reproduction
pharyngula | January 14, 2011Jacqulyn Levin, a high school health education teacher, had a simple lesson plan to help students understand the anatomy of the female reproductive tract.
"She stood in front of the students," district spokesman Jeff Puma said. "If you can picture a body builder flexing his arms and having his hands [above head level] out to the side, my hands would be the ovaries, my arms would be the fallopian tubes, and so on."
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me — it's a way to get the layout of the structures clear in students' heads. I'll be teaching human physiology this term, and I'll just…
pharyngula | January 5, 2011Among my usual flood of daily email, I frequently get tossed onto mailing lists for conservative think tanks. Why? I don't know. I suspect that it's for the same reason I also get a lot of gay porn in my email: not because I follow it or asked to be added, but because some tired d-bag with no imagination thinks its funny to dun me with more junk. The joke's on them, though: I might keep it around and skim the stuff now and then to get inspiration for a blog post, and then click-click — a few presses of a button and I add the source to my junk mail filter, and never see it again.
No, I didn't…
pharyngula | December 11, 2010
This is awesome news. Biologists have figured out how to enable two male mice to have babies together, with no genetic contribution from a female mouse. I, for one, look forward to our future gay rodent overlords.
It was a clever piece of work. Getting progeny from two male parents has a couple of difficulties. One is that you need an oocyte, which is a large, specialized, complex cell type, and males don't make them. Not at all. You can tear a boy mouse to pieces looking for one, and you won't find a single example—they're a cell found exclusively in female ovaries.
Now you might think that…
pharyngula | December 1, 2010It's kind of like having my fashion sense chastised by the Insane Clown Posse…I'm not going to lose sleep over it. He's upset that I don't think a blastocyst deserves the same consideration we give to a child or an adult human being — that I have baldly stated that I'm pro-abortion. Unfortunately, his argument against my position doesn't hold up at all well.
Women have a right to control their bodies -- the right to self-determination. Yet the right to self-determination is contingent. One does not have a right to kill another person. The right to life supersedes the right to self-…
pharyngula | November 20, 2010I'm about as pro-choice as you can get; I'm even willing to say that I'm pro-abortion, and would like to encourage more people to abort. But I'm also rather shocked by my fellow Minnesotans, Pete and Alisha Arnold, who have decided to allow people to vote on whether they should get an abortion. Way to trivialize a significant life decision, Pete and Alisha!
They have an online poll, and you can go vote right now.
Should We Give Birth or Have an Abortion?
Give Birth 77.3% (118,301 votes)
Have an Abortion 22.7% (34,741 votes)
Clearly, looking at those numbers, the 'bots have been at work,…
pharyngula | October 27, 2010Imagine you're pregnant. Imagine that you discover the fetus is doomed by serious birth defects, and is going to be stillborn no matter what. Imagine that you weepily go to the local reproductive services to have the futile pregnancy terminated. Imagine (and this is probably the easiest part) that you get there and discover a fervent group of fanatical, close-minded Christians waving signs with aborted fetuses on them, telling you that you're damned for going into that clinic.
What would you do?
Well, obviously, you should find common cause with the protestors and tell them that you respect…
pharyngula | October 6, 2010Sometimes…sometimes you just want to kick some ass. And the only thing holding you back is the unpleasant task afterward of having to scrub your boots.
This is an actual article from USA Today's "Faith and Reason" section, which doesn't seem to have much reason behind it. It's by Cathy Lynn Grossman, who claims to love talking about "visions and values, faith and ethics", and yet, manages to provide the most nauseating commentary on the recent Nobel for in vitro fertilization yet, even worse than anything I've seen from the Catholics. Consider these repugnant questions from Ms Grossman.
Do…
pharyngula | October 4, 2010The head of the Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, the specifically crazy anti-choice arm of the Catholic Church, has already issued a statement about the Nobel Prize awarded to an IVF pioneer. He's against it, of course.
Among his peculiar complaints is the objection that it "didn't treat the underlying problem of infertility but rather skirted it", which is rather odd. This:
Couples can't have children↓Couples use IVF↓Couples now have children
Looks to me like a rather direct way to treat infertility. Where they once could have no children, now they have children.
They also don't like the fact…
pharyngula | September 25, 2010They are as bad as creationists. They often are creationists. Their anti-abortion ideology is so overwhelming that they will make up 'facts' and call them science. Here's a recent example:
"I think it's important to note with the term fertilized egg, that's the same thing as using the N word for an African American," said Mason. "Because it's a dehumanizing term and it's not based in science. The term would be a zygote, or an embryo, speaking of a unique individual." Mason is hoping the passage of the amendment will lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
"It's a bad law," said Mason,…
sastyk | June 3, 2010 I was struck today by the news that the Italian region of Lombardy is going to start paying women not to have abortions. As a demographic move, it is a comparatively small and insignificant one, in a nation already well below replacement rate. If this resulted in the cancellation of every abortion in the region, it wouldn't matter very much in the great human scheme of things. What matters is whether this has effects on other nation's policies - and of course, that reproductive policies never take place fully in the great human scheme of things.
