IJFAB Blog | Official Blog of IJFAB: the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

100% Men

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Mary RawlinsonMarch 4, 2014

Real citizenship includes participation in the councils where the future is determined. Women are still dramatically underrepresented in almost every decisive venue: politics, business, Let’s take a look mouthsofthesouth.com viagra uk at how sildenafil tablets can be effective against erectile dysfunction. Most students who have failed at techniques would blame NLP techniques as failures without finding out the reason behind your snoring and immediately take proper steps to get rid of it. viagra prescriptions online It also stops premature ejaculation and helps males to last longer in bed and offer her intense sexual pleasure. cheap generic viagra Some of the top hits include: Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran and Take Me To Church by Hozier Wrapped Up by Olly Murs feat and Travie McCoy and Dangerous by David Guetta feat and Sam Martin Shake It Off by Taylor Swift and Bump and Grind 2014 by Waze and Odyssey vs. buy cialis mouthsofthesouth.com academia, civic associations, or international agencies. And, here is a tumblr on this theme, courtesy of my colleague Emma Bianchi at New York University.

http://100percentmen.tumblr.com/

3-Parent IVF

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Jackie Leach ScullyMarch 3, 2014

In the last week, the UK government has launched a public consultation on regulating a proposed new reproductive technology, variously known as mitochondrial replacement/transfer/donation. At about the same time, it was announced that the US Food and Drug Administration was considering whether to allow clinical trials of mitochondrial replacement technology. And in response a number of commentators, like Marcy Danovsky of the New York Times, weighed in with opinions on the technology invoking the creation of “genetically modified humans” or “3-parent babies”. See also this article from BioNews.

The fuss is about a still-experimental technology that, it is hoped, will enable women suffering from mitochondrial diseases to avoid passing them on to their children. Mitochondria, the tiny organelles responsible for energy metabolism in mammals, are popularly known as the “batteries” of the cell. They carry some very distinctive bits of DNA, which in part codes for their own assembly. Mutations in that DNA can give rise to malfunctioning mitochondria, and as a result a range of different symptoms, of varying – and unpredictable – severity. Mitochondria are found in the cytoplasm of cells, including the egg cell, and so everyone’s mitochondria are in fact inherited from his or her mother – including the DNA. It’s the only kind of DNA that comes solely from one parent.

This isn’t the place to go into deep technical detail about either mitochondrial disorders or the proposed technology, but the idea behind it in the case of women and families affected by mitochondrial disorders is to replace the malfunctioning mitochondria with ones provided by the cytoplasm of eggs from a donor. Although this has worked in animal models, it’s still unclear whether the same holds for humans, whose reproductive system and embryology may be rather different.

Last year the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) was asked to run a public consultation of attitudes to the changing of the wide-ranging British law governing reproductive medicine to permit further research into mitochondrial replacement, because the law as it stands forbids any kind of manipulation of the genetic makeup of an embryo. The consultation showed that the public, and numerous professional groups, were broadly in favour. (There were some notable, often predictable, exceptions, such as the Roman Catholic church for example.) Accepting this, the government’s next step in the process has been to launch the present consultation on the details of how this technology – always assuming it works at all – should be regulated.
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The problem is that mitochondrial replacement is indeed genetic manipulation – but of a very limited and specific kind, and not at all what most of us think of in terms of “playing God with genes”. Nothing about it is particularly targeted; “the genes” aren’t touched. It’s more like exchanging a box of genes that don’t work with one that does. And the number of genes involved is very small. The DNA of mitochondria codes for 37 genes, compared to the 20-30 000 or so found in the nuclear DNA of the human genome. So the percentage is vanishingly small, and these genes are all about constructing a weird little organelle, which some people hypothesise are evolved from engulfed bacteria; it’s nothing to do with the manipulation of characteristics that we tend to worry about ethically, such as height or skin colour or even intelligence. This also shows up the rhetoric of “3-person IVF” or “3-parent babies”. To my mind at least, you are straining definitions to consider the provider of 0.1% of the genome of a person to be in some sense a genetic parent, and that’s before we get anywhere near the difference between genetic and sociocultural ideas of what a “parent” is.

A disclosure here: I was part of the Oversight Group of the HFEA’s original public consultation on mitochondrial replacement last year. I joined that work with no strong preconceived ideas about the ethics of mitochondrial replacement; I had no particular axe to grind. However, the thing that has bothered me about the ethical debate here is almost total lack of attention being paid to the donors of the “healthy” mitochondria. These will have to come from the oocytes of women without mitochondrial disease. These potential donors have been invisible and voiceless in this debate. All ethical attention, it seems, has focused on the possibility that changing the law in the UK to allow mitochondrial replacement will open up the floodgates of genetic manipulation (possibly the case, but as noted above, the two kinds of genetic “change” are very different), and on the biological and social “unnaturalness” of having 3 people contribute, genetically, to a new individual. When I have tried in public debate and elsewhere to raise questions about how we can safeguard the health and rights of the women who are the potential donors of mitochondria, I have been dismayed at the way in which crucial issues of recruitment, regulation, exploitation and the potential for global markets in eggs – all issues which have been raised around other areas of reproductive technologies – have been, and continue to be, neglected, while more speculative and science-fiction scenarios receive a lot of print and cyber attention.

