Campbell's target article is a stimulating attempt to extend our understanding of sex differences in risk-taking behaviors. However, Campbell does not succeed in demonstrating that her account adds explanatory power to those (e.g., Daly & Wilson 1994) previously proposed. In particular, little effort was made to explore the causal links between survival (staying alive) and reproduction.

Maternal fetal surgery (MFS) trials have the potential to substantially increase the survival and quality of life of fetuses with life-threatening conditions, but they also entail relevant and yet overlooked fair access challenges. In this topic piece, we will present the fair access concerns in MFS trials/practice and their ethical ramifications as well as some possible ways to address them. The most obvious challenge is cost. Although the cost of the surgery itself is generally covered, costs are high (...) for participants, including commute or housing near the hospital. This might hinder participations of parents from lower economic status. Strict eligibility criteria aimed at protecting participants further limit accessibility. These issues further affect the scientific validity of the trial. For example, the above-mentioned issues contribute to difficulties in recruitment which already lead to MFS trials delays and cancellations. They also contributed to homogeneous samples that are difficult to generalize. Hence, it is important that researcher first acknowledge the existence of fair access issues beyond those related to the cost of the surgery itself and that these issues affect participants’ right to fair access to the trial benefits as well as the scientific validity of the trial. Second, it is important that researchers actively try to foresee and reduce these issues. (shrink)

A recent statement of consensus held that the principle of double effect would allow the induction of a previable fetus in order to eliminate a grave and present danger to the life of a mother suffering from peripartum cardiomyopathy. The author responds to this declaration, points out some limitations preventing it from being a vehicle for broader agreement, and offers an alternative, namely, medical induction of labor in cases of maternal–fetal vital conflict can be justified if the fetus has (...) at least a fair chance of survival. This support of induction in cases of periviability considers the interests of both fetus and mother and, unlike the earlier consensus statement, can be defended by those who hold that one’s moral intention includes both the ultimate and proximate ends, or the immediate consequences of one’s act. (shrink)

Maternal health has become a top global priority. In contrast to the decline of the maternal subject (Stephens, 2011), and despite previous evidence that maternal health has struggled to find a place on the global policy agenda (Shiffman and Smith, 2007), it is now clear that the promotion of health for mothers and children is a staple of both government and private donor commitments. On humanitarian grounds, it makes sense to focus on maternal health and (...) class='Hi'>survival in the Global South. Death related to pregnancy or childbirth is a disheartening example of needless suffering. But beyond the initial impulse to reduce suffering, what motivates and/or requires action for addressing injustice in the form of distributional inequities for maternal and reproductive health? In this article, I make a case for the necessity and validity of transnational cooperation to address maternal mortality and morbidity in the Global South. The first component of my argument addresses the transnational elements of both global interconnectedness and responsibility to act. These elements are drawn from Iris Marion Young’s philosophical justification for North-South responsibility-taking. The second component of my argument adds the concept of affective solidarity to that of transnational responsibility. My argument in this section draws from Iris Marion Young’s earlier work on identity (Young, 1990) and embodiment (Young, 1984) and expands the analysis of affective solidarity as a form of both embodiment and political commitment in order to explain the mechanism for transnational connection and understanding. And the final component of my argument explains how both of these elements – transnational responsibility and affective solidarity – support a theory of transnational maternal feminism. (shrink)

The aim of this study is an analysis of the possible adaptive consequences of delivery of low birth weight infants. We attempt to reveal the cost and benefit components of bearing small children, estimate the chance of the infants’ survival, and calculate the mothers’ reproductive success. According to life-history theory, under certain circumstances mothers can enhance their lifetime fitness by lowering the rate of investment in an infant and/or enhancing the rate of subsequent births. We assume that living in (...) a risky environment and giving birth to a small infant may involve a shift from qualitative to quantitative production of offspring. Given high infant mortality rates, parents will have a reproductive interest in producing a relatively large number of children with a smaller amount of prenatal investment. This hypothesis was tested among 650 Gypsy and 717 non-Gypsy Hungarian mothers. Our study has revealed that 23.8% of the Gypsy mothers had low birth weight (<2,500 g) children, whose mortality rate is very high. These mothers also had more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths than those with normal weight children. As a possible response to these reproductive failures, they shortened birth spacing, gaining 2–4 years across their reproductive lifespan for having additional children. Because of the relatively short interbirth intervals, by the end of their fertility period, Gypsy mothers with one or two low birth weight infants have significantly more children than their ethnic Hungarian counterparts. They appear to compensate for handicaps associated with low birth weights by having a larger number of closely spaced children following the birth of one or more infants with a reduced probability of survival. The possible alternative explanations are discussed, and the long-term reproductive benefits are estimated for both ethnic groups. (shrink)

This paper investigates the impact of kin on child survival in a matrilineal society in Malawi. Women usually live in close proximity to their matrilineal kin in this agricultural community, allowing opportunities for helping behavior between matrilineal relatives. However, there is little evidence that matrilineal kin are beneficial to children. On the contrary, child mortality rates appear to be higher in the presence of maternal grandmothers and maternal aunts. These effects are modified by the sex of child (...) and resource ownership: female children and children in households where women, rather than men, own land suffer higher mortality rates in the presence of maternal kin. These modifiers suggest the detrimental effects of matrilineal kin may result from competition between such kin for resources. There are some positive effects of kin on child survival: the presence of elder siblings of both sexes is correlated with higher survival rates, and there is some weak evidence that paternal grandmothers may be beneficial to a child’s survival chances. There is little evidence that any male kin, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, and including fathers, affect child mortality rates. This study highlights the importance of taking social and ecological context into account when investigating relationships between kin. (shrink)

