HumbertoEcho:
You guys are slipping. They are legal since a few years already.... :-)



WOW! You could have the frank AND bean worked at the same time, and only have to buy 1 dinner!

Gaseous Anomaly: Joce678: Do you have any idea how difficult it is to adopt a human child?

Healthy white baby? 7 years? What else you got?

I got two Koreans and a negra born with his heart on the outside.

ialdabaoth: downstairs: serpent_sky: There's also EXTREMELY high standards for adoption

^^^This. Its a nightmare. An acquantence of mine, my sister's best friend and her husband have been trying to adobt for YEARS. I totally applaud them for keeping up with the BS... but some people don't have the mental fortitude to do so.

Its not like there's a bank of kids witout homes, where you can visit some website and "add to cart".

Only if you care about the kid's race.

They don't. Well, they don't as in they don't need the kid to be white. They are white, but specifically want to adopt a minority kid for all the right reasons... no one wants them.

Mugato: God's trying to give you a hint. We have too many people here already. Adopt.

If only someone could come up with a modest proposal...

Kurmudgeon: I wouldn't mind but there's some local guy who works on the garbage truck. He has multiple children by multiple girlfriends. He and the girlfriends look about how you'd expect, all on the public dole.
This guy we did not need 7 more of.
/that number may be low.


Something about your anecdote doesn't quite add up.

CrispFlows:

Isn't what's wrong with eugenics the concept of racial purity? THAT's the ethical flaw, not the 'controlled breeding' .

Historically, that's what caused it to lose favor among the general public. It had already fallen out of favor among biologists about 20 years earlier, because it is abject nonsense.

Biological Ali: serial_crusher: I object to fertility science in general.
If you have some biological fault that prevents you from producing healthy children, just go adopt some of the perfectly fine ones that need homes. Yes, even the black ones.

Wouldn't that apply to everyone? If there are kids that need adopting, adopt them instead of having your own - there's no logical reason to single out people who use just certain techniques for having children.

That's a good point, but I look at it from a money standpoint. If I can make a kid the easy and cheap way, I'll try that first.
But if I have to jump through a bunch of hoops and spend a bunch of money, might as well adopt at that point.
I also have ethical issues with the way IVF is implemented in most cases, making a bunch of embryos in a batch and then keeping most of them frozen in case the first few don't take (and then performing medical experiments on them if the other ones do take). Being a "life begins at conception" person, I can only support IVF if every embryo gets an equal chance.


Khellendros: serial_crusher: I object to fertility science in general.
If you have some biological fault that prevents you from producing healthy children, just go adopt some of the perfectly fine ones that need homes. Yes, even the black ones.

You're missing the issue with adoption. There are LOADS of people who want to adopt. Literally tens of thousands who are trying to adopt (through both state and private means). And there are tens of thousands of children in orphanages and temporary foster care. The problem is that the couples want infants, and the orphanages are filled with children that are 4+ years old. They have tons of mental issues, emotional issues, and physical problems.

I thought it was more specific, that people want white infants, but there are plenty of black and hispanic infants that go on to become 4+ year olds eventually. But I admit I haven't studied the problem in detail. So, sorry if I was incorrect.

125 posts and this is the first Giggity?

ArcadianRefugee: serpent_sky: There are some pretty rough adoption stories out there and a lot of adopted kids don't end up so well off, what with having to come to terms with biological parent(s) that didn't want them, often not knowing much, if anything, about their genetic background.,things like that. Plus, not everyone could love an adopted child like their own.

There's also EXTREMELY high standards for adoption, to the point that a good lot of people don't qualify, but anyone can go for fertility treatments as far as I know.

Everyone I know who has adopted did so from another country*: Guatemala, Russia, etc. None of them adopted from within the US because of how freakin' annoying it can be.

* [shakes baby rattle] THEY TOOK OUR JERBS!

It's really interesting that you mention overseas adoption:

a) Overseas adoption agencies and "Christian adoption agencies" in the US specialising in private adoptions tend to be the two areas where the old specter of baby farming crops up...only nowadays, they usually don't kill off the undesirable babies, but tend to adopt these out to parents who are pretty much ineligible otherwise to adopt. (Nowadays, this is probably best described as "baby mills".)

This is NOT to say all international adoption is like this, but unfortunately baby mills DO tend to be more common due to less regulation.

b) Guatemala in particular is an interesting case, because (as it turns out) dominionist baby mills catering to "white Christian families" overseas forced the effective shutdown of the entire international adoption program in Guatemala.

