The political arena of bioethics is a widely controversial topic, obviously stemming from the two polarized social viewpoints of this country. Abortion is always a highly debated topic within the political spectrum of bioethics. It raises questions about morality, basic human rights, women’s rights, the commencement of life, religion, and personal autonomy. Abortion is always a divisive topic brought up during political debates, generally because the disposition of an individual’s viewpoint is rigid and unchanging for this type of topic. It encompasses a personal perspective on the matter of life, whether by aborting an unborn fetus is in an act of immorality, or if it should be a given freedom of choice for every woman facing this agonizing dilemma.

From the conservative perspective, most believe that life begins at conception. From the moment two individuals perform sex, that is deemed as the starting point of life for the baby fetus. The most renowned governmental jurisdiction of abortion laws come from Roe vs. Wade, a 1973 landmark decision made by the United States Supreme Court on the ruling of the legality of abortion. Wade, a Texas District Attorney,  essentially argued that the “potentiality of human life” alone should be enough evidence for the Court to rule in their favor (“On the Legal Status of the Proposition That ‘Life Begins at Conception’). By taking this tactic, one should no longer consider at what point the fetus is in fact viable and a living person, but rather the fact that it has the potential to become a person should act as proof enough to not abort it. Roe, a pregnant Texas woman, proclaimed that the set of laws put in place to make abortion illegal, were corrupt and unethical in the eyes of the woman having the pregnancy. Roe finally won the case as the court ruled that the Texas abortion laws were infringing on the Ninth and Fourteenth Rights of the plaintiff.

Conversely, from a more liberal point of view, one should also take into consideration the scientific evidence backing the creation of life. One must consider the male and female sexual reproductive systems, the act of intercourse, and in a socially liberal perspective, the rights of the woman having the child and her entire circumstances. The most important thing to understand is that fertilization does not happen immediately, nor even hours after intercourse. The sperm must first undergo biological changes to successfully fertilize the egg in the fallopian, which takes time. This is why emergency contraceptives, like Plan B, can still eliminate the chance of pregnancy up to five days after intercourse. Plan B works in an interesting way, finding alternative routes to block the fertilization of an egg in a female. During the first half of the menstrual cycle, Plan B helps halt ovulation, in other words, it blocks the egg from become fertilized by the sperm cells trying to reach it. If a woman is in the second half of her menstrual cycle, then emergency contraceptive acts to help promote the production of cervical mucus, trapping the sperm rather than the egg and therefore inhibit fertilization.

In other words, science has proven that life does not begin with the onset of sexual intercourse. But then the question that is still around is, when does life officially begin? Does life begin when the embryo is able to cellularly develop a heart? Or when the fetus forms a pre-human brain? The answer to these questions will successfully allow our court systems to deem whether or not it is moral to take a life when it has yet to be birthed.

One must also consider the viewpoint of the mother. She is the one enduring these nine months of hormonal imbalance, eating and surviving for two instead of just one, and physically putting on added weight, causing pain that at times can be unendurable and unwanted. The definition of life is one that seems ambiguous and grey at times, but one factor that our legal system is lacking is the weighted consideration of the mother.

If a fetus needs an umbilical cord to help provide nutrients and essential proteins from the mother to the baby, is it truly living on its own. If a fetus cannot perform the essential autonomic tasks of basic survival (i.e. respiratory functions or basic thought processing), it is living? This is an entirely opinionated debate, and is outrageous for one side to say they are right over the other. This is such a dynamic bioethical situation which does not only encompass ‘where does life begin’, but rather it asks the questions ‘what is life’, ‘should a mother be able to fully decide to abort an unwanted child’, and ‘what is the best way to compromise so that both parties can come to an agreement.’

Works Cited

Rubenfeld, Jed, “On the Legal Status of the Proposition that “Life Begins at Conception”” (1991). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 1568.

Gender difficulties have encountered complications stemming from socio-economic, political, educational, and most importantly, bioethical issues. Gender differs from sex, in that gender is a social construct formed by society to assign titles to individuals to finely place them in these rigid groups. Sex, on the other hand, is the biological identity placed upon you at birth by given chance. The difference between the two is that sex is not chosen, while gender can be individually constructed to help conjoin the hormones produced by the brain to compliment the reproductive system of your own body.