The effects of grandparent survival on child survival and mean interbirth interval, both independent of and relative to parent survival, were investigated in a historical population. Families for the data set were reconstituted from the parish and census records of Cambridgeshire, 1770–1861. In a logistic regression analysis, only the mother’s and the maternal grandmother’s survival were found to be significant predictors of child survival. Maternal grandmother’s survival was found to influence child (...) class='Hi'>survival both via maternal survival and independent of maternal survival. Grandparent survival was not found to influence mean interbirth interval. These findings are reviewed with respect to other studies of grandmothering, the Grandmother Hypothesis, and the evolutionary significance of human female postreproductive lifespan. (shrink)

Retrospective and prospective data collected in Cameroon were used to reassess hypotheses about how infant and early childhood mortality is affected by birth spacing and breast-feeding. These data show that: (a) a short preceding birth interval is detrimental for child survival in the first 4 months of life; (b) full and partial breast-feeding have direct protective effects on child survival in the first 4-6 months of life, with the effects of the former stronger than those of the latter; (...) (c) early subsequent conception significantly increases mortality risks in the first 16 months of life of the index child. These findings are robust to various controls, e.g. study design, data defects, child's health conditions at/around birth, postnatal maternal and child recurrent illnesses, patterns of utilisation of health care services, and immunisation status of the child. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to account for the effect of mother's death on child survival in a historical population. Using comprehensive data on the early French Canadian population of Quebec, evidence is provided for a higher risk of dying for motherless children that remains significant over all childhood and long after the death of the mother. The specific effect of the loss of maternal care was estimated by comparing mortality before and after mother's death, furnishing a (...) means to control for family heterogeneity. No differential in investment between genders was detected before age 3, but older girls suffered a three-fold higher susceptibility to mother's death than their male counterparts. This suggests that grown-up girls assuming the responsibilities of the missing mother had a lower chance of survival. (shrink)

Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction: in the spirit of Zora : traveling with the "eternal feminine" -- Returning to the margin : changed -- African American literature : like a bridge over troubled water -- Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes : envisioning the (new) "Negro artist" -- Striking down colorism in color struck : a play in four scenes -- We are not tragically colored -- Langston Hughes writing about the "the Negro artist and the racial mountain" -- Transgressing (...) boundaries of white male power in the ways of white folks -- Blackness from the inside out -- Seeing "women loving women" -- Black female journey to sexual in(sight)fullness -- "What if Mama finds out?" : entering a life-changing place of self-liberation -- When "nobody was lesbian, nobody was feminist, nobody was gay" -- Higher education that makes a difference -- "Still children of the night" : survivors against the odds -- Black boys' lives still matter : in search of a loving father -- "Spilled salt" on a Black mother's table and the struggle for maternal survival -- No shame: recovering our mother's way(s) of being -- Remembering where we came from -- Getting to the heart of the lessons : Black women teaching "other" ways of loving -- Epilogue: continuing to teach in the image of "an alternative Black man" -- It's about revolutionary manhood. (shrink)

Survival after solid-organ transplantation has improved significantly, and many contemporary transplant recipients are of childbearing potential. There are limited data to guide decision-making surrounding pregnancy after transplantation, variations in clinical practice, and significant knowledge gaps, all of which raise significant ethical issues. Post-transplant pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of maternal and fetal complications. Shared decision-making is a central aspect of patient counselling but is complicated by significant knowledge gaps. Stakeholder interests can be in conflict; exploring these (...) tensions can help patients to evaluate their options and inform their deliberations. We argue that uniform, evidence-based recommendations for pregnancy after solid organ transplantation are needed. Conducting research, including patient-engaged studies, in this area should be priority for the transplant community. (shrink)

We conducted a meta-analysis of 17 studies that tested for an association between grandparental survival and grandchild survival in patrilineal populations. Using two different methodologies, we found that the survival of the maternal grandmother and grandfather, but not the paternal grandmother and grandfather, was associated with decreased grandoffspring mortality. These results are consistent with the findings of psychological studies in developed countries (Coall and Hertwig Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33:1-59, 2010). When tested against the predictions of (...) five hypotheses (confidence of paternity; grandmothering, kin proximity, grandparental senescence, and local resource competition), our meta-analysis results are most in line with the local resource competition hypothesis. In patrilineal and predominantly patrilocal societies, the grandparents who are most likely to live with the grandchildren have a less beneficial association than those who do not. We consider the extent to which these results may be influenced by the methodological limitations of the source studies, including the use of retrospective designs and inadequate controls for confounding variables such as wealth. (shrink)

