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A court battle between a divorced couple over the future of their frozen embryos began Monday with an attorney for the former husband accusing the woman of using the dispute to get money.
Dr. Mimi Lee, 46, a pianist and part-time anesthesiologist, married Stephen Findley, a wealthy executive, five years ago. Shortly before the wedding, Lee learned she had breast cancer.
Unsure whether the disease would make it impossible for her to have children, the couple went to a fertility center, where Lee's eggs and Findley's sperm created five embryos, now frozen.
Findley filed for divorce two years ago and wants the embryos destroyed. Lee, now infertile, wants to implant the embryos into a surrogate and have a baby. Without the embryos, she will never have a child who shares her genes.
If the embryos are implanted and carry to term, the ex-husband becomes a father without consent. If the embryos are destroyed, the ex-wife is denied the deep need to procreate. The embryos themselves have issues either way. Modern biomedical ethics are complex.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday July 16 2015, @09:18AM
Then again, no country outside the western world even gives a second thought to equality, so that might never happen.
That's not true. India, for instance, has "scheduled tribes" and "scheduled castes" where they have affirmative action to try to make up for arbitrary families being shut out of all but the "dirtiest" jobs for thousands of years because the state religion said so. They get preferences in college admissions and stuff. People still discriminate against the "lower castes" in India, but, from what I read, it's starting to disappear in urban areas at least. Culturally ingrained, religion-based familial discrimination is nasty stuff; it'll probably take them quite a while to eradicate it completely.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cubancigar11 on Thursday July 16 2015, @01:17PM
It is the opposite. After the introduction of affirmative action, caste based discrimination has been found to increase. While the general educated populace at the time of independence (~70 years ago) used to think that caste-ism will get eradicated eventually, current zeitgeist is that it exists everywhere. Thanks to affirmative action some very smart people are now doing caste politics instead of engineering or medicine.
Btw, SC/STs have not been oppressed for "thousands of years". They are in exactly the same situation where Europe was before industrialization. In fact, early colonizers of India held castes as a superior way to control society than aristocracy that was outright based on violence and physical power.
It is also well documented that caste was a fluid concept that invited its treatment according to how much power one held. For example, Guptas [wikipedia.org] were running a dynasty but now are a merchant class. Shrivastavas [wikipedia.org] were originally fighters from present day Afganistan but are now known for maintaining ledgers and generally being mathematicians.
Scheduled tribe is a different concept altogether. They were literally tribes which controlled large swathes of forest land before the Government of independent India tried to 'educate' and 'upbring' them because those lands held minerals and tribes were really tribal - death by arrows are still common - that couldn't be controlled like pest as the British did with gun.
The ugliest form of caste-ism, which is how it is shown in media, exists in Indian villages that are still largely agrarian. And I think it will only be solved by industrialization. A capitalist cannot afford to not hire someone due to his/her caste.