Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cover: Old woman in river town of Wuxi, photographed by Rick Rickman. From A Day in the Life of China...
Last week in Maryville, Tennessee Circuit Court Judge W. Dale Young announced his decision in the unprecedented case: the embryos are people, not property, and should go to the mother. In an opinion loaded with some of the coded language that often surrounds abortion controversies, Young ruled that "human life begins at conception." The lawsuit ought to be decided as a question of custody, he concluded, and "it is to the manifest best interests of the child or children, in vitro that they be available for implantation." Questions of final custody, child support and visitation rights will be decided later...
...national abortion debate. "A bad decision," says Ellen Wright Clayton, a specialist in law and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. The judge could simply have weighed the respective interests of each spouse, Clayton contends, and decided to award the eggs to Mrs. Davis without going on to say when life begins...
Young based his ruling on the testimony of Dr. Jerome Lejeune, a French specialist in human genetics who testified that the seven embryos each have unique characteristics that distinguish them as human beings. Three other experts argued that the embryos possess only the potential for life. Their views echo those of professional groups like the American Fertility Society, whose ethical committee in 1986 concluded that "the pre-embryo deserves respect greater than that accorded to human tissue but not the respect accorded to actual persons...
Thanks to the increasing proficiency of storm forecasters and a greater readiness to heed their warnings, the loss of life inflicted by Hugo was minimal. A mass exodus from coastal areas saved countless people in the U.S. Except for a few diehards who refused to leave their low-lying homes, Hugo found few lives to endanger...