This study examines child survival and growth in a patrilineal Ethiopian community as a function of father absence and sex. In line with evolutionary predictions for sex-biased parental investment, the absence of a father and associated constraints on household resources is more detrimental for sons’ than daughters’ survival in infancy. Father absence doubles a son’s risk of dying in infancy but has a positive influence on the well-being of female members of the household, improving daughter survival, growth, (...) and maternal nutritional status. Lack of paternal investment may be compensated for by other matrilateral kin through increased reciprocity between mother, daughter, and sister. (shrink)

It has been a common claim that surrogacy is morally problematic since it involves harm to the child or the surrogate—the harm argument. Due to a growing body of empirical research, the harm argument has seen a decrease in popularity, as there seems to be little evidence of harmful consequences of surrogacy. In this article, two revised versions of the harm argument are developed. It is argued that the two suggested versions of the harm argument survive the current criticism against (...) the standard harm argument. The first version argues that the child is harmed by being separated from the gestational mother. The second version directs attention to the fact that surrogacy involves great incentives to keep the gestational mother’s level of maternal-fetal attachment low, which tend to increase the risk of harm to the child. While neither of the two arguments is conclusive regarding the moral status of surrogacy, both constitute important considerations that are often ignored. (shrink)

Females' tendency to place a high value on protecting their own lives enhanced their reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation because infant survival depended more upon maternal than on paternal care and defence. The evolved mechanism by which the costs of aggression (and other forms of risk taking) are weighted more heavily for females may be a lower threshold for fear in situations which pose a direct threat of bodily injury. Females' concern with personal survival (...) also has implications for sex differences in dominance hierarchies because the risks associated with hierarchy formation in nonbonded exogamous females are not offset by increased reproductive success. Hence among females, disputes do not carry implications for status with them as they do among males, but are chiefly connected with the acquisition and defence of scarce resources. Consequently, female competition is more likely to take the form of indirect aggression or low-level direct combat than among males. Under patriarchy, men have held the power to propagate images and attributions which are favourable to the continuance of their control. Women's aggression has been viewed as a gender-incongruent aberration or dismissed as evidence of irrationality. These cultural interpretations have evolutionarily based sex differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own aggression. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the dimensions of unsafe motherhood, contrasting data from economically developed countries with some from developing countries. It addresses many common factors that shape unsafe motherhood, identifying medical, health system and societal causes, including women's powerlessness over their reproductive lives in particular as a feature of their dependent status in general. Drawing on perceptions of Jonathan Mann, it focuses on public health dimensions of maternity risks, and equates the role of bioethics in conscientious medical care (...) to that of human rights in public health care. The microethics of medical care translate into the macroethics of public health, but the transition compels some compromise of personal autonomy, a key feature of Western bioethics, in favour of societal analysis. Religiously‐based morality is seen to have shaped laws that contribute to unsafe motherhood. Now reformed in former colonizing countries of Europe, many such laws remain in effect in countries that emerged from colonial domination. UN conferences have defined the concept of ‘reproductive health’ as one that supports women's reproductive self‐determination, but restrictive abortion laws and practices epitomize the unjust constraints to which many women remain subject, resulting in their unsafe motherhood. Pregnant women can be legally compelled to give the resources of their bodies to the support of others, while fathers are not legally compellable to provide, for instance, bone‐marrow or blood donations for their children's survival. Women's unjust legal, political, economic and social powerlessness explains much unsafe motherhood and maternal mortality and morbidity. (shrink)

A variety of studies show that parental absence early in life leads to deleterious effects on the developing CNS. This is thought to be largely because evolutionary-dependent stimuli are necessary for the appropriate postnatal development of the young brain, an effect sometimes termed the “experience-expectant brain,” with parents providing the necessary input for normative synaptic connections to develop and appropriate neuronal survival to occur. Principal among CNS systems affected by parental input are the monoamine systems. In the present study,N= (...) 434 rhesus monkeys (233 males, 201 females) were reared in one of two conditions: as mother-reared controls (MR;n= 269) or without adults with 24-h access to same-aged peers (PR;n= 165). When subjects were six-months-old, they underwent a separation paradigm involving 4, sequential, four-day social separations from their mothers or peers, with each separation followed by three-day reunions with their mothers or their peers. Prior to the separation paradigm, baseline cisternal CSF samples were obtained, as well as at the end of each the four social separations, and after final separation, during a recovery period. CSF was assayed for concentrations of monoamine metabolites and a blood sample was genotyped for the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) genotype. Replicating earlier landmark findings, PR subjects with thesallele exhibited lower baseline concentrations of the serotonin metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), when compared to PR subjects homozygous for theLallele. MR subjects were undifferentiated by genotype. PR subjects exhibited lower CSF 5-HIAA concentrations during baseline, but higher CSF 5-HIAA during social separations, when compared to MR subjects. There were rearing effects for the dopamine metabolite homovanillic acid (HVA) and for the norepinephrine metabolite 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MHPG), with PR subjects showing higher HVA and lower MHPG when compared to MR subjects. These findings indicate that there are long-term deficits in the response of monoamines following early maternal absence. The results of this study confirm and extend earlier findings that early parental absence has deleterious consequences for the development of the monoamine systems, and that these consequences are modulated by the 5-HTT genotype. (shrink)

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where (...) ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

