Menstrual Blood: A Valuable Source Of Multipotential Stem Cells?

Researchers seeking new and more abundant sources of stem cells for use in regenerative medicine have identified a potentially unlimited, noncontroversial, easily collectable, and inexpensive source — menstrual blood.

[…]

Tests showed that MenSCs could differentiate into adipogenic, chondrogenic, osteogenic, ectodermal, mesodermal, cardiogenic, and neural cell lineages. According to Patel, the sample MenSCs expanded rapidly and maintained greater than 50 percent of their telomerase activity when compared to human embryonic stem cells and better than bone marrow-derived stem cells.

Our ability to bear children is considered a handicap, a burden, a weakness, even by some who consider themselves pro-woman. Breastfeeding in public is still considered obscene by many. Menstruation is a taboo — we’ve all heard the jokes about how nobody wants to see commercials for those products. Hell, I’ve made them.

Funny, isn’t it, how that which is life-giving in women is so often that which is reviled?

Menstruation is a taboo — we’ve all heard the jokes about how nobody wants to see commercials for those products. Hell, I’ve made them.

Funny, isn’t it, how that which is life-giving in women is so often that which is reviled?

Marysia has the manifesto online and ready for signing!

Pro Every Life, Pro Woman, Pro Reproductive Justice for All: A Manifesto

Sponsored by: Turn the Clock Forward & the Nonviolent Choice Directory

We, the undersigned, affirm that:

We are pro every life, before, during, and ever after birth.

Therefore we vigorously, straightforwardly advocate women’s right to nonviolent sexual and reproductive choice.

What is nonviolent choice? (more…)

When I cross-posted yesterday’s post at MySpace, I noticed that the line, “It’s pretty easy to find the candidates’ stands on abortion” had been changed to “It’s pretty easy to find the candidates’ stands ..ion”. I thought maybe I’d made a weird copy-paste error, but I retyped it several times and it happened every time. I even tried sticking periods after the “o” and “n” in “on” to try to fool the filter. Nothing doing. So, for the record, here are phrases you can post in a blog post on MySpace:

• an abortion
• for abortion
• of abortion
• about abortion
• pro-abortion
• anti-abortion
• against abortion
• saline abortion
• medical abortion
• RU-486 abortion

But not, apparently, “on abortion”.

I don’t get it either.

Not for the first time, the letters-to-the-editor section is making me dream about a web app. It would let you feed in keywords (”Hussein Obama”, “Billary”, “Bush Derangement Syndrome”, to name a few), then it would scan the local paper’s website for people writing letters containing those keywords. It would look up the addresses of the letter writers and via the Google Maps API, it would build a map of houses to avoid.

(I’m tempted to put the word “liberal” on the keywords list, since it only seems to appear in the types of letters where it’s used as a swear word.)

Shorter Amanda Marcotte: I really wanted to use the Texas sex toy ban to claim that whenever pro-lifers talk about protecting unborn children, they’re actually just trying to suppress women’s sexuality. Too bad the Attorney General’s petition to reinstate the ban never mentioned abortion or unborn children in any way. Oh well, I already have most of this column written; I’ll just submit it anyway.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have taken a major step toward eventually being able to reprogram adult cells to an embryonic stem cell-like state without the use of viruses or cancer-causing genes.

Via Science Daily

(…wow, try saying that title five times fast.)

I promised Marysia I’d post my results from the Political Compass and Belief-O-Matic tests.

(more…)

…so of course he’s fictional.

Prez4Life Blog Chronicles Fictional Prolife Progressive Presidential Campaign

www.Prez4Life.com debuted on January 22, 2008, with an announcement by former Sen. Thomas Lincoln that he would run for President as a prolife liberal on an independent ticket. Thomas Lincoln and most of Prez4Life is fictional, and the blog will tell the candidate’s story through to the November election.

Prez4Life will explore the realities of the prolife progressive position. The abortion issue tends to be perceived as a prolife conservative vs. pro-choice liberal debate, with no room for crossover. Even prochoice conservative Republican Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign didn’t do much to alter that viewpoint.

