Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've been reading about issues in bioethics for years, and the title of this book (before I noticed the subtitle) was what got me to pick it up and check it out. I'm quite interested in the ethical issues (and resultant political controversies) surrounding hESC (human embryonic stem cell) research, abortion, and birth control which has contragestive effects (i.e., birth control which prevents a zygote from implanting in the uterine lining). This last is a thorny issue because those on the right, who maintain that a pregnancy begins at conception, classify these methods as abortifacients. On the other hand, those on the left have adopted a different definition which classifies pregnancy as beginning at implantation, and therefore they call these forms of birth control emergency 'contraception'. As another reviewer pointed out, the author seemed (astonishingly) to accuse her political opponents of making up the word 'abortifacient' - which is the term for substances which can cause an abortion and which is a pretty common word in the context of reproductive pharmacology. (The drug RU486 is an abortifacient, but before abortion was as easy to procure as it is today, unwanted pregnancies were often ended with herbal abortifacients. Ophelia refers to this in Hamlet.) It's ironic that she makes this blunder in a book whose thesis is that she is scientifically well-informed, whereas her opponents are ignorant.)
I can't fault her too much for not addressing the important question of replacing hESC research funding with iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cell- which are produced without the use of embryos) funding, because the major breakthrough only was made about ten months prior to her book release. Incorporating the new results and changes in how we think about stem cell research might have required rewriting the entire book. Of course, even at the time when she was writing the book it was clear that in terms of actual treatment of illness, it was adult stem cells and not embryonic ones which were providing treatments. Embryonic stem cells were/are so important because of potential treatments or cures which might be produced using them. To point out that iPSC research is now seen as possibly even more promising than hESC research (when her whole charge was that the supporting the destruction of embryos is justified by its unique promise of future treatments) would have blown a hole in her argument. This is particularly true given that the new method of producing stem cells is one whose funding has been championed as an alternative by those who oppose research which destroys human embryos. (It's too bad for her that she hadn't published a year earlier.)
The review from the 'Daily Camera' is laughable. What this most decidedly is NOT is "a probing philosophical work".
She portrays the ethical controversies as merely a situation in which she and like minded people who are scientifically literate are doing what any rational well-informed person would choose to do, whereas her opponents are either ignorant, or too ideologically extreme, or naive believers in religious and superstitious nonsense (or some combination of these) and cannot see that they are preventing society from advancing into new frontiers of knowledge and health. She completely ignores the fact that her opponents are a coalition motivated by a variety of values (granted- many of them values associated with their chosen faith) who take positions which actually are rational and logically consistent, but which follow from different ethical and philosophical beliefs than those she begins with.
For example, providing emergency contraception to those who may want it, and thereby preventing unwanted pregnancies and unnecessary abortions sounds like a reasonable thing to do, but that is all premised on a particular set of assumptions (like what 'contraception' is, how you define 'pregnancy'- and most fundamentally, what is a 'human being'.) It does not sound reasonable to say that after years of abiding by the compromise language of the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal money from being spent on abortions), those in congress who oppose abortion because they believe it kills a human being should get the government involved in providing abortifacients in order to prevent surgical abortions. From the first point of view, one is proposing the use of contraception to prevent a set of circumstances which might require an unpleasant and guilt-inducing medical procedure. From the second point of view one is being asked to weaken a policy which was designed to prevent the killing of innocent human beings based on the argument that killing with chemicals is acceptable where surgical killing is unacceptable.
The author doesn't actually address the bioethical arguments at all, but disposes of them by advocating her side and pretending that there is no other side. This is the sort of political point scoring that makes everyone hate bloviators on FOX News and MSNBC. Then again. if you only hate the former, and you like the latter, you may actually enjoy this Pelosi and Planned Parenthood endorsed portrayal of the progressive Democrats in the House fighting the good fight against the "right wing anti-choicers" during the G. W. Bush administration. Of course, if that's what you like, you'd be just as well served if you went and read some back issues of The Nation.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Sex, Science, and Stem Cells: Inside the Right Wing Assault on Reason
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