Gender has had many complications throughout recent decades, mostly concerning homosexual orientation and the general lack of female rights in many societies. Women’s rights have been a pivotal movement throughout the entirety of the last century as societies have been progressing with more socially liberal ideologies. LGBT advocates have been attempting to advance the liberal ideals of societies, trying to further open-mindedness and acceptance for all sexually-oriented individuals.

Homosexuals and transgenders have been excommunicated from the scientific community for the past couple decades. In the 1980s and 1990s of the United States, homosexuals have been widely discriminated in the medical community, most likely due to the AIDS pandemic which plagued the gay population for two decades. Many people saw the AIDS epidemic as a deserved disease placed upon homosexuals as a “wrath from God” to punish these sinful individuals. As science has advanced over the past 30 years, so has our knowledge of this horribly fatal disease. We now understand that this disorder has indiscriminately latched onto those who can help this virus thrive and pass its genetic code onto the next generation of helpless individuals.

For decades, many gays were turned away from hospitals, treatment centers, or even personal interactions from close friends because of the ignorance that came with this disorder. The lack of knowledge of this disorder caused many, including priests, doctors, and close friends to completely isolate the homosexual community which would in turn set back social progression for 30+ years. “Although all people who contract AIDS sexually are assigned blame for their infection, such blame is greater for a gay or bisexual man than for a heterosexual man or woman” (http://abs.sagepub.com/content/42/7/1130.short), despite the equally probable chance of either a gay or straight individual contracting this disorder.

In regards to women’s role in bioethics, there have been many discrepancies as to how much rights women should have pertaining to reproductive or sexual liberty. There has been much debate over the limitations of birth control, Plan B, and abortion–ironically, the majority of these politicians are males. Women have been restricted sexually, deterministically, and reproductively–generally due to the ideologies that many hold on the definition of life and women’s sexual rights entirely. Many politicians lack the scientific evidence to back their personal/religious views on the human reproductive systems. Many lack a third-person perspective on the situation; not viewing it from the female’s point of view, “the failure of bioethics comes from the lack of sufficiently self-critical by examining whom the field serves and how” (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1738410).

The government has just passed a law that allows any potentially pregnant female to purchase the Plan B contraceptive. This has raised many debates on when the beginning of life commences–stemming from biological and religious perspectives as an origin. Because gender is a construct of the society which you live in, it is difficult to view it from a third-person perspective, objectively taking a stance which is both unbiased and progressive. Social progression is the key to an advancing society in regards to equality and justice.

As humans, we feel that with our vast knowledge base, we should be conducting experiments on anything which even remotely is of interest–even if it significantly crosses the moral boundary. As science rapidly advances and new discoveries are made at a exponential rate, what we must keep in mind is that just because we are interested in the scientific finding of a procedure, does not mean we are entitled to know so. The human brain is capable of understanding the fundamental units of life itself, yet does this mean that we should molecularly alter these basic units of life to our own benefit or mere interest?

Genetic engineering has reached a milestone with the induction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Scientists have literally unraveled the building blocks of DNA and can successfully reconstruct them in a unique fashion. This new discovery has opened the doors for genetically modified bacteria, yeast, insects, plants, animals, and food. This revolutionary finding has changed the way crops are produced, shipped, and even taste. Geneticists are able to molecularly construct a desirable crop, say corn for example, that has no need for herbicides or pesticides, has an indefinite shelf life so that food can be shipped across the world to starving nations without the fear of it rotting on the way, and alter the texture and taste of the vegetable itself. Another outstanding benefit of genetic modification that scientists have recently touched upon, is the creation of “potentially edible plant vaccines that could be used to immunize individuals against a wide variety of infectious diseases ranging from cholera to potentially AIDS” . Technology has reached the point in our lifetime where we are no longer using science to explore the confounding natural world, but by playing God to create a world in which we find most desirable.

