Thursday, November 13, 2003
Battle for a Brave New World - latest instalments
Tucked away behind closed doors, a lot is going on in the Brave New World of human engineering. Four pieces of news just in the last few days give us a glimpse of the battles being fought.
How would you like your body to be owned by some drug company through its patents? In behind-the-scenes jousting, the US Congress is debating whether human embryos and human embryonic stem cells can be patented.
The United Nations committee in charge of drafting an international treaty on cloning has thrown up its hands and deferred a decision for another two years. Irreconcilable differences between a group led by Costa Rica and the United States which opposed cloning of any sort and a group led by Belgium which would have allowed "therapeutic" cloning have ended in a stalemate.
A survey by the California-based Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) shows that 77% of countries have taken no action to ban reproductive cloning and 86% of countries have not banned "designer babies".
Within hours after US President George W. Bush signed a bill banning partial-birth abortions, it was blocked by court orders from federal judges in the states of Nebraska, New York and California. Opponents of the law have been very emotive in their arguments, saying it attacks women’s “reproductive freedom�. So what is the procedure in question. Essentially, a late-term foetus is partially delivered before being killed, usually by puncturing its skull. Here’s an illustrated description of the process. Note that the child has no “freedoms� in the matter.
Tucked away behind closed doors, a lot is going on in the Brave New World of human engineering. Four pieces of news just in the last few days give us a glimpse of the battles being fought.
How would you like your body to be owned by some drug company through its patents? In behind-the-scenes jousting, the US Congress is debating whether human embryos and human embryonic stem cells can be patented.
The United Nations committee in charge of drafting an international treaty on cloning has thrown up its hands and deferred a decision for another two years. Irreconcilable differences between a group led by Costa Rica and the United States which opposed cloning of any sort and a group led by Belgium which would have allowed "therapeutic" cloning have ended in a stalemate.
A survey by the California-based Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) shows that 77% of countries have taken no action to ban reproductive cloning and 86% of countries have not banned "designer babies".
Within hours after US President George W. Bush signed a bill banning partial-birth abortions, it was blocked by court orders from federal judges in the states of Nebraska, New York and California. Opponents of the law have been very emotive in their arguments, saying it attacks women’s “reproductive freedom�. So what is the procedure in question. Essentially, a late-term foetus is partially delivered before being killed, usually by puncturing its skull. Here’s an illustrated description of the process. Note that the child has no “freedoms� in the matter.
