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The Biopolitics of Womb Life
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15788 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
4,682 Words |
| Author
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Thomas R. Verny
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SCIENCE AND THE UNBORN: CHOOSING HUMAN FUTURES
Clifford Grobstein
New York City: Basic Books, 1988
208 pp., $18.95
As the heat of battle rises between the Right-to-Life (antiabortionist) and Pro-Choice (proabortionist) forces, an ever-increasing number of experts have joined the fray, lending the weight of their scientific expertise to the ongoing battle. Clifford Grobstein--laboratory scientist, teacher, medical school dean, and "analyst of biomedical policy"--makes a valiant effort to be impartial, to determine the status of the unborn on purely scientific grounds. He wants to help society reach a clearer vision of the unborn, unclouded by emotionally charged and biased arguments. Grobstein's conclusions will rest on logic and the latest high-tech techniques for the study of intrauterine life.
Because much of the discussion that follows is based on findings obtained through the use of new gyne-gadgetry, a few words of explanation are in order. Ultrasonography has rapidly replaced the more hazardous X rays as a means of "seeing" into the womb. In this technique, a small apparatus that produces high-frequency sound waves is placed on a pregnant woman's abdomen, and the echoes (like in radar) are transmitted to a TV screen. Real-time scanning allows observers, including the mother, to watch the baby's movements from the sixth week of life on.
The invention of fiber optics allows doctors to look into any dark space in the body, including the ovaries and the uterus. For example, with the aid of a fiber-optic endoscope, New Zealand obstetrician A.W. Liley determined that by four and a half months the unborn exhibits a wide repertoire of motor responses to external stimuli such as grimacing when a bitter substance like quinine is added to the amniotic fluid or doubling its rate of swallowing amniotic fluid if saccharine is added.
Amniocentesis is a procedure by which a long needle is introduced into the amniotic sac. Under ultrasound observation, some fluid with flaked-off fetal cells is then withdrawn and the cells are studied for genetic disease such as Down's Syndrome. Amniocentesis cannot be performed until the sixteenth week of pregnancy, and the results are not known for another four weeks. A more recent technique is chorion villi sampling which can be performed much earlier in pregnancy but is also more traumatic (it collects living cells from the developing placenta) and, consequently, leads to a higher rate of miscarriages.
Another innovation that has enabled scientists to study the until-now-hidden process of conception and early development of the conceptus is in vitro fertilization, more commonly known as IVF, or test-tube babies. IVF occurs in a flat laboratory dish that contrains a culture similar to the fluid in the oviduct (fallopian tube). To this glass plate are added ova and sperm. Under proper laboratory conditions (if the egg or eggs and the sperm cells are all healthy), one can observe with the aid of a microscope every detail of fertilization, cell division, and subsequent growth.
While the results of ultrasound and amniocentesis may create a serious moral dilemma for parents who are found to carry a defective child, IVF and the techniques it has
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