Word: womb
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...price is $40, but new parents may feel it is well worth it. For Rock-A-Bye-Bear is a Teddy bear that makes cranky infants drop right off to sleep. How? It is implanted with a device that plays the soothing sounds babies hear while still in the womb: the pulsing thump and whoosh made by blood coursing through their mothers' pelvic arteries...
...idea of using womb sounds to calm unruly newborns was first explored by the British and Japanese but did not hit the commercial big tune until Entrepreneurs Bob Bissett and Marie Shields teamed with Fort Lauderdale Obstetrician William Eller in 1975. Eller selected as their recording artist a nonsmoking, well-nourished pregnant woman, waited until she began labor and then inserted a tiny microphone through her dilated cervix into her uterus...
...played back in hospital nurseries. Says Virginia Purdy, nursery supervisor at Fort Lauderdale's Holy Cross Hospital: "It's the most boring sound you've ever heard. It drives the help crazy." But the help noticed that infants usually dozed off within 15 seconds after the womb sounds began. That led to Rock-A-Bye-Bear which, with sales of 25,000 so far, may well be the sleeper of the year...
...could object that the fetus in the womb is as signally present in society as the child in the crib, that each are equally members of society. Yet surely the conception of "member" involves some minimal interaction. The fetus reacts to society of the outside world solely through the medium of the mother. Strictly speaking, then, society has no legal responsibility to the fetus, but rather to the mother...
...divided. Many Catholic Congressmen oppose abortion personally but want no constitutional amendment to control it. But for John Paul, activism is essential on human rights. "If a person's right to life is violated at the moment in which he is first conceived in his mother's womb," he has said, "an indirect blow is struck also at the whole of the moral order." He urged the cheering crowd in Washington to "demand that society give all life its protection...