Catching Up on Culture

Cohabitation and Divorce

I've been saving some articles for a while, and it's time to get to them. The first one is hard to tell when it was originally published, because when I went to the article in the The Olympian Online, it put today's date all over it, and I've been saving the url for at least a couple weeks. Oh well.

The headline says, "More cohabitation lowers divorce rate," with a subhead of, "Marriage rate also declines." Here's the link.

My problem with this is that the headline makes it sound as though the higher rate of cohabitation leads to more stable marriages, thus reducing the divorce rate. But that's not what the study found. The blame for this extremely misleading headline lies with The Olympian, a news organization in Olympia, Washington, one of the liberal regions of the country.

In fact, the study found that "couples who get married are more committed to each other than those who live together without marriage." The headline's reference to declining divorce rates is due to divorces dropping from a peak of 22 per 1,000 in 1980 to 18 per 1,000 in 2004. This has no relation to cohabitation, as seen in this explanation:

Report authors David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead said they are glad the divorce rate is on the decline, but they worry about the children of couples who are living together without marrying.

"The breakup rate of cohabiting couples is considerably higher" than that of married couples, Popenoe said. "As more and more cohabiting couples have children, that becomes more of a problem."

For the sake of our children, let's hope the divorce rate keeps declining and that cohabitation starts doing the same.

Cloning Research

The researchers who brought us Dolly the Sheep are in a quandry, and they'd like your help. According to an article in The Guardian:

Professor Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep, is to seek permission from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to ask women to donate eggs for cloning experiments designed to shed light on the debilitating condition motor neurone disease.

Until now, cloning experts in Britain have justified their work by using only spare eggs left over from couples undergoing treatment at fertility clinics. The eggs are typically rejects of the IVF process and are routinely discarded if not used in experiments.

Kinda reminds me of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's latest pronouncement on embryonic stem cell research, that it's OK since the embryos will be discarded anyway.

The problem comes when they run out of to-be-discarded embryos, or when those embryos aren't the high quality needed for the research, which is the case for Dolly's creator, Prof. Ian Wilmut.

In an interview with the Guardian, Prof Wilmut, who was awarded a cloning licence in February, said: "I have never doubted that women would donate if they thought we were helping people to have treatment. Our hope and belief is that women who have seen the devastating effect of this disease will be prepared to make such a donation."

I saw this coming when California passed the bond measure approving $3 billion for embryonic stem cell research. The creation of embryos--whether that's for stem cell research or for research in fighting a particular disease--requires eggs. And the only current source for human eggs is human women of childbearing age.

Who will donate eggs? Possibly my friend who never ever wants to have kids. Most likely, the donors will be women who need the money that would need to be paid in order to get donated eggs. And this will become an exploitation of poor women.

The other source of eggs is still in the speculation stage. At the website for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, there is a discussion of the possible use of aborted female fetuses as a supply of eggs for reproductive treatment for women without ovary function. But this source could also be used for research.

Some researchers have suggested that fetuses eventually might be used as a source for oocytes in oocyte donation programs (1,2). One variant is to remove oocytes from the ovaries of aborted fetuses, mature them in vitro, and use them as donor oocytes for couples who need eggs as part of their IVF effort. A second variant is to remove ovaries from aborted fetuses and transplant them in women who lack ovarian function so the transplanted tissue eventually will contribute to the woman's normal reproductive cycle. Although at present the use of fetal oocytes for conception is hypothetical and speculative, its endorsement by some researchers and its critique by government-sponsored commissions make timely a discussion of its ethical dimensions (3,4).

This raises the ethical question of turning abortion into a "manufacturer" of research materials, which increases the financial incentive for abortion providers to promote abortions, even when it's not in the best interest of the pregnant woman.

No matter how you look at it, the call for more eggs and embryos is an open invitation to start (or continue) the exploitation of vulnerable young women. This is not the direction Western civilization should be going.