What is the metaphysical relationship between the fetus/embryo and the pregnant organism? In this paper I apply a substance metaphysics view developed by Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard to argue, on the basis of topological connectedness, that fetuses/embryos are Lady-Parts: part of the maternal organism up until birth. This leaves two options. Either mammalian organisms begin at birth, or we revise our conception of organisms such that mammalian organisms can be part of other mammals. The first option has some (...) advantages: it is numerically neat; aligns with an intuitive picture of organisms as physically distinct individuals; and ties ‘coming into existence’ to a suitably recognisable and important event: birth. But it denies that the fetus survives birth, or that human organisms existed prior to their birth. The second option allows us to recognise that human organisms exist prior to and survive their birth, but at a cost: it leaves the question of when an organism comes into existence unanswered, and demands potentially far-reaching conceptual revision across a range of domains. (shrink)

This study examines whether mortality of two adjacent siblings in families is age-specific and is modified by the MCH78, 198590 in the treatment (MCH–FP) and comparison areas. Logistic regression was used to estimate the net effects of survival status of elder siblings on mortality of younger siblings in the neonatal, postneonatal and toddler periods, controlling for birth order, previous birth interval, maternal age, education and religion, household possession of valuable items and sex of the child.

Receiving social support from community and extended family has been typical for mothers with infants in human societies past and present. In non-industrialised contexts, infants of mothers with extended family support often have better health and higher survival through the vulnerable infant period, and hence shared infant care has a clear fitness benefit. However, there is scant evidence that these benefits continue in industrialised contexts. Better infant health and development with allocare support would indicate continued evolutionary selection for allocare. (...) The research reported here used multiple logistic regression analysis to test whether a lack of family and other social support for mothers was associated with an increased risk of developmental delay in 9-month-old infants in the UK Millennium Cohort (analysis sample size, 15,696 infants). Extended family-based childcare during work hours and more maternal time spent with friends were the most influential kin and social support variables: infants of mothers with kin-based childcare versus all other childcare arrangements had a lower risk of developmental delay (OR = 0.61, 95% CIs: 0.46–0.82). Infants of mothers who spent no time with friends when compared with those who saw friends every day had double the odds of delay. Greater paternal involvement in infant care was associated with a lower odds of developmental delay. In conclusion, shared care of infants and social support for mothers may influence fitness-related traits in industrialised societies rather than being factors that influenced selection only in the past and in societies which retain close kin networks and a strong local community focus. (shrink)