In brief, in the Prez4Life world, Thomas Lincoln is a former Democratic Senator from Minnesota who was first elected to Congress during the Nixon Administration and was defeated in 2002 after his vote against authorizing the Iraq War. He announced his presidential candidacy during a rally for prolife liberals prior to the March for Life in Washington, DC, on the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.

As the election year progresses, Prez4Life will post updates on the fictional race from a variety of sources and perspectives (from a single anonymous author). The blog will follow its own storyline even as it reacts to real world events.

The serial fictional blog can be found at www.Prez4Life.com.

(ht: Rachel MacNair)

I’m curious who the author is. It all rings very true to the pro-life progressive experience. The candidate is a pro-labor, pro-social-programs, anti-war liberal who nonetheless gets labeled a “conservative” on abortion because he applies his pro-little-guy, nonviolent principles to the unborn. He’s Catholic — obviously not a requirement for being a pro-life liberal, but a pretty common background. His father was a union organizer, and his mother admired Thomas More.

The blog entries also do a good job of capturing the confusion and suspicion that greets pro-life progressives — the blurb from the oh-so-politically-savvy “Weekly Wrap” that can’t comprehend Lincoln’s position as anything but “triangulation”, the liberal blogger who can’t even type the name of the group “Prolife Progress” without following it with “oxymoron alert”, the right-wingers who sneer at “so-called prolife liberals” and question Lincoln’s faith, the attempted exclusion from the March for Life.

In the first entry, a woman who declined to be named asked whether pro-life progressives should really be running yet another man. I loved that, because I was asking myself the same question as I was reading. Unfortunately, the answer given was reflective of reality — there simply aren’t enough pro-life progressive women with the extensive experience and qualifications that the fictional Senator Lincoln has. One could have posited a fictional woman, of course, but that would be ducking the reality. I’d like to see the blogger explore the question of why pro-life liberal women and minorities have been underrepresented; perhaps this will come up in the search for a running mate.

I’m really looking forward to future installments. It’s like the West Wing for pro-lifers.

Apparently Nellie Gray fell over an amplifier on stage during the pre-march rally yesterday. She didn’t get up at first, and there was uncertainty over whether she was conscious, but she only sustained some cuts and bruises and will be fine.

Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War, edited by Rachel MacNair and Stephen Zunes. An anthology on the consistent life ethic.

Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, by Robert George. A defense of the right to life of the embryonic human being, from a scientific and philosophical viewpoint.

I have a Google News Alert set up for the phrase “pro-life liberal”, because I’m interested in finding others like myself. Unfortunately, about two days after I set up the alert, Fred Thompson came along and labeled Mike Huckabee a “pro-life liberal”, and ever since my mailbox has been filling with the robotic repetition of this phrase by people who appear to have never actually talked to a real, live liberal.

I hereby offer my services to the anti-Huckabee right. (I’m generous that way.) The next time you think about mindlessly regurgitating this talking point, feel free to drop me — an honest-to-goodness pro-life liberal — a line. Don’t be afraid: I won’t take away your guns or force you to pray to Richard Dawkins. This is your chance to ask an actual, self-described liberal whether Huckabee has the goods. I think you’ll find that there might be just a few teeny, tiny areas of fundamental disagreement* between a demon liberal and old Huck.

(I even saw Huckabee — Baptist minister, creationist, and believer that most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were clergymen — labeled a “secular liberal” the other day. Well, labeled in that dishonest Fox News way, where they can say, “We didn’t really call him one, we just asked if he was one.” It’s a world gone mad.)

* OK, so there’s nothing in that last link to actually disagree on, but it worries me that he wouldn’t answer.

Edited after posting to add some links.

So, the National Right to Life Committee is endorsing Fred Thompson (PDF). Thompson opposes amending the Constitution to declare that all human beings, born and unborn, are legal “persons” under the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment. He says, “I thought Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided,” but apparently he doesn’t think that the problem with it was that it denied the personhood of unborn human beings. He prefers the approach of appointing “conservative” (for which read “anti-privacy”) judges to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and send the issue of abortion back to the states.

