Word: capron
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Alexander Morgan Capron, a sandy-haired professor of law at Georgetown University, stood at a blackboard in a hearing room of Congress's Rayburn Office Building and began writing formulas: the symbols represented ten different ways of making babies. The fourth formula that he chalked up read XM & YD by AΙ with Gestation M, meaning that a married woman is artificially inseminated by a male donor's sperm. The fifth formula, XD & YM by IVF with Gestation M, meant that the beginnings of life could be created through the uniting in a laboratory dish (invitro fertilization...
...reason why Capron resorts to formulas is that biology is now creating concepts of birth and parenthood faster than the standard English vocabulary can define them. As Capron testified before a House science subcommittee early last month, "Many the new reproductive possibilities remain so novel that terms are lacking to describe the human relationships they can create. For example, what does one call the woman who bears a child conceived from another woman's egg? I'm not even sure we know what to call the area under inquiry...