Choosing Tomorrow's Children
Choosing Tomorrow's Children

Author: Stephen Wilkinson

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2010-02-18

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0191572713

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To what extent should parents be allowed to use reproductive technologies to determine the characteristics of their future children? And is there something morally wrong with parents who wish to do this? Choosing Tomorrow's Children provides answers to these (and related) questions. In particular, the book looks at issues raised by selective reproduction, the practice of choosing between different possible future persons by selecting or deselecting (for example) embryos, eggs, and sperm. Wilkinson offers answers to questions including the following. Do children have a 'right to an open future' and, if they do, what moral constraints does this place upon selective reproduction? Should parents be allowed to choose their future children's sex? Should we 'screen out' as much disease and disability as possible before birth, or would that be an objectionable form of eugenics? Is it acceptable to create or select a future person in order to provide lifesaving tissue for an existing relative? Is there a moral difference between selecting to avoid disease and selecting to produce an 'enhanced' child? Should we allow deaf parents to use reproductive technologies to ensure that they have a deaf child?

The Day I Wasn't There
The Day I Wasn't There

Author: Helene Cixous

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2006-05-29

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 0810123649

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"Tragedy and comedy intimately and movingly mingle in Helene Cixous's The Day I Wasn't There. Its narrator, who resembles Cixous, recounts the birth and death of her first child, a Dawn's syndrome baby she abandons to the care of her midwife mother in an Algerian maternity hospital. She uses this event to probe her family history and her relationship with her mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany; her dead father, after whom the baby is named; her doctor brother, who takes the infant under his wing; and her grandmother Omi. Cixous's elusive writing bears all the trademarks of her poetic and provocative style, vivid with wordplay, intense feeling, and a stream of consciousness that moves freely over time and place. Informed by psychoanalytical theory and always brutally honest, The Day I Wasn't There is above all an intimate study of a woman's inner landscape."--BOOK JACKET.

Today's Stoic, Tomorrow's Hero?
Today's Stoic, Tomorrow's Hero?

Author: Gerald T Keep

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2005-10

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 059536814X

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A wrenching account of one family's five-year battle with what proved to be terminal liver disease, this story explores all aspects of the difficulty in raising a family under such conditions. Written from the point of view of the primary caregiver, the story reveals much about the possible challenges facing the 17,000 families now waiting for a liver transplant in the USA. Many more face other debilitating diseases or the ravages of age. Despite his scientific training to try to understand what is happening, the author is crushed by the medical bureaucracy, and the wild ups and downs of the course of the disease. Having adopted their children, the author struggles with his fundamental values and his conflicting responsibilities to the children and to his ailing wife. This book should help friends and family better understand what a stoic experience the caregiver of one seriously ill may be going through. More importantly, it can show such a lonely individual that what they are going through is not unique, and that they need not be alone. As events proceed through hospice, funeral, and grief, the author looks back on their time together and reflects on the nature of life and love.