You see...there were rumours (so many that the US Department of State's travel advisories warned Americans not to be seen with Guatemalan kids in rural areas) that kids and babies were being stolen to adopt out to overseas prospective-parents...and it turned out there was a terrible, terrible truth to these rumours as kids were being adopted out in many cases without parental rights being terminated or parents even being told--typically they were told their children died in childbirth, or that they would be cared for whilst the parents got in better financial circumstances....and instead the kids would be adopted out to largely American "white Christian" households.

(Some of the same perpetrators who did this in Guatemala--who largely moved in after a massive earthquake in 1971--tried to do the same thing in Haiti after the horrid quake there, but fortunately there was a bit better awareness of international baby mills at this point.)

Of note--Guatemala seems to have been particularly popular because it wasn't a Hague Convention state until recently (the Hague Convention is an international treaty designed to allow children who are abducted or wrongfully taken from their parents to be returned quickly to their home country--you see it much more often in the context of international parental child abduction, but the Convention has provisions for state authorities to approve adoptions rather than the chain of notaries and apostilles that Guatemala formerly had) which functionally made it very easy for children to be wrongfully taken from their birth parents.

And yes, in the Guatemalan situation, it's ALREADY turning into a massive fustercluck as birth parents in Guatemala start suing for custody of their children from people who illegally adopted them from private agencies :P

Most of the countries with "desirable" children either tend to be from non-Hague Convention countries or are from East Asian countries with strong regional prejudice against adoption and/or sexual favouritism against boys (China is a hot-spot in particular for this, as is South Korea; the baby mills are pretty much run by the Chinese government in the first case, and by various dominionist charities and a very few legitimate ones in the other case); other countries (largely in the former Eastern Bloc) tend to restrict international adoption to what would be referred to as "special needs" children here, though this is often not well publicised in the US.

(And no, things aren't going to get better in this--apparently one of the major "baby mill" operators in Guatemala promptly set up shop in Ethiopia, which is becoming the "new hotness" in private international adoptions. :P)

How do they feel about two women and one cup?

redonkulon: Just take the mitochondria from the father who presumably isn't a waster and mix it with the broken ones from the mother. The healthier mitochondirons will win out and then the merger is just from 2 parents and the ethicists can go back to lighting up their bongs.

I believe the mitochondria comes only from the mother. Maybe my cell biology information is wrong.

And in regards to the actual article (which involves nucleus transfer in the case of mitochondrial unwellness):

This is actually something I am glad the ethicists agreed was Perfectly OK, and for a number of reasons:

a) Mitochondrial disorders tend to lead to some rather nasty metabolic disorders (everything from your muscles spontaneously disintegrating when exercising to some forms of diabetes--at least one form of diabetes/"metabolic syndrome" HAS been linked to mtDNA hiccups and is colloquially known as "Type III Diabetes" by researchers)

b) Mitochondria, unlike every other part of a cell, have their own separate genetic code that is actually more related to bacteria than eukaryotic life (the latest theory is that mitochondria are basically descendants of rickettsia that may have colonised ur-eukaryotic cells and then set up such a strongly symbiotic relationship that one can't live without the other...the really interesting thing is that this happened at least twice, with bikonts (including plants) having the same thing going on with chloroplasts (descended from cyanobacteria) and unikonts with mitochondria (likely rickettsia-descendents)...seriously, it's enormously neat if you think of it, right up there with endogenous retroviruses being a possible kick-start for evolution neatness).

In other words, this is more akin to a functional organ transplant--basically a "cell organ" is broken, so they put the nucleus of a cell in a denucleated egg with working "cell organs" (which are actually bacteria!)...

Not nearly as squidgy IMHO as, say, surrogate parenting proper :D

Somacandra: ph0rk: f you have bad DNA, why the fark do you need to procreate anyway?

Protip: No one ever turns and says to the spouse: "Let us create babby for to spread great DNA"

Why are you channeling meow_said?

ph0rk: No, but by the time you're seeing your nth specialist and looking for a second woman to donate an egg, you've probably been informed that one of you has pretty shiatty DNA.

Not really. Fertility problems sometimes have very little to do with the "quality" of someone's DNA. For example, a variety of environmental factors can cause men to create "monstrous sperm" or teratozoospermia. Over 85% of these sperm in a sample and that's considered infertile.

demaL-demaL-yeH: Why are you channeling meow_said?