This is 100% backwards. This is what you do when you think abortion is a matter of sexual morality, not a matter of violence against a human being.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years defending pro-lifers against the charge that the question of fetal personhood is only a smokescreen, and we really just want to control women. In my experience, most grassroots pro-lifers really do believe that the unborn child is a human person with a right to life. But what to do when the premier anti-abortion organization throws its weight behind a candidate who apparently doesn’t believe it?

Maybe my experience is atypical. Or maybe our supposed leadership is failing to represent the majority of pro-lifers again.

Fred Thompson said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is a “pro-life liberal” this morning on the Steve Gill Show.

(via)

I WISH. Fred, don’t taunt me like that!

Thompson is apparently upset at Huckabee for raising taxes in Arkansas — departing from the preferred Republican approach of spending money you don’t have — and not persecuting illegal immigrants. It seems that Huckabee actually used some of that tax money to fund infrastructure improvements, education, and health care for kids!

Well, it’s a start. Now if only Thompson could accuse him of wanting to renounce military aggression, end torture, and restore Constitutional limits on presidential power, we’d be getting somewhere.

Guillermo Habacuc Vargas says he wanted to make a statement about hypocrisy.

He paid two kids to capture a sick, starving dog on the streets of Managua and tied in up in an art gallery. Patrons were instructed not to give food or water to the dog, which died after a day on display.

Vargas’ point seems to have been that people cared about this dog when he was on display in the gallery but wouldn’t have cared about the same dog if he’d died on the street. This is true, but it’s hardly a startling insight (and sure as hell not worth killing a dog over). It’s not news that people are more concerned with suffering that takes place where they can see it. People are numb to suffering on the street; suffering in an art gallery still takes us by surprise. I think the much more instructive aspect of this exhibition is one Vargas doesn’t mention.

Nobody fed the dog.

I assume there were no armed guards on hand to force patrons and gallery employees not to feed it. All it would have taken was a dish and some food or water. People came and looked all day, and were outraged. But not one person fed the dog. Maybe people were afraid to defy even the weak authority of the artist and the gallery. Maybe it didn’t even occur to them to do so.

This is probably the closest thing to the Milgram Experiments you can do in an art gallery. Like the Milgram Experiments, it’s easy for us to comfort ourselves by thinking, “I wouldn’t have done that.” Statistically speaking, yes, there’s a good chance you would. There’s a good chance you would have obeyed the people in charge and not fed the dog. There’s a good chance I would have. It’s what we’re conditioned to do — to believe ourselves so helpless in the face of injustice that we actually become helpless, we obey, even when a way to remedy the injustice is right in front of our faces.

Feed the dog.

(ht: The Gin Blog)

Democracy for Life of Illinois will be holding a kickoff event in Effingham next week:

Democracy For Life of Illinois (DFLI), an affiliate of Democrats for Life of America (DFLA), has scheduled a press conference and initial meeting for October 22, 2007 at the Thelma Keller Conference & Convention Center, 1202 N. Keller Drive, Effingham, IL. The event will begin at 6:00 pm. Featured speaker will be Carol Crossed of Rochester, NY, one of the founders of DFLA. The purpose of the meeting is to publicly announce the formation of DFLI and explain its goals and purpose. Presentation of “The Case for Pro-Life Democrats” will be made as well as a brief explanation of DFL’s “95-10 Initiative.” Democrats for Life of America, Inc. is a national organization for pro-life members of the Democratic party founded in the year 2000. Democrats for Life of America exists to foster respect for life, from the beginning of life to natural death. This includes, but is not limited to, opposition to abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia. The goal of DFL is to mobilize Democrats at local, state, and national levels to:

a. elect pro-life Democrats to office
b. support pro-life Democrats while in an elected position
c. promote a pro-life plank in the Democratic Party platform
d. achieve pro-life legislation with the help of national and state pro-life Democrats
e. participate actively in Democratic party functions and offices

All members of DFLI, pro-life Democrat officeholders and candidates and interested members of the public are invited. For questions or more information, contact DFLI president, David Seiler: 217-342-6882.

[ETA: updated with more information. Also, apparently I got the name wrong at first and it’s Democracy for Life of Illinois. I kind of like that.]