Reproductive Rights

No Brainer

| alexandersanger

The No-Brainer Syndrome : the HPV Vaccine and Male Circumcision Recommendations as the Latest Weapons in the Fight Against HPV, HIV and AIDS

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called the new HPV vaccine, Gardasil, approved last year by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “a no-brainer.”  Many advocates in the blogosphere use the same phrase, “no-brainer”, to describe the World Health Organization (WHO) 2006 recommendation for male circumcision as an HIV/AIDS prevention strategy, at least in sub-Saharan Africa. Most health professionals agreed, even if they didn’t use the exact phrase.
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Abortion and Crime: An Update

| alexandersanger

In Chapter Two of Beyond Choice, on pages 66-67 in the hardback, I discussed, in the section on eugenics, the abortion/crime controversy, citing the 2001 study by Donohue and Levitt, which found that the legalization of abortion resulted, twenty or so years later, in a reduction in the crime rate because potential criminals were being aborted rather than born. I also cited contradictory studies that found no effect, or the opposite effect, of abortion on crime. I concluded saying that “The best that can be said is that the case for the alleged causal connection between the legalization of abortion and a decrease in crime rates is unproven.”
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As Goes New Jersey… We Hope.

| alexandersanger

Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court, in an unanimous decision, ruled that a doctor, prior to performing an abortion, was not required to tell his patient that the embryo inside her was “a complete, separate, unique, irreplaceable human being,” with the implication that abortion he was about to perform was the same as murder. The patient, Rosa Acuna, had filed a malpractice action against her doctor, Sheldon Turkish, after her abortion, claiming emotional distress, and asserted that he should have told her, as part of the informed consent process, that it was a “scientific and medical fact” that the abortion would result in the “killing of an existing human being.” The plaintiff claimed further that her doctor had a duty “to explain that the procedure (would) terminate the life of a living member of the species Homo sapiens, that is a human being.”
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Eugenics, Race, and Margaret Sanger Revisited: Reproductive Freedom for All?

| alexandersanger

In winter 2001, the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York City sponsored an exhibit, “Perfecting Mankind: Eugenics and Photography,” where posted on the wall was a quotation ascribed to my grandmother, Margaret Sanger: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.” My grandmother never said this. The quotation actually came from a 1919 editorial in American Medicine that followed my grandmother’s review of an article. This quotation has been repeatedly and falsely attributed to my grandmother over the decades since. After I objected, the ICP promptly removed the offending quotation from the exhibit, but only after countless gallery visitors had seen it.
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