Here are a few updates and extensions to recent posts on blog.bioethics.net:
Judge orders return of placenta to new mother
Art Caplan’s post referring to a story in which a mother had sued to recover her placenta so she could ingest it prompted an interesting comment from Annemarie Jutel:
The placenta is routinely returned to patients in New Zealand, as both the tangata whenua (Maori) any many Pacific Island peoples have ceremonial routines around the management of the placenta. The placenta is usually buried, with a nice plant on top of it (although sometimes it sits in the freezer for weeks/months, next to the ice-cream, awaiting the arrival of grand-parents from places afar to bury the placenta “en famille”). There’s no yuck factor at all. It’s just what we do here. The word “whenua,” in NZ Maori, means both “land” and “placenta.”
The language of “wrongful birth”
Our Tuesday post about the Estrada case in Florida was picked up by BuzzFeed, a site that tracks, well… buzz. It seems the case wasn’t so buzzworthy, though. Out of ten topics tracked by BuzzFeed that day, wrongful birth was second-to-last in clicks — it just beat out pregnancy nutrition. The top three clicked buzz items that day? Topless Protests, Signs of the Apocalypse and Baseball Player Boyfriends, in that order.
You’re wonderful. Now change.
Extending our post last week about how the media influence our standards of perfection… Newsweek cites a study in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in reporting that plastic surgery reality TV shows are prompting people to go under the knife. That prompts the magazine’s Mary Carmichael to ask:
Are these shows just harmless entertainment — the sort of thing that people who are open to cosmetic procedures would seek out anyway? Or are they bad medicine?
Barry Bonds and enhancement’s strike zone
Bonds is now just two homeruns away from tying Hank Aaron for the all-time career record. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced this week that he will in fact be present when Bonds breaks the record. Also this week, the leader of the Tour de France was booted from the race on suspicion of doping. This year’s race has lost two teams, the winners of four stages and the overall leader to charges of illegal performance enhancement. NYT reported that there’s been talk of canceling the race, but tour organizers say they’ll continue to pedal ahead.
-Greg Dahlmann