Word: fetus
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...word of the victim. Ironically, it was in an effort to help the police gain more evidence that the girl's parents put themselves at odds with the state. After arranging to travel to London for an abortion, the parents asked police whether a tissue sample from the fetus could be used as a "genetic fingerprint" that would positively identify the rapist. The inquiry made its way to Attorney General Harry Whelehan, who judged himself duty-bound to stop the family from breaking Irish...
...politics? Oh, I'm antismoking. And yours? Why, I'm starting an action committee to have the suffix -man removed from every word in every book in the Library of Congress. And yours, sir? Well, God told me to chain myself to a fire hydrant until we put a fetus on the Supreme Court...
...single X and a short, stumpy Y chromosome. In 1990 British scientists reported they had identified a single gene on the Y chromosome that determines maleness. Like some kind of biomolecular Paul Revere, this master gene rouses a host of its compatriots to the complex task of turning a fetus into a boy. Without such a signal, all human embryos would develop into girls. "I have all the genes for being male except this one, and my husband has all the genes for being female," marvels evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides, of the University of California at Santa Barbara. "The only...
...even this snippet of DNA is not enough to ensure a masculine result. An elevated level of the hormone testosterone is also required during the pregnancy. Where does it come from? The fetus' own undescended testes. In those rare cases in which the tiny body does not respond to the hormone, a genetically male fetus develops sex organs that look like a clitoris and vagina rather than a penis. Such people look and act female. The majority marry and adopt children...
However, it was clear to me that childbirth was not a plausible scenario. Neither I nor the father had the means or the real desire to raise a child, nor would I have felt comfortable carrying the fetus to term and giving it up for adoption. So I made an appointment for an abortion at Planned Parenthood...