose body was reported on the news. In both cases, the unwanted Irish women's voices of either agony, during the unregistered by anybody misogynist bloodshed that took place inside the flat, or the forbidden sounds of lesbian sexual excitement, need to be censored and stifled, not to disrupt an idealized image of the well-established family and heteronormative patterns. In the light of the aforementioned parallel, empowered by the shared bodily and emotional closeness with her female lover, and already bitterly aware that silence in discourse is synonymous with textual, or even, actual death, the speaker in "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" comes to claim her own agency and makes her voice heard by others and taken into account. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft argues that women must be independent citizens, but that they cannot be that unless they fulfill certain duties as mothers. This is problematic in a number of ways, as argued by Laura Brace in a 2000 article. However, I argue that if we understand Wollstonecraft's concept of independence in a republican, rather than a liberal context, and at the same time pay close attention to her discussion of motherhood, a feminist reading of Wollstonecraft is not only possible (...) but enriching. I will attempt to show, in particular, that the seeds of a feminist argument for co-parenting are to be found in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (shrink)

The medical treatment in utero of human beings raises several ethical questions. I argue that treatment is sufficient to establish the fetus as person; and consider how conflicts between the interests of the fetus and mother are to be resolved when such treatment is proposed. My arguments rest upon a ‘relational model’ of ethical discourse derived from H. Richard Niebuhr's “ethics of the fitting.”I conclude that the limitation of personal autonomy is rarely justified, but may be when direct, grave, (...) harm to others is imminent; and that educative rather than punitive measures are the best prospect for protecting fetal life. (shrink)

In her 1890 short story “Louisa,” Mary Wilkins Freeman explores nepotistic interference with female mate selection. Twenty-five-year-old Louisa Britton is pressured by her mother to marry against her inclinations, that is, to accept a suitor whom she does not “like.”1 The focal point of Freeman’s plot is the ensuing mother-daughter conflict, an evolutionarily significant issue that invites readers to consider the questions it raises in larger terms: What motivates parents to interfere with a daughter’s mating decisions? Is (...) a parent’s assessment of potential mates likely to be more accurate than that of the young woman herself? Is parental advice typically helpful—and, if so, helpful to whom? What are the potential... (shrink)

A collection of essays by an international team of scholars, _Archival Afterlives_ explores the posthumous fortunes of scientific and medical archives in early modern Britain. It demonstrates the sustaining importance of archival institutions in the growth of the “New Sciences.”.

In 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote a short story based upon the life of Eleanor Ormerod. A wealthy spinster, Ormerod achieved notoriety in late nineteenth-century Britain as an economic entomologist. In 1904, Nature compared her to Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville. In terms of recent scholarship devoted to the history of women in science, Ormerod's career differed markedly from that of her two predecessors. The emotional or intellectual support of a brother, husband, father, or male family relation made no (...) considerable contribution to her commitment to the study of entomology. Furthermore, her life as an independent spinster offered no positive proof for Francis Power Cobbe's dictum: as she aged, Eleanor Ormerod showed no tendency to become a ‘women's rights woman’. She publicly accepted or internalized the dominant, masculine ideology of science; and by contemporary standards, she achieved success. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vessel of Honor: The Virgin Birth and the Ecclesiology of Vatican II by Brian A. GraebeAaron Pidel S.J.Vessel of Honor: The Virgin Birth and the Ecclesiology of Vatican II. By Brian A. Graebe (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021), 351 pp.Though Mary's undiminished virginity in giving birth (virginitas in partu) was long understood to be an event as miraculous and a teaching as authoritative as her virginity in (...) conceiving (virginitas ante partum), virginitas in partu underwent a kind of existential reinterpretation in the middle of the twentieth century. Authors such as Albert Mitterer and Karl Rahner suggested that, physically speaking, Jesus's birth might have happened like any other, rupturing the hymen, distending the birth canal, and causing Mary pain, albeit not in the spiritually disintegrating way common to postlapsarian humanity. These arguments effectively "unsettled" the traditional understanding of virginitas in partu, leading theologians of the highest stature to distinguish between the doctrine itself and the anatomical aspects attached to it over time. Fr. Brian Graebe has written a fine book arguing that the bodily dimensions of the virgin birth, including the physical "seal" of virginity, belong to the substance of the doctrine. This more inclusive understanding not only does better justice to the data of tradition, he argues, but illuminates the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. The book impresses by its theologically reflective method, its clarity of exposition, [End Page 1106] and its depth of research—especially into the archival and antepreparatory sources of Vatican II.Vessel of Honor responds in effect to Rahner's argument that physical intactness is peripheral to the dogmatic core of Mary's virginity in partu. To show otherwise, Rahner contended, one would need to show that such a doctrine can be found directly in the apostolic teaching, or that it, "being implicitly contained therein, has grown out of the apostolic doctrine, by a legitimate historical, logical, and theological process, as its authentic development" (68–69). If the bodily aspects of this doctrine really belonged to the deposit of faith, in other words, one would need to show how they are implied in the traditio divino-apostolica, as well as how they cohere organically with the rest of the deposit. The two major parts of Vessel of Honor respond in turn to each aspect of Rahner's challenge.The first three chapters argue that Mary's bodily integrity in parturition belongs at least implicitly to the traditio divino-apostolica. Turning first to the postapostolic tradition, Fr. Graebe shows that—apart from the early exceptions of Origen and Tertullian—patristic sources either affirm or strongly imply a miraculous delivery. This constant witness culminates in the Lateran Council (649 AD), which, while not itself an ecumenical council, was received into the magisterium of Pope Martin and affirmed by the Third Council of Constantinople (680 AD). Its teaching that Mary "gave birth without corruption" (incorruptibiliter... genuisse) would be defended by Paschasius, Ratramnus, Thomas Aquinas, and others. This consensus remained undisturbed until the eve of Vatican II.Even at Vatican II, Fr. Graebe argues in the next chapter, the Council Fathers intended to reaffirm the more inclusive idea of virginitas in partu against those who would marginalize its bodily dimensions. Here he really breaks new ground, delving deep into the antepreparatory, preparatory, and conciliar drafting history. He shows convincingly that many of the chief drafters of the final formula—"Our Lord, who did not diminish his mother's virginal integrity but sanctified it..." (Lumen Gentium §57)—saw it as excluding Rahner's and Mitterer's minimalizing interpretations. Drawing on material from the Vatican Apostolic Archives, Fr. Graebe shows that some of the very theologians who voted to omit the pointed phrase "in the birth itself" (in ipsomet partu) did so for tonal rather than substantive reasons.The third chapter argues that Mary's physical integrity in birth is to be believed with divine and Catholic faith, despite the ongoing confusion introduced by Rahner and others. Admittedly, Vatican II did not define but merely reaffirmed the traditional understanding of virginitas in partu. But there are other reasons for including it in the traditio divino-apostolica. [End Page 1107] Drawing heavily... (shrink)