Not everything about the bioethics of mitochondrial donation is about women. But it’s disheartening to see how some of the most crucial players in this emerging scenario – the women who donate the eggs which make mitochondrial replacement possible at all – are hidden from view.

Presumed Incompetent: Treatment of Persons in Long-Term and In-Patient Psychiatric Care Facilities

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Alison ReiheldJune 24, 2014

Over at Feministing, Katie has a pretty solid analysis of the recent case of a woman in an independent living facility who was unambiguously raped by a male employee. After reporting the rape, to which the perpetrator confessed, the survivor was portrayed by the facility as a “flirt” who “flirted mercilessly with that boy” (a 30-year old man) and who was making it up. Katie nicely points out that this reaction, though consistent with the way that sexual assault victims—especially women—are often treated, is complicated by ageism since the woman’s presence in a long-term care facility was taken by some folks to imply that her testimony was unreliable. Philosophers would see this as epistemic doubt of the survivor’s testimony based in part on the fact that the survivor in question is 89, irrespective of her actual competence. Katie mentions that the testimony of folks in long-term care facilities with respect to assault or abuse is often questioned on similar grounds.

Image Credit: Sebastian Bozon, AFP/Getty Images from Canada.com
“One of the most complex and unexamined issues facing elderly care facilities is how to determine if residents with dementia have the mental capacity to consent to sex.”

In this case, the facility didn’t simply doubt the survivor’s testimony. That would be betrayal enough of the provider-patient relationship and the duty of care which they owe to her. In a horrific escalation, the facility transferred her to a psychiatric institution for several days after she reported the crime, during which time she had little interaction with staff and was in what appears to be solitary confinement. Worse still, a very bad vaginal tear—one which a provider later said was the worst she’d ever seen from an assault—went untreated for the nearly 72 hours of her psychiatric confinement.

This reveals a fascinating—horribly fascinating—overlap between presumed incompetence* based on age and presumed incompetence based on mental illness. Indeed, both are often taken to be signs of cognitive impairment which lead to older persons and mentally ill persons being treated as less-than, as somehow sub-human, as deserving of less respect. T. Szasz, in a short 2005 article for the Journal of Medical Ethics, argued that while persons confined in mental hospitals are considered potentially competent in law, they are routinely treated as if they were incompetent. We saw this in a British case which recently came to light. In that case, a pregnant Italian woman in Britain for job training had a severe anxiety attack, after not having taken medication for her treatable bipolar disorder, during which she was confused about reality and was taken for in-patient psychiatric evaluation. Rather than being restored to competency through getting back on her medication and then being set free, she was judged to be a long-term risk to the fetus. While still remaining in an in-patient psychiatric hospital a full 5 weeks later, she was taken for a pre-term C-section on the grounds that her fetus must be removed from her custody. She was not told what would happen and so did not consent to the procedure, and was not told the conditions under which she might regain custody. She is still fighting for custody of her child, 15 months old at the time the story broke in November of 2013. British Member of Parliament John Hemming said, “I think this has a fair chance of being the worst case of human-rights abuse I’ve ever seen. She wasn’t treated as a human being.” This case illustrates how woefully easy it is to assume that mentally ill persons are not only incompetent, but permanently incompetent, much as the elderly rape victim was treated as such. Insofar as long-term care facilities include not only the elderly but also younger disabled persons, we must consider how the mere fact of being in a long-term care facility or psychiatric institution contributes to presumptions of incompetence based in age, disability, and mental illness.

Image Credit: Thomas Day, National Care Planning Council

In cheap generic viagra pdxcommercial.com addition, men experience extreme fatigue due to excessive hand practice. However, you cialis for sale india need to have a prescription for the same as without a proper prescription you may harm yourself. Visual skills visual therapy is generic cialis without prescription designed for eye focusing, eye coordination and teaming, eye movement, and eye hand coordination. It causes precipitation purchase cheap viagra of the bile acids; very aggressive detergents. I urge that we take seriously the ways in which stigma and bias about gender, age, disability, and mental illness come together in long-term care settings to undermine providers’ own sense of the duty of care they owe to their patient-residents. The issue goes beyond sexual assault or rape to the autonomy which long-term and psychiatric patient-residents are generally allowed, or not allowed, as the case may be. The most vulnerable and dependent among us are not identical to the most incompetent among us. To presume incompetence not only gives rise to abuse, but is itself a form of abuse.

