OT: Stem Cell Research - fer it or agin it?

I'll recheck the sign. I don't recall it saying that.

Not in my experience. The prejudics is for infants, as opposed to other kids, but there's lots of demand for black and asian babies.

John

The children of slaves had none. The children of the free needed none because the government was vastly less inclined to interfere.

China, Iran, Syria, ... yep pretty much.

On Sun, 29 Oct 2006 20:31:04 -0800, John Larkin wrote in Msg.

The whole abortion issue is something that outsiders shouldn't mess with because it is not conceivable that anything useful would come out of it. Suffice it to say that an abortion is a highly unpleasant thing for the woman getting it, so it is unlikely that she does it light-heartedly because she forgot to take her pill.

Like Bill says, abortions happen. Making abortion illegal won't keep embryos from being aborted. It will just criminalize poor women and drive them into the dangerous hands of unskilled quacks. Wealthy women will always be able to receive a clean, safe, and legal abortion.

The only useful remedy is education, education, education, like for so many other things. Teach people about contraceptives and make them available cheaply.

I lived a bit dangerously as a youth but got away with it. Literally the only hurdle was that I couldn't get myself to go into the drugstore and buy the prerequisites. That first pack of condoms was awfully hard to buy.

robert

She could just drink some tansy tea. Farmers routinely worried (and still do) about tansy, since it aborts calves quite readily. In humans, it works perfectly well and in small enough doses to manage easily. In farming communities (I grew up on a filbert farm), it was widely known about and used before the days when abortion was made legal in the US. Far easier and in vastly smaller doses than things like pennyroyal. A young mother who missed her period would ask around and then just go visit the local wise woman, so to speak, for a spot of tea.

And heck? Who is to say that she just didn't accidentally wind up out in a field and chewing on some grass and accidentally tried some of that stuff with yellow tops on it without really knowing what it was?

I think it still works fine at 8 months, though I can't recall a case where anyone tried it that late. However, under a doctor's care it's likely the child will live. In fact, they've even crossed the lung barrier now (somewhere in the 20-24 week point) where the cells releasing surfactances in the alveoli shut down for about a week while they metaphorphize from what amounts to a primitive lizard surfactant to a modern primate form. During that period, it used to be death for a child out of the womb. But I think they can now atomize an equivalent and keep the baby breathing properly over that short stint. Don't know how early a fetus they can keep alive, now. But it is pretty early, I bet. That probably continues to complicate the question you are trying to frame.

Jon

Doctors take an oath of sorts. It would be hard to find one that would aide this process, unless you had some serious money to help search for a very unscrupulous doctor in some distant land or else had a real medical reason (very unlikely, but when that kind of case occurs it should be one that is made between mother and doctor.)

Frankly, although there is a hypothetical here, it's just not been a problem in reality. We've had the laws on the books for a fair time now in the US (and I don't know how long elsewhere) and this just isn't anything to write home about. It's not newsworthy.

Don't worry about it.

Jon

There are more than enough cases where some expectant mother sells her baby-to-be to more than one family to indicate that this is true, as long as the baby is expected to be healthy and white. Money talks.

This from a system which can provide endless amounts of money to imprison people for the most trivial of crimes - like 25 to life for stealing a slice of pizza. How much will that cost?

Or we could stop paying teenage girls to make babies.

Cheers! Rich

Well, since this is religious faith, the US isn't supposed to be allowed to legislate it. "Congress shall make no law establishing religion..." and all that.

Cheers! Rich

Since I posted URL's to back up the figures I quoted, you can take that this isn't true in this particular case. You might claim that the URL's invented their data, but their figures tie up with what I've known for many years now.

Back in your orgone box.

More likely that the bad gene mixes just stop working early on due to a missing or defective enzyme. Hypothesising an unnecessary error-checking mechanism violates Occam's Razor.

Those ideas aren't "evolutionary" or even scientific, but pure mystical nonsense. Please restrict them to user-groups interested in fantasy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I've heard such cases, too. I'm still looking for evidence about the USA, as a whole society. I honestly do NOT know what the situation is, and I recently looked around a bit for it. I may repeat this kind of thing to others and I don't like apocryphal reports as my source.

Jon

And spend close to 2 billion a week on Iraq.

Frankly, there is NO EXCUSE. And it is so bad that I have actually had a parent call me up and say, "I am going out into my garage with my son and turning on the car." My wife and I immediately worked to help remedy some of the difficulties and were lucky enough to be able to make enough of a difference.

Later on, at a dinner I was having with one of the psychologist who knew her and we were discussing her situation, he told me a funny thing about his own perspective. He said,

"You know, Jon? After all that, she called me up and asked me over. But when she asked me to come over, I just knew that she intended to take a gun out and blow her brains all over the place when I arrived. I was so scared of seeing her, thinking that I'd just enable her to make a spectacle of the situation and I wasn't going to be party to it. It was only when I talked with (and he mentioned another psychiatrist we both knew well in the field) X, that he told me, 'No, she's fine. She wants to tell you how much better things are.' and I decide to go over."

This is where I find so many in the community close to.

Jon

This isolated phrase wasn't deleted as it should have been. (It was moved elsewhere.) Sorry for any confusion from it's odd placement.

Jon

Your logic suggests that since "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is a religious thing, we shouldn't be allowed to make any murder a crime. Or stealing, for that matter.

John

That's not at all good logic, John. If A-->B, that does not mean B-->A. And you darned well know it and are just being argumentative.

A law can make good secular sense. Just because it happens to be found in some superstition, as well, doesn't make it religious.

Jon

Actually, I should have said "A law can make good secular sense. Just because it happens to be found in some superstition, as well, doesn't make its secular purposes less secular." Sorry about the miswording.

Jon

It's one of those things that We Don't Talk About.

Cheers! Rich

You may be constrained to working with simple mechanisms, but some people, and some proteins, are not.

What's mystical about a complex biological system doing complex stuff? Please hold your hand up in front of your face, and wiggle your fingers, and think about all the things that are happening.

John