This paper puts Jane Bennett’s vital materialism into dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference. Together these thinkers challenge the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that is bound up with both the instrumentalization of the earth and the disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal. In its place they seek to affirm a vital, generative materiality: an ‘active matter’ whose differential becomings no longer oppose activity to passivity, subject to object, or one body, self or entity (...) to its ‘other’. For both thinkers, displacing the hylomorphic conceptual structures that have tended to dominate western metaphysical thought is inseparable from critiquing the model of the individual subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. Such individualism is countered by the relational ontologies figured in Bennett’s ‘distributed agencies’ and Irigaray’s ‘placental economy’, and by a shared attentiveness to the capacities of the human body to bear others within. Nonetheless, this paper argues that each thinker renders this ‘other within’ in very different ways. On the one hand, Bennett’s approach complements and expands Irigaray’s notion of the elemental by affording a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matters. On the other, Irigaray’s conception of generative relationality and the ontological priority of the in-between allows us to think such material entanglements in ways that more fully displace the twinned logics of individualism and instrumentalization. Her project thereby affirms the relational and irreducible differences on which the ‘vitality’ of a vital materiality depends. If there is no more “earth” to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire, no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the ex-sistence of the “subject”? If the earth turned and more especially turned upon herself, the erection of the subject might thereby be disconcerted and risk losing its elevation and penetration. For what would there be to rise up from and exercise his power over? And in? Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman Jane Bennett has recently argued that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption”, continuing that: “The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption”.11J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, ix. Henceforth VM. View all notes This insight is prefigured and re-affirmed by the work of Irigaray. Her sustained analysis of western thought and culture shows how its constitutive disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal is inextricably bound up with an equally deep-rooted disavowal of matter and corporeality. As the above passage from Speculum suggests,22L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 133. Henceforth S. View all notes Irigaray seeks to expose woman's reduction to an object for a subject and a maternal-material resource for man's speculations; but in disentangling woman from her symbolic identification with the earth, she also seeks to release the earth from its identification with a passive and manipulable matter. Her work thus bears directly on the revaluation required to transform human beings' relations to materiality: both their own, and that of the earth they inhabit. At the centre of this revaluation is Irigaray's work to displace the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that Bennett also critiques, and to affirm instead a sexuate materiality that is both living and generative. Her consistent troubling of hylomorphism is as unsettling for the subject as her question: “But what if the ‘object’ started to speak?” This question is echoed in Bennett's concern with “the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks”.33 VM, 2, citing W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, 157. View all notes As this passage indicates, Bennett's own project is more concerned with the agency of non-human materialities – including their role in the constitution of the human – than with specifically sexed bodies or a materiality inflected by sexual difference. It is these crucial differences in emphasis, I will suggest, that allow the work of these two thinkers to be brought together in productive dialogue. On the one hand, Bennett's approach affords a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matter; on the other, Irigaray's twinned ontology of sexual difference and maternal relation is better able to affirm the relational differences on which the “vitality” of a vital materiality depends. The paper begins by outlining several key elements of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference to show how it leads necessarily to a rethinking of matter. This rethinking is especially helpful for shifting away from the hylomorphism that has been a dominant strand in western thought, informing an understanding of the earth as a fundamentally inert and ever-ready resource. As I will show, the figures through which Irigaray re-articulates female specificity also allow her to refigure the earth as active matter that “turns upon herself ” in generative flux. In the second section, I will situate Irigaray's re-thinking of matter in relation to Bennett's “vital materiality”.44Bennett can be aligned with a number of thinkers who have come to be grouped under the heading “new materialisms”. See S. Alaimo and S. Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008; D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. View all notes An advantage of this concept is that it refuses the separation between humans and matter still implicit in concepts such as “the environment”. By attending to “our own constitution as vital materiality”, as well as the ways our “own” bodies are never “fully or exclusively human”, Bennett adjusts the status of human actants while re-evaluating non-human bodies “as actants rather than as objects”. As I will show, her approach provides a constructive critical perspective on Irigaray's work by drawing attention to the specifically non-sexuate nature of the elemental. Equally, however, Irigaray's insistence on sexuate difference problematises any appeal to a generic notion of “the human”. This is especially helpful, I will suggest, in relation to contemporary descriptions of climate change as “anthropogenic”. By homogenising human beings, such descriptions make it more difficult to address the ways in which current ecological problems are inseparable from global patterns of social, political and economic inequity. For both thinkers, challenging hylomorphism needs to be matched with a critique of the dominant modern model of the subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. And for both, this model is displaced and undone by the capacity of the human body to bear others within, in ways that engender and sustain human life. Yet as I will discuss in the final two sections, each thinker renders this “other within” in very different ways, with significant implications for the ethics and politics of a “vital materiality”. In the end it is Irigaray's rendering of a distinctively female capacity to bear an other within, explored via the generative relationality of a placental economy, that more fully escapes the individualism of the One and the Same. Together, Irigaray and Bennett show that to take seriously the ecological crises that currently confront us means overcoming the disavowal of both human beings' own fundamental materiality and our dependency on the sustaining materialities of the earth. In contrast, a dominant strand in contemporary responses to these crises is an environmental politics of “enlightened self-interest”55I borrow this phrase from H. Kopnina's critical discussion in “Forsaking Nature? Contesting ‘Biodiversity’ Through Competing Discourses of Sustainability”, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 7, no. 1 : 51–63. that precludes any serious re-evaluation of human beings' relations to matter and the earth. If human beings can be persuaded that current levels of environmental degradation are damaging to them, threatening perhaps their very survival, they are more likely to take decisive steps to alter their behaviour. Insofar as such approaches demand action only for the sake of human interests and ends, they are both anthropocentric and spring from the same instrumentalising rationality that has engendered the ecological crises we currently face. They may well be successful in prompting action. But by foregrounding the survival of “the human species” per se, such approaches foreclose discussion of whose interests are served if survival is all that is allowed to be at stake, and whose lives are thereby consigned to ongoing exploitation. Moreover, as I will argue below, the instrumental rationality that serves survival is at odds with an affirmation of life, as a becoming that depends on difference. With this in mind, I will problematise Bennett's proposed politics of “expanded self-interest”, while seeking to retain many of the insights her approach brings. To more fully displace the “rational” self-interest that has encouraged human exploitation of the earth, we might take up Bennett's “vital materiality” in ways informed by Irigaray's conception of generative difference and the relational space-time of the in-between. (shrink)

Extrinsic mortality is a key influence on organisms’ life history strategies, especially on age at maturity. This historical longitudinal study of 125 women in rural Domenica examines effects of extrinsic mortality on human age at maturity and pace of reproduction. Extrinsic mortality is indicated by local population infant mortality rates during infancy and at maturity between the years 1925 and 2000. Extrinsic mortality shows effects on age at first birth and pace of reproduction among these women. Parish death records show (...) huge historical variation in age-specific mortality rates. The infant mortality rate (IMR) in the early 1920s was low, increased dramatically beginning in 1929, and reached a maximum in the 1950s, at which point IMR declined steadily to its present low rate. The mortality rate early in life showed a quadratic association with age at first birth. Women who experienced conditions of low IMR early in life reproduced relatively late in life. Those born into moderately high levels of infant mortality tended to reproduce earlier than those born at low levels. At very high infant mortality levels early in life, women went on to delay reproduction until relatively late, possibly as a result of somatic depletion and energetic stress associated with the conditions that lead to high IMR. Population mortality rates at age of maturity also showed a quadratic association with age at first birth. The pace of reproduction, estimated as number of surviving offspring controlled for maternal age, showed a similar quadratic effect. There were complex interactions between population mortality rates in infancy and at maturity. When extrinsic mortality was high during infancy, extrinsic mortality later in life had little effect on timing of first birth. When extrinsic mortality was low to moderate in infancy, extrinsic mortality later in life had significant effects on adult reproduction. I speculate that these effects are mediated through development of personality facets associated with reproduction. (shrink)