Generally speaking, I'm strongly in favor…
pharyngula | May 20, 2010Them folk are not like us folk. I really had to twist my brain to read this article from Touchstone on "contradeception", because I'm finding it hard to imagine how screwed up in the head you have to be to think that way.
It's an article against contraception. When these quiverful zealots argue that they love kids, I can sympathize; when they say they are trying to outbreed non-Christians, I can sort of understand the logic, even though I think they're wrong; but this story…children are like an afterthought. The reason you shouldn't use contraception is because getting pregnant is public…
laelaps | April 23, 2010
For at least 30 million years, bone-eating worms have been making their homes in the bodies of decomposing whales on the seabottom, but the rotting cetacean carcasses are not just food sources for the polychaetes.
The term "worm" immediately conjures up images of the red, squiggly things which crawl all over the sidewalk after it rains, but this imagery does not fit the boneworms of the genus Osedax. These worms start off life as sexless larvae, and the timing of their arrival at a whale corpse makes all the difference as to whether they will be male or female. If the larva lands on the…
pharyngula | April 21, 2010They're considering a new law to keep women ignorant and ashamed.
The governor of Oklahoma is considering tough new abortion bills that would allow doctors to withhold test results showing foetal defects and require women to answer intrusive questions.
The results of the questionnaires would be posted online.
Women would also be required to have a vaginal ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the embryo or foetus in a third bill passed by the legislature on Monday.
So let me get this straight. If a woman in Oklahoma thinks she is pregnant, she can go in for "testing"…but she…
jchosy | April 16, 2010Researchers at the University of Hull, UK, recently published a paper about chemical signaling in reproductive behavior in crayfish. Yep, crayfish. Apparently, the female must release urinary cues in order to initiate courtship behavior in males. No pee, no sex. Unfortunately (and understandably), being peed on also triggers aggression in this species. The authors argue the female crayfish use their influential bodily fluids to stimulate aggression in males to gauge size and strength in prospective mates, allowing the females to choose the fittest males for subsequent copulation.
In male…
pharyngula | April 7, 2010Baltimore has a very sensible ordinance that requires pregnancy counseling centers to plainly state what services they provide.
The ordinance requires that a "limited-service pregnancy center" post an easily readable sign, written in English and Spanish, stating that the center does not provide or make referrals for abortion or birth-control services. A center failing to comply within 10 days of being cited could be fined up to $150 a day.
That's perfectly reasonable, even if the center is directly opposed to abortion — they could cheerfully put up a sign bragging that they do not abort…
pharyngula | April 7, 2010It's true — here in Minnesota, we're always talking about them dingbats next door in Wisconsin, and they are — we live in a place where all our children are above average, dontchaknow, and the only way that is statistically possible is if some place nearby is all below average. So we love to rag on them. Until they mention Michele Bachmann and then we have to hang our head in shame and slink away.
Anyway, the latest news from our neighbor to the east is that some cheesehead named Scott Southworth is trying to strongarm teachers into not following the sex education guidelines, threatening them…
pharyngula | March 11, 2010We don't have a good name for this abomination. It's not bestiality, since it is cross-phylum, cross-kingdom lasciviousness.
Although, I do have to admit…that is one smokin' hot orchid.
pharyngula | March 9, 2010The Philippines has a problem with a rising number of AIDS cases every year, and members of the government have been promoting a sensible response: Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral has sponsored a program that distributes free condoms, for instance. You can guess who opposes prophylactics, though.
"The condom business is a multimillion dollar industry that heavily targets the adolescent market at the expense of morality and family life," said Bishop Nereo Odchimar, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines. He called fidelity and premarital chastity "the only effective…
pharyngula | February 22, 2010About 20 clergy, representing the very best of Christian theology, of course, and various Republicans gathered in Virginia to protest the existence of Planned Parenthood—they want all state funding, about $35,000 a year, stopped. They claim that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization because it provides abortions (which I consider a necessary and brave service, given the violence of anti-choice lunatics) and contraceptives, ignoring the fact that they also provide reproductive health care for women. In a just and rational world, Planned Parenthood would be regarded as a heroic…
edyong | February 21, 2010Whiptail lizards are a fairly ordinary-looking bunch, but some species are among the strangest animals around. You might not be able to work out why at first glance, but looking at their genes soon reveals their secret - they're all female, every single one. A third of whiptails have done away with males completely, a trick that only a small minority of animals have accomplished without going extinct.
Some readers might rejoice at the prospect of a world without males but in general, this isn't good news for a species. Sex has tremendous benefits. Every fling shuffles the genes of the two…