Mouse Embryos Grown in Bottles
Mar. 18th, 2021 03:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithIn a valuable step toward a uterine replicator, Israeli scientists have grown mouse embryos in bottles for 11 days, about half the 20-day gestation period. This roughly doubles the previous length that the embryos could be sustained in artificial media. \o/
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Date: 2021-03-18 06:39 pm (UTC)Well ...
Date: 2021-03-18 08:42 pm (UTC)The problem is, people have abortions for various reasons:
* Some would prefer to have the baby but can't afford it. That's anywhere from a third to a large majority of women, depending on the study. These might be prevented if anyone cared to offer financial support. Anti-abortion activists? *crickets chirping*
* Around 1% of women seek abortion for rape or incest. They have strong reason to want the baby not to exist. These have a higher risk of fetal anomalies.
* Another significant group is women seeking abortion due to fetal anomaly. These are often late-term and often wanted pregnancies. Again, the goal is for the baby not to exist, but in these cases this is typically a tragic outcome.
* Various percentages of women seek abortion due to suspected fetal anomaly because they were doing or experiencing things known to cause bird defects (e.g. medications with teratogenic effects, contraindicative health problems). This group would likely divide into those wanting the fetus not to exist (if presumed unhealthy) and those simply wanting it out of their body (if due to maternal limitations).
So it boils down to the standard observation that forcing people into gestational slavery is wrong and harmful, both to the victim and to others, but that hasn't stopped people from pursuing it avidly.
The additional issue here is that forcing babies to be born with severe conditions may be considered child abuse by some, while abortion is considered murder by others, and selective abortion of disabled infants is considered erasure or genocide by others. It is noteworthy that the people clamoring for these births do not intend to raise the severely disabled babies, but want to fob them off on someone else, the mother if at all possible or the state if necessary. Given that society tends to abuse disabled people, I do not believe arguments that claim saving all severely disabled infants is "for their own good." That argument would hold more water if society provided for disabled people to the best of its ability, rather than to its minimum and grudging obligation.
For an example of how Terramagne occasionally does much worse than here due to the availability of superpowers, T-Ireland got its hands on fetal transfer via Healing, and promptly banned ALL abortions, with grievous results. >_< I haven't written it out yet, though.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-03-19 04:34 am (UTC)>>The additional issue here is that forcing babies to be born with severe conditions may be considered child abuse by some, while abortion is considered murder by others,...<<
I actually read a scifi version of this once! The /three/ different AI cultures had different values for when to 'reboot' infants, which would then be considered a new person.
- one would keep rebooting and altering programming like mindwashing (and the whole process wasn't really common knowledge, and folks were /really/ disturbed when they found out)
- one would only reboot for extreme trauma resulting in an inability to function
- the last would reboot for more minor trauma, but there was at least one instance of a new parent trying to force a 'Have Tou Tried Not Being [different]' on her new kid, because she wanted a Replacement Goldfish for a dead sibling (fortunately the medic being asked shut that down real quick, and the kid was fostered elsewhere)
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-03-19 05:39 am (UTC)There's a hilarious example of that in The Fresco, in which pro-life men were used as surrogates by aliens, who said that the men's consent could be presumed from their pure pro-life stance. :D
In Terramagne, reproductive freedom became a human right when men came at risk of unwanted pregnancy (via hyenas or their own Male Pregnancy superpower) or unwanted reproduction (via cloning and other zetetic technologies). That one I actually have written out: "Would-Be Sacraments."
>> I actually read a scifi version of this once! The /three/ different AI cultures had different values for when to 'reboot' infants, which would then be considered a new person. <<
Fascinating. I haven't seen that one.
Terramagne has some interesting variations. Dr. Infanta can regress someone to infant stage, which tends to wipe most if not all memories. They still have the same core personality and body, but would have different experiences growing up, thus mature into a significantly different person. Similarly, some telepaths can mindwipe people thoroughly enough to create a nearly blank slate; but most of them won't do it. These are examples of ego-death rather than full death.
In other cases, the narrative memory is lost, but the personality remains the same or similar and most or all skills and general knowledge remain intact. Loss of memory may incline the person in somewhat different directions, but it's more like what happens after any major life change than like starting over from scratch. There's a piece I'd love to do about a character who lost her memory due to a zetetic accident while saving a bunch of other people, and they all stuck by her even though she didn't remember any of them. They appreciated, equally, who she had been before and who she became after.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-03-19 06:05 am (UTC)https://m.fanfiction.net/s/5216658/1/Masks#end
...but the kids don't show up until the later chapters. I like the take on alien culture sexuality and gender vs the usual human take on such things, and a lot of the characters are generally reasonable. However, a lot of the characters are war survivors, and there is an attempted alien invasion which goes...really emotionally not great, for everyone (including the invaders).
>>There's a piece I'd love to do about a character who lost her memory due to a zetetic accident while saving a bunch of other people, and they all stuck by her even though she didn't remember any of them. They appreciated, equally, who she had been before and who she became after.<<
Sounds interesting. It occurs to me that she might do better with friends who only briefly knew her-that-was, as they wouldn't expect her to be someone other than her-that-is.
I read that in another story too; the 'kidnapped as a kid with amnesia, now an adult' character bonds with the one person in the group who didn't know him as a kid...because that is the one person who doesn't expect anything from him and won't abandon him when/if Amnesia Guy turns out to be the wrong person.
It is interesting...sometimes relationships are from affinity or commonality or proximity or random chance...but occasionally they spring from someone saying "No, /this/ is the right thing to do, and I'm going to do it."