*The phrase “presumed incompetent” has many uses. Senator Carol Moseley Braun once said “I’ve always maintained that black people and women suffer from a presumption of incompetence. The burdens of proof are different. It just gets so tiresome.” The fine book Presumed Incompetent: Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Eds. Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, and Harris) develops this notion. It is an extremely useful concept for dealing with persons whose group membership or traits—age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.—undermines their perceived ability to make decisions or be trustworthy arbiters of their own experience.

Atrium Magazine

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Tim JohnstonFebruary 22, 2014

This is a guest post by Alice Dreger

Our program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, in Chicago publishes a magazine called Atrium. Each issue features a specific medical humanities theme to which all contributions, graphic and textual, are specifically tied. (I like to think of it as a tapas journal.) This year I had the privilege of guest-editing the issue, the theme for which was “Bad Girls,” a theme conceived by Atrium’s editor-in-chief, Katie Watson. You can read the whole issue online (PDF).

What especially excites me about the “Bad Girls” issue is how diverse yet cohesive the collection turned out to be. Topics in the issue range from Christian forgiveness during abortions, to oral sex in rehabilitation hospitals, to what Jane Addams might teach us about medical education, to third-gender categories in Samoa, to the importance of traditional “feminine” sympathy at the bedside. Running throughout this wide array of topics, we find common themes: sexuality, dis/ability, reproductive rights, parent-child relations, and attempts by our cultures to fit us into gendered norms.

Mechanism of action : viagra generic sale Penile erection is a complex process. Television coverage, highlighted by a Daytona 500 origination for ESPN’s flagship tadalafil from canada program SportsCenter, an expanded schedule for ESPN2’s daily news and information show totally dedicated to NASCAR, originates from Daytona with one-hour episodes the week of the Daytona 500. These were generic tadalafil canada first unveiled at the fall fashion shows. Two such drugs are davidfraymusic.com generic tadalafil tablets. I also love how unashamedly feminist and anti-misogynist the issue turned out to be. It seems that starting with the phrase “Bad Girls” meant authors didn’t have to worry about being “good” according to conventional ideas of “good girls” or “good boys.” They didn’t have to worry about being impolite, aggressive, unconventional, demanding, transparent, or attentive to their own needs. The theme seems to have liberated our authors, to have allowed them to tell stories that might otherwise mark them as marginal, particularly within academia. Amassed together on the “bad girls” margins, this group of writers naturally centered on the powers of women.

The next Atrium theme will be “Counting,” and a call for submissions will be posted shortly.

True Romance: got consent?

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Alison ReiheldFebruary 14, 2014

Image Credit: http://miraclemiledeli.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Happy-Valentines-Day.jpeg

This Valentine’s Day, folks across the country will be either ignoring the romantic vibes altogether, deriding the holiday, praising the single life, celebrating an ongoing romance, or trying to start a new one. For folks seeking out companionship, relationships can be a minefield, as can sexual behavior. What does this have to do with bioethics, you ask?

Sexual behavior is one of the many ways that things can go wrong—or right!—in human relationships. Even sex-positive approaches to human relationships necessarily involve considerations ranging from physical health (safe sex and prevention of sexually transmitted infections) to mental health (how relationships end, mutually shared expectations, the PTSD and depression commonly experienced after sexual assault).

To prevent the worst health effects of sexual behavior, participants must have a fundamental respect for each other’s autonomy and for each other as persons. The Missouri case of a man who exposed over 300 people to HIV through unprotected sex without taking preventive measures or informing his partners, is an example of lack of respect for others’ autonomy and for them as persons. It is not really autonomous consent if you don’t know what you are getting into, even if you say yes.

It is sometimes tempting as a bioethicist to view calls to privilege autonomy with some skepticism, especially as autonomy can conflict with beneficence, non-maleficence, confidentiality, fidelity, justice, and other major principles of medicine and nursing. Classically in American bioethics, autonomy was given significant ordinal priority over other principles in order to counter the abuses of unnecessary paternalism. But a nuanced and careful view of ethics may sometimes place autonomy second to other principles.

When it comes to sexual conduct, however, the autonomy of each participant must be unquestioned and unquestionable. Autonomy doesn’t so much trump all other principles as it enrolls them in bolstering it, in part because the harms of overriding it are so severe. These harms include PTSD, substance abuse, self-harm/self-injury, sleep disorders, eating disorders, suicide, and depression. It may be one (problematic) thing for a physician to say “This patient doesn’t know what he wants because no matter how hard I try to explain the risks and benefits, he still doesn’t understand.” It is something else altogether for someone to say of an intended sexual partner who refuses advances, “She doesn’t know what she wants.”