Because saying "Let us create babby for to spread great DNA" is hilarious, especially in an overserious deep voice.

I actually find the aforementioned poster quite hilarious as well :-)

LAUGHTEROL

dericwater: redonkulon: Just take the mitochondria from the father who presumably isn't a waster and mix it with the broken ones from the mother. The healthier mitochondirons will win out and then the merger is just from 2 parents and the ethicists can go back to lighting up their bongs.

I believe the mitochondria comes only from the mother. Maybe my cell biology information is wrong.

They are just from the mother--sperm, alone of all cells other than mature erythrocytes, lack mitochondria (or pretty much anything else other than DNA and a way to get the DNA into the egg)...much as erythocytes lack nuclei, mitochondria, or really anything other than ways to carry hemoglobin.

Eggs do have mitochondria, hence why we can quite reliably say that mitochondria (and hiccups in mtDNA) are from Mom's side of the family.

The particular process that's being used involves taking a nucleus (which contains the actual genetic code) from a cell that has broken mitochondria, and placing it in a denucleated (and unfertilised) egg that has working mitochondria--the only way it'd ever work with daddy's DNA is if you managed to rejuvenate adult cells into stem cells, split this, and somehow make an egg out of the "X" half.

Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?


Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.


Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

way south: FloydA: CrispFlows:

Isn't what's wrong with eugenics the concept of racial purity? THAT's the ethical flaw, not the 'controlled breeding' .

Historically, that's what caused it to lose favor among the general public. It had already fallen out of favor among biologists about 20 years earlier, because it is abject nonsense.

It fell out of favor because Hitler.


That's correct.


The basic tenants of the practice require you to treat people like dogs but would probably work.


That is not correct. It's based on an assumption that (A) a "superior" phenotype can be objectively identified, (B) that the selective environment is stable, and (C) that removing unwanted variation will have no maladaptive repercussions.

None of those assumptions stands up to scrutiny.


So you're correct that it became "unfashionable" due to the revelations of the Nazi atrocities, but it was already largely abandoned by scientists a couple of decades before the rise of the Nazis.

serpent_sky: serial_crusher: I object to fertility science in general.
If you have some biological fault that prevents you from producing healthy children, just go adopt some of the perfectly fine ones

There are some pretty rough adoption stories out there and a lot of adopted kids don't end up so well off, what with having to come to terms with biological parent(s) that didn't want them, often not knowing much, if anything, about their genetic background.,things like that. Plus, not everyone could love an adopted child like their own.

There's also EXTREMELY high standards for adoption, to the point that a good lot of people don't qualify, but anyone can go for fertility treatments as far as I know.

I know I would be a horrible parent (I don't like kids) and wouldn't be good at either. I resent people telling me how much I should want kids, so I'll extend the same courtesies I'd like extended to me to people desperate enough to have children that they spend tons of money and go through many emotionally difficult and medically invasive procedures to have them. And I certainly respect people who can, and do, adopt.

Pretty much this. The adoption specs are so hard to get through that even good, loving foster parents who've had the kid for 10 years and the kid wants to stay with them, can't get adoption rights half the time.

Plus, even with a legal adoption that (supposedly) severs all parental rights, you have to worry about a biological parent out there somewhere deciding she was pressured into adoption, or is REALLY ALL BETTER NOW and would be a great mom, or something similar. Not saying that it happens all the time, or even very often, but it's got to be on the minds of everyone who adopts a kid.

I'm not sure why we as a society make it really easy for dumbasses to have kids and so hard for decent people to pick up after them when the kids need parents.

HumbertoEcho: [www.eatnineghost.com image 450x341]

You guys are slipping. They are legal since a few years already.... :-)

It is pretty impressive that they are now I think 22 and they haven't done any major media that I am aware of since they were like 16 or 17.

Although, I found their uncyclopedia page, and it is pretty funny... http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Brittany_Hensel

Podmore makes a valid point that should be stressed:

A lot of people don't get that, for lots of women, part of their self worth is wrapped up in being able to make a baby. It's not rational, but it's true. Probably like a guy being able to get an erection

i wondered why couples with known serious genetic defects in their families are still bound & determined to have their own. evidently the pull is so strong that nature & wishful thinking wins out. evidently the ticking clock is strong mojo.

Mrs.Kritter has a slew of sisters each with a slew of children while she could have none. Yes it is apparent the presence or absence of children affects peoples lives.