Word: braved
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...experts--among them many conservatives who once supported the laws--that mandatory minimums are foolish. The Supreme Court last week declined to hear a case challenging the California three-strikes law, but four Justices expressed concern about the law's effect and seemed to invite other challenges. A few brave politicians have gingerly suggested that the laws may be something we should rethink. Some states are starting to backtrack on tough sentencing laws...
...Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J.: "The limit is not that the population doesn't want it; it's that they cannot pay for it. We could do many more diseases if PGD were covered by insurance." In fact, insurance has become a central issue of this brave new world (see following story...
...novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned future childbirth as a very orderly affair. At the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in accordance with orders from the Social Predestination Room, eggs were fertilized, bottled and put on a conveyor belt. Nine months later, the embryos--after "decanting"--were babies. Thanks to state-sponsored brainwashing, they would grow up delighted with their genetically assigned social roles--from clever, ambitious alphas to dim-witted epsilons...
This unequal access won't bring a rigid caste system a la Brave New World. The interplay between genes and environment is too complex to permit the easy fine-tuning of mind and spirit. Besides, in vitro fertilization is nobody's idea of a good time; even many affluent parents will forgo painful invasive procedures unless horrible hereditary defects are at stake. But the technology will become more powerful and user friendly. Sooner or later, as the most glaring genetic liabilities drift toward the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, we will see a biological stratification vivid enough to mock American...
...Brave New World, state-sponsored eugenics was part of a larger totalitarianism, a cultural war against family bonds and enduring romance and other quaint vestiges of free reproductive choice. The novel worked; it left readers thinking that nothing could be more ghastly than having government get into the designer-baby business. But if this business is left to the marketplace, we may see that government involvement, however messy, however creepy, is not the creepiest alternative...