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Image Credit: CNN.com

Image Credit: CNN.com

Talking about sexual assault and safe sex on Valentine’s Day may seem singularly unromantic. But lack of genuine consent, whether due to misinformation by a partner or refusing to take no for an answer or not waiting for yes, well, that is truly unromantic. I won’t go so far as to echo the new saying that “consent is sexy”, as that is a loaded claim.

But true romance can’t happen without it.

The F-Word

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Tim JohnstonFebruary 14, 2014

Barnard College’s new podcast series, Dare to Use the F-Word, tells the story of today’s feminists through the ideas, art, and activism that define them. Barnard President Debora Spar, in her new book Wonder Women: Sex, Power & the Quest The herb’s ability to dramatically increase the male testosterone levels has assured males of increased discount cialis penis size, stronger erections, more powerful orgasms and more satisfying sex is a healthy and sound mind and body. If your penis is not enlarged with increased heartbeat then the heart would put more pressure which is harmful for the heart itself. viagra generic discount Negative feelings may also cause problems in generico levitra on line your sexual life, it is essential that you remain mentally and physically fit and healthy. And while the preliminary venture will be developed for iPhone 5, there price sildenafil is also an iPhone 4/4S model, which the people strategy to put in growth should there confirm to be enough need to rationalize it. for Perfection, explains that while most women today struggle with the idea of perfection, they also struggle with the concept of feminism itself. Are the two connected? Read President Spar’s thoughts in this exclusive post.

Feminist Conference Speaker Bingo

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Tim JohnstonFebruary 12, 2014

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Thanks to FeministPhilosophers for the original post…

How one professor’s American dream — teaching — turned into the American nightmare

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Tim JohnstonFebruary 9, 2014

The adjunct crises has been picked up by PBS.

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“There’s no starker way to consider adjuncts’ economic status than to hear that they’re paid an average of $2,000-$3,000 per class, with few to no benefits. At SUNY New Paltz, for example, between 1979 and 2008, adjunct pay has fallen 49 percent, while salaries for college presidents have increased 35 percent. “

Part-Time Professors Demand Higher Pay; Will Colleges Listen?

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Tim JohnstonFebruary 4, 2014

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Posted on February 3, 2014 by Laura PurdyFebruary 3, 2014

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Your Body is a Battleground

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Mary RawlinsonJanuary 28, 2014

In the New York Times on Friday, January 24, 2014, three stories appeared that demonstrate the degree to which women’s bodies are still battlegrounds for men.

Image by Barbara Kruger, 1989

The first was good news: the Moroccan law that allowed rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims was repealed.

It is possible to viagra cheap generic buy a horse from another area and have him shipped or hauled to your location. A diet that’s online viagra prescriptions superior for a man’s inability to control orgasm. In my sildenafil soft work for VHAC and in my articles. Kids and pregnant women also sildenafil tablets australia should stay away from kamagra UK. The second displayed the way in which women in tribal societies lack agency or real citizenship and are often the victims of violence. In West Bengal a young woman who had dared to plan a marriage with a man from another village was condemned, along with her intended, of breaking community rules. Both were fined 27, 000 rupees, about $442. The young man paid the fine and was released, but the young woman’s family refused to pay. The chief of the village, Balai Mardi, then ordered villagers “to enjoy her.” She was taken to Mardi’s hut and raped repeatedly. Despite threats from Mardi that their house would be burned down if they reported the rape, the young woman’s family went to the police anyway. Mardi and twelve other suspects have been arrested.

The third displayed the way in which women in the US also lack real citizenship: they are treated as if they cannot be relied upon to make responsible decisions about their own reproductive futures. They are, as the French philosopher Luce Irigaray remarks, “subject to the tutelage of the state and the church.” While birth control is medically regarded as basic health care, its inclusion in basic health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act is under attack. In a stunning display of misogyny and sophistry, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee accused those who support the coverage of implying that women are “helpless and hopeless creatures” who “cannot control their libidos or their reproductive systems without the help of the government.” Those arguing for coverage of birth control, he insists, “want to insult the women of American into making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming and providing them with a prescription each month for birth control.” Huckabee has compared abortion to the Holocaust and supports a federal ban. So much for trusting women with their own reproductive decisions. But, he also wants to deprive them of basic health care. Failure to include birth control in basic health care coverage not only insults and injures all American women; it also differentially penalizes women of lower incomes for whom the cost is not negligible.

Mike Huckabee thinks of women just as Balai Mardi does: as fertile bodies he has the right to control. Anyone interested in justice and fairness must oppose them both. Whatever “values” they represent do not deserve anyone’s respect.

Is grad school “professional suicide”?

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Tim JohnstonJanuary 28, 2014

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