On September 27, 2016 people across the world looked down at their buzzing phones to see the AP Alert: “Baby born with DNA from 3 people, first from new technique.” It was an announcement met with confusion by many, but one that polarized the scientific community almost instantly. Some celebrated the birth as an advancement that could help women with a family history of mitochondrial diseases prevent the transmission of the disease to future generations; others held it unethical, citing medical (...) tourism and consequences for the future of the therapy. The child in question was actually born a few months earlier on April 6, 2016, but the research was published a few months later in the October edition of Fertility and Sterility. The mother carries DNA that could have given the baby Leigh Syndrome, a severe neurological disorder characterized by psychomotor regression that typically results in death between ages two and three.[1] Also known as subacute necrotizing encephalomyelopathy, Leigh Syndrome is caused by genetic mutations in mitochondrial DNA, which causes defective oxidative phosphorylation. Because people with this condition cannot re-form ATP, “demyleniation, gliosis, necrosis, spongiosis, or capillary proliferation”[2] can occur, thereby producing bilateral lesions across the central nervous system. The 36-year-old mother previously had four miscarriages and successfully birthed two children, both of whom survived less than six years due to the syndrome. For religious reasons, the mother opted for Spindle Nuclear Transfer instead of Pronuclear Transfer,[3] which many religious organizations oppose because it entails the destruction of fertilized eggs.[4] In Pronuclear Transfer, both the parent and donor egg are fertilized. The parent’s nuclear material is then removed from the egg containing mutated mitochondria and inserted into the fertilized donor egg—from which the original nuclear material has been removed and destroyed. Spindle Nuclear Transfer, on the other hand, removes the mother’s nuclear material from the egg with unhealthy mitochondria, then implants it into a donor’s egg. The newly created egg is then fertilized with the father’s sperm. This Spindle Nuclear Transfer was performed in Mexico by a team of doctors led by Dr. John Zhang, the founder of the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City. In their report, the doctors outline that five oocytes were successfully reconstituted, four of which developed into blastocysts. Only one was euploid: containing 46 XY chromosomes. Researchers then biopsied that blastocyst and found that the transmission rate of maternal mtDNA was, “5.10 ± 1.11% and the heteroplasmy level for 8993T>G was 5.73%.”[5] This indicates that at the blastocyst stage, around five percent of the mitochondria are from the original maternal egg with the mutation for Leigh Syndrome. After birth, they biopsied different tissues and found that they had an average of less than 1.60 ± 0.92% of transmitted mtDNA from the original maternal egg. The baby is reportedly doing well and the team of doctors concluded that “[h]uman oocytes reconstituted by SNT are capable of producing a healthy live birth. SNT may provide a novel treatment option in minimizing pathogenic mtDNA transmission from mothers to their babies."[6] Even when considered theoretically, Spindle Nuclear Transfer is controversial. Many doctors believe that the risks at this stage of research are too great. Dr. Trevor Stammers, a bioethicist at St. Mary’s University in London, points out: “We do not yet have a clear picture of the interaction between nuclear DNA and mitochondria.”[7] Others hold that faulty mitochondrial DNA can still be transferred during the procedure. Still more argue this technology could create problems because of germline modification.[8] Dr. Paul Knoepfler, a cell biologist at the UC Davis School of Medicine, explains: “Since this is uncharted territory and the children born from this technology would have heritable genetic changes, there are also significant unknown risks to future generations.”[9] However, proponents counter these arguments. They say the benefits outweigh the risks, as “mitochondrial replacement techniques [like Spindle Nuclear Transfer] would eliminate maternal transmission of mitochondrial disease… allowing a woman with a family history of mitochondrial diseases to ensure her children would not be affected.”[10] Additionally, experts say that no symptoms will occur if less than 20% of the transferred mitochondrial DNA is faulty.[11] And while opponents see potential germline modification as a problem, advocates answer that this could stop a family history of mitochondrial disease, which they deem a more serious concern. In this case specifically, however, there are more issues at hand. While the team of doctors did eliminate the possibility of germline modification by selecting a male embryo, there are other ethical concerns. Some argue that this case could be described as “medical tourism.” While New Hope Medical Clinic does maintain a branch in Mexico, Dr. Zhang stated that Mexico has “no rules.”[12] It is a country with underdeveloped regulations, making it difficult to confirm that doctors adhere to widely-held medical and ethical standards. Furthermore, while it is highly unlikely that the child will develop Leigh’s Syndrome, Dr. Dietrich Egli of the New York Stem Cell Foundation says the 5% mitochondrial transfer rate indicates that the technique “was not carried out well.”[13] He points to studies of embryos where the rate of mtDNA transfer was almost ten times lower. Spindle Nuclear Transfer is currently legal in the UK,[14] and many are hoping to see it legalized in the US, although Congress currently prohibits the FDA from considering applications that would entail trials in people.[15] While Dr. Zhang’s work is arguably revolutionary, many wonder if the manner in which this study was performed—in Mexico and with a high mitochondrial transfer rate—will impact the technology’s future in the US. Last week, Dr. Zhang presented the report to scientists gathered in Salt Lake City, saying that while science isn’t a race, it is “in a sense, a race for the family to find a cure, to find hope.”