The world has existed for 4.54 billion years. If the earth’s existence were condensed to a metaphorical 1 hour time span, it took about 9 minutes for the first forms of life itself to come about, 17 minutes for for bacteria to be introduced. It took about 40 minutes for the first organisms with a nucleus to be introduced, 57 minutes and 7 seconds for the first mammal to form. It was not until the last 2 minutes of this metaphoric hour-clock that the first human ancestors started to roam the still apparently primitive earth, and in the 59th minute and 58th second, the industrial revolution took place.

Using Darwin’s theory of Evolution, life has been modifying itself for billions of years, trying to adapt to drastically changing environments (Ice Ages, meteorite bombardment, etc.). Humans believe that we are exhausting all our natural resources and must literally rip apart the genome of life itself and poke around in the building blocks of 4.54 billion years of exact modification.

The globe has existed for longer than our mental capacity can even fathom. The earth has been thriving long before humans, and (I believe) will continue to exist long after we use up these natural resources. Evolution has been at play ever since that first speck of life was created around the Earth’s billionth birthday. Organisms have been reacting to environmental changes, allowing those with a certain genetic makeup to thrive and prosper in an ever-changing environment. Humans cannot predict the environmental changes at play in the future and therefore cannot account for what genes need to persist, and which must ultimately fade out of the spectrum of existence. Geneticists believe that they can genetically modify crops and animals to ultimately benefit the human race, yet, it is not in our power to decide which organisms (and more specifically, genes) will need to prosper in order for life to thrive and intelligently advance.

Ethical practices in medicine have been widely marginalized, paralleling the racist and ethnically prejudice attitudes of a given era. Take for example the Nazi experimentations on Jewish inmates within concentration camps. Nazi scientists would conduct human experimentations on Jewish prisoners, resulting in disfigurement, disability and usually death. There was never informed consent given, as it was the largest performance of medical torture in modern history. These experiments were conducted in an effort to ‘advance’ medical knowledge while subsequently torturing and killing the millions of Jewish prisoners that were forced against their will to take part in these unscientific experiments. This inhumane act of medical cruelty resulted in the development of the Nuremberg Trials of medical ethics.

The development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics was the first step in establishing a written set of laws that protect basic human medical rights that are still in place to this day. This list includes such basic rights as voluntary consent, yielding fruitful results for the good of a society, the avoidance of physical or mental disturbances, proper preparations should be taken, subjects should be able to end the experimentation at any point, etc. Even though these laws were established after World War II in 1947, unethical malpractice was still prevalent in the United States for 30 more years.

The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment was an infamous clinical research study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in which African Americans who had syphilis were observed and untreated to see how this disease would progress and develop if untreated. This was one of the longest lasting unethical medical procedures to take place in the United States, paralleling the racist attitudes towards African Americans and their human rights. This case of unethical medical practice was significantly controversial because of the induction of penicillin, a known cure at the time to treat syphilis. These examples of large-scale unethical medical practices stem from the differences that exist between varying races and ethnic groups.

In Anne Donchin’s text Embodying Bioethics: Recent Feminist Advances, she proclaims “bioethics took hold in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a movement for patients’ rights. It grew alongside the civil rights and women’s rights movements, borrowing from their rhetoric and momentum, yet it has never taken seriously the linkages” (66). Donchin believes that race is a fiction without clear biological boundaries. Instead she believes that race and ethnicity are cultural artifacts which emphasize the marginalized differences of varying groups of people. Donchin states that bioethics is now recently coming to terms with basic human rights.

In Howard Brody’s The Future of Bioethics, the author believes that with the rise of social change and globalization, that “local bioethics issues pale in comparison to international injustices” (177). For example, watching foreign governments take part in chemically poisoning their own people to propel oppression is an act of unethical medical practices. Simply watching from afar as millions of helpless civilians are medically tortured is an act of bioethical discrimination. Equality is the universal backbone to bioethics. The day when an African child is given the same cancer treatment as an upper-class American, is the day when bioethics has truly prevailed.

Blinding autonomy is the key to bioethics. If there were no censorship for medical procedures in response to ethnicity or race, there would no longer be any social injustices. When a global community can come together and use medicine for the benefit of any individual no matter where they reside or how they look, is the day where bioethical procedures will single handedly denounce racism as a form of social acceptance.

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