Word: fetuses
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Still, the efforts to protect the rights of the fetus have far-reaching implications, and not just for pregnant women. The UAW, et al. v. Johnson Controls case, now facing the Supreme Court, provides a dramatic example. In 1982 Johnson Controls, a Milwaukee-based company that is one of the nation's largest car-battery manufacturers, decided to forbid its fertile women employees to hold jobs that would expose them to lead levels potentially damaging to a fetus. High doses of lead -- higher than any permitted by law in the workplace -- have been linked to miscarriages and fetal death. Even...
Ironically, it was the Supreme Court's decision creating a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade that also provided some of the legal underpinning for fetal rights. The same ruling recognized a government interest in protecting the fetus during the last trimester of pregnancy. But while judges had a hand in creating fetal rights, courts will never be able to ensure real protection to an unborn child. That will have to come from mothers who take responsibility for the lives they carry within them -- and a nation willing to provide the fetus with real prenatal care...
...find enough subjects with the condition, since it develops later in women. Also, the hormone changes of the menstrual cycle are thought to complicate research, raising costs. Perhaps most important, doctors are worried that if women enrolled in a clinical trial became pregnant, experimental drugs could endanger the fetus...
Critics counter these arguments by asserting that it is worth the trouble and expense of recruiting women research subjects, given that women make up half the population -- and half the taxpayers underwriting federal research. Concern for the fetus is often exaggerated, they say. "There is a tendency to think of women as walking wombs," says the University of Wisconsin's Karlin. Most female cardiac patients, she notes, are not planning to get pregnant...
...ancient methods still in use in some rural parts of Asia, where baby boys have always been preferred. Nowadays technology also plays a role: fetal testing procedures, such as amniocentesis and sonograms, are employed by women in China, Korea, India and elsewhere to detect the sex of a fetus. Many mothers will abort a female. "Over the past century science has only quickened the pace of the death of the female child, from the born to the unborn stage," says Meenu Sondhi, an amniocentesis researcher at Delhi University...