Month: August 2000

Some states in Australia have laws making it illegal for women to get pregnant via in vitro procedures. One woman challenged Victoria’s anti-in vitro law as unconstitutional, and an Australian Court agreed with her saying the ban violated Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act. Australian Prime Minister John Howard reacted as any good statist would — he immediately vowed to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to specifically prohibit single women from using in vitro fertilization.

Howard told the Associated Press,

This issue involves overwhelmingly, in the opinion of the government, the right of children in our society to have the expectation, other things being equal, of the affection and the care of both a mother and a father.

While it may be true that, everything being equal, a child is better off in a two parent household, to then deduce from that a moral principle that it is always wrong for a single woman to have a child and raise it on her own is absurd. For some government officials, ethicists and others always feel the need to insert their own peculiar views about the family into personal, private reproductive decisions.

If a single woman can afford in vitro fertilization and wants to have a child on her own, more power to her.

Source:

Canberra moves to block single women’s access to in vitro fertilization from the Associated Press

    A promising approach to treating Alzheimer’s patients is making its first tentative steps from mice to human beings.

    Although the exact cause of Alzheimer’s is still poorly understood, the current prevailing theory is that a protein called amyloid accumulates into deposits known as plaques which disrupt the brain’s functioning. In 1999 Dale Schenk of Elan Pharmaceuticals announced that in animal experiments he injected mice with a protein fragment called beta-amyloid which prevented amyloid from accumulating in the brains of the mice.

    Subsequent research with mice has demonstrated that mice genetically altered to develop amyloid plaques which result in Alzheimer’s like condition in the animals have maintained their memory and learning skills when injected with a vaccine that promotes the production of beta-amyloid.

    The main concern over the vaccine for humans revolved around safety issues. Some researchers suspected that encouraging beta-amyloid production might itself cause brain damage. But at the Alzheimer’s 2000 conference held in Washington, DC, in July, researchers reported that recently finished clinical trials on 24 Alzheimer’s patients in the United States found no evidence of side effects. “There’s no question the vaccine was well tolerated,” Schenk told Science News.

    A larger, 80-patient clinical trial testing safety and dose response is underway now and if that study confirms that the vaccine is safe, trials to determine whether the vaccine is an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s in human beings will commence in 2001.

Source:

Possible Alzheimer’s vaccine seems safe. J. Travis, Science News, July 15, 2000.

The only group that seems capable of matching the radical feminist flair for overly dramatic and inappropriate denunciations of their targets are their traditionalist conservative opponents who often give the feminists a run for their money in the hyperbole department. Take Paul Craig Roberts’ latest column at Townhall.Com, What civil rights has wrought.

The first half of the column is a pretty standard attack on the entrenchment of racial and sexual quotas in American law. That part of his column seems superficial (are racial preferences really “unambiguously unconstitutional”?), but he’s not too far off the mark. Unfortunately Roberts picks up and runs with a message conservatives seem to be latching on to — men are victims. And they are not just ordinary, run-of-the mill victims, but rather victims of a monumental conspiracy comparable in its depths to what Jews faced in Nazi Germany or pretty much everyone faced in Soviet Russia.

Give me a break. According to Roberts, “White males are the only unorganized group in society. … Moreover a large percentage of white males are liberals who have been brainwashed by propaganda about white male villainy. The self-hating white male is an active proponent of political correctness. He can be found on every campus, busy at work inflicting punishments on his fellows for insensitivity toward women and minorities. Indoctrinated and divided, white males are today second-class citizens in law, and their situation is worsening.”

This is absurd on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. Sure there are certainly people who fit Roberts vision, but they hardly make up “a large percentage of white males” (or, at the very least, Roberts presents not a single scrap of evidence to back up his claim). It is interesting that to make his case Roberts has to adopt one of the classic tropes of radical feminism — men who disagree with him are not simply wrong but they are “brainwashed,” apparently unable to think for themselves, consider evidence and make up their own minds. The folks Roberts complains about are not “brainwashed,” they’re just idiots (just as our society seems to have forgotten that some people choose to committ evil acts, so it seems to have forgotten that some people choose to be stupid).

Roberts is at his best when he writes, “J.R. Nyquist in the July 20 WorldNetDaily.com notes a growing hostility toward men, especially in the conversation of young college-educated women.” Is Roberts serious? He’s going to quote a columnist at a web site as evidence of the sort of attitudes young college-education women maintain toward men? So much for keeping scholarship and issues of evidence based on sound scientific methods rather than just hearsay and anecdotes (speaking of which, let me offer the anecdote of a very liberal college-educated woman I know who was recently complaining that she was learning nothing from her women’s studies course because all the professor did was bash men. Just like men, young college-educated women are not the mindless victims of “brainwashing” Roberts and others imagine them to be).

The way to counteract the claims of radical feminists is by a calm look at the facts, not hysterical polemics.