[16] Only time will tell if this study set back other families racing and hoping for a cure. References 1. "Leigh Syndrome." Genetics Home Reference, US National Library of Medicine, 25 Oct. 2016. Accessed 26 Oct. 2016. 2. McKusick, Victor A., and Ada Hamosh. "LEIGH SYNDROME; LS." Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, Johns Hopkins University, 20 Jan. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 3. Zhang, J, H Liu, S Luo, A Chavez-Badiola, and Z Liu. "First live birth using human oocytes reconstituted by spindle nuclear transfer for mitochondrial DNA mutation causing Leigh syndrome." Fertility and Sterility, vol. 106, no. 3, 2016, pp. e375-76. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 4. Sample, Ian. "‘Three-parent’ babies explained: what are the concerns and are they justified?" The Guardian, 2 Feb. 2015. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 5. Zhang, et al. 6. Ibid. 7. Knapton, Sarah. "Three-parent babies: the arguments for and against." The Telegraph, 3 Feb. 2015. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. "Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy FAQs." New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute, New York Stem Cell Foundation. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 11. Reardon, Sara. "‘Three-parent baby’ claim raises hopes — and ethical concerns." Nature, 28 Sept. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 12. Hamzelou, Jessica. "Exclusive: World’s first baby born with new “3 parent” technique." New Scientist, 27 Sept. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 13. Reardon, Sara. "‘Three-parent baby’ claim raises hopes — and ethical concerns." Nature, 28 Sept. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 14. "3-Person IVF: A Resource Page." Center for Genetics and Society, 24 Oct. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 15. Ritter, Malcolm. "Baby born with DNA from 3 people, first from new technique." Associated Press, 27 Sept. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 16. Chen, Daphne. "Controversy swirls around first three-parent baby." Deseret News, 19 Oct. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. Works consulted Swetlitz, Ike. "FDA urged to approve ‘three-parent embryos,’ a new frontier in reproduction." STAT, 3 Feb. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Oppression1Françoise Lionnet (bio)In her disquietingly incandescent poetic novella, La vie de Josephin le fou, completed with the energy of urgency in just two weeks in November 2002,2 Mauritian author Ananda Devi explores Joséphin's relationship with the protective aquatic environment that becomes his refuge from domestic abuse and maternal rejection:J'ai pris l'habitude d'aller dans la mer chaque fois que le monde d'en haut criait trop fort. La mer m'a (...) accueilli chaque fois sans poser de questions, elle avait pas de voix, la mer, que des sons transparents et mouillés, des sons qui vous bercent et vous endorment et vous cicatrisent et vous guérissent….(20)Going into the ocean became a habit every time the world up above would scream too loud. The ocean welcomed me every time, without asking any questions--the ocean had no voice, only sounds, transparent and soaked, sounds that could rock you to sleep and heal your wounds…..(27)The French-language narrative plays with the homonyms mer (sea/ocean) and mère (mother) to underline the nurturing maternal qualities of the deep, which it contrasts with the behavior of the abused and abusive human mother. Caught in a vortex of violence on land where he must always hold his breath and his tongue, Joséphin has developed the ability to survive without much air. This learned ability to restrict his breathing has prepared him for life under water:J'avais pas besoin de respirer. J'avais tellement retenu ma respiration depuis bébé pour pas la mettre en colère… que c'était facile de le faire de nouveau pour rester longtemps longtemps sous l'eau. Vivre là, en captant quelques bulles d'air échappées des coquilles.(22)I didn't need to breathe. I had held my breath for so long as a baby to not make her mad…. that it was easy to do it again, to stay a long long time under water, to live there, off of a few air bubbles escaped from sea shells.(28)In a story that takes on the generic characteristics of the fantastic, Devi thematizes the relationship between social or familial oppression and the physiological constriction of lungs due to oxygen deficiency. Joséphin's (self-)denial of air speaks to us today, eloquently, of an urgent issue that became prominent in the past two years: choking as a form of torture inflicted upon victims of police brutality. The oft repeated slogan, "I can't breathe," militant words of the international Black Lives Matter movement, [End Page 169] have become a rallying cry against oppression. "I can't breathe" is recognizable everywhere as a sign of outrage against gratuitous human cruelty, and in 2020, George Floyd became its most famous contemporary symbol, after Eric Garner's death in a choke hold first drew attention to the issue. Journalist Lonnae O'Neal has discussed Floyd's fate, his tragic last moments, his call to his absent, deceased mother. O'Neal dwells on the words he uttered as he lay in the street: "Momma! Momma! I am through." In her elegy to black motherhood, O'Neal asserts that a dying man's call to his mother "is a prayer to be seen," "a sacred invocation" that expresses the poignant hope that memory and justice will prevail. She invokes Floyd's need to be recognized as a human being, to testify to his humanity with his last breaths, and thus to be remembered as having mattered. Her lyrical prose contains direct echoes of Martinican poet Aimé Césaire's poem "Le cri" in which the narrator forces recognition of his humanity by leaving traces of his "souffle," his breath, in the invisible presence-absence of air:Le vent novice de la mémoire des méandress'offenseÀ vif que par mon soufflede mon souffle il suffisepour à tous signifierprésents et avenirqu'un homme était làet qu'il a crié[…]The wind, inexpert at remembering meandersis stungto the quick that my breathmy breath alone sufficesto signify to allnow and foreverthat a man was... (shrink)

Although the world has experienced remarkable progress in health care since the last half of the 20th century, global health inequalities still persist. In some poor countries life expectancy is between 37-40 years lower than in rich countries; furthermore, maternal and infant mortality is high and there is lack of access to basic preventive and life-saving medicines, as well a high prevalence of neglected diseases, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Moreover, globalization has made the world more connected than before such (...) that health challenges today are no longer limited within national or regional boundaries, making all persons equally vulnerable. Because of this, diseases in the most affluent countries are closely connected with diseases in the poorest countries. In this paper, we argue that, because of global health inequalities, in a situation of equal vulnerability, there is need for global solidarity not only as a means of reducing health inequalities, but also as a way of putting up a united force against global health challenges. We argue for an African approach to solidarity in which the humanity of a person is not determined by his/her being human or rational capacity, but by his/her capacity to live a virtuous life. According to this view of solidarity, because no one is self-sufficient, no individual can survive alone. If we are to collectively flourish in a world where no individual, nation or region has all the health resources or protection needed for survival, we must engage in solidarity where we remain compassionate and available to one another at all times. (shrink)

Heuser, Eller and Byrne provide important descriptive ethics data about how physicians counsel women on the clinical management of pregnancies complicated by severe fetal anomalies. The authors present an account of what such counselling ought to be based on, the ethical concept of the fetus as a patient and the professional responsibility model of obstetric ethics. When there is certainty about the diagnosis and either a very high probability of either death as the outcome of the anomaly or survival (...) with severe and irreversible deficit of cognitive developmental capacity as a result of the anomaly diagnosed, the pregnant woman should be offered the alternatives of aggressive and non-aggressive obstetric management and induced abortion before viability. It is also ethically permissible to offer feticide followed by termination of pregnancy after viability in such cases. This ethically justified approach will reduce the variation in the actual practices of specialists in maternal–fetal medicine described by Heuser, Eller and Byrne. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bringing Cancer Care to Those who Don't Have ItLawrence N. ShulmanI have been treating cancer patients in the Harvard Medical School hospitals since 1977, and in those 35 years we have made tremendous progress. Though work still needs to be done, and far too many patients still die of cancer, many are cured. In particular, children and young adults have a high rate of cure from such diseases as (...) Hodgkin's lymphoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and childhood sarcoma. Patients with breast cancer in the US have a greater than 80% chance for long-term survival. The death rate from cervical cancer in the US is very low. These results have been achieved by making diagnoses earlier, in many cases surgical excision, and often systemic therapies such as chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, radiation therapy, and more recently by using so-called "targeted" therapies—those directed at particular molecular characteristics of the cancer cells.Princess Dina Mired has said that the opportunity to survive cancer should not be an accident of geography. In cases where we already have effective and inexpensive tools to cure cancer, these treatments should be considered a basic human right, a life-saving medical service.I met Patty, a young woman living in the U.S. during November of her senior year in high school, after she discovered a small lump above her left collar bone. Though she felt entirely well, she called her primary care doctor who saw her the next day, felt the enlarged lymph node, and referred her to a surgeon, who did a biopsy later that week. Her primary care doctor also called me, and we scheduled a visit when the pathology results were available. The following week the pathologist notified Patty's pediatrician that the biopsy showed Hodgkin's lymphoma. When I met Patty, she was a bright and focused young woman, waiting to hear about her college applications and enjoying her senior year. Her cancer diagnosis was completely out of context with her life as she planned it, but with the support of her family and boyfriend, she seemed prepared to take things one step at a time. A PET CT scan demonstrated a modest mass in the mediastinum (chest), but no other disease. She was in an early stage of the disease with an excellent prognosis. We recommended and administered six months of chemotherapy with doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine—four chemotherapy agents that are off-patent, and relatively inexpensive. She lost her hair, not a trivial issue for her, but otherwise felt reasonably well during the treatment. She was determined to graduate with her classmates, and was able continue to attend school and keep up with her work. In June, seven months into her cancer diagnosis and treatment, she graduated with honors, and was on track to enroll in college in September.Like other 18-year-old women with Hodgkin's lymphoma, Patty had an over 80% chance for cure with the potential for a long and productive life ahead of her because we could perform a biopsy, make a diagnosis, and safely and effectively treat her with four inexpensive, off-patent, chemotherapy drugs. She had nearly the same likelihood of living a long and fruitful life as her classmates, and had the same chances for childbearing. In my line of work, with the knowledge we now possess, to allow someone like Patty to die without a chance of curative care is simply unacceptable. Treatment of curable cancers should be considered on par with the right to clean water, adequate nutrition, treatment for infectious disease, and access to maternal and child healthcare services.But in many places in the world, people with cancers we could easily eradicate in Boston have no access to cancer services, and do die unnecessarily. The local healthcare infrastructure has no [End Page E10] capacity to evaluate a patient, perform or process a biopsy, make a diagnosis, or treat the patient with potentially curative surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. I have rounded on the wards of hospitals in developing countries, stopping to talk with numerous patients like Patty: young women, some of whom might have had Hodgkin's lymphoma, but no... (shrink)

While not ignored, the question of the role of mothers in the schema of political rule in Hobbes is not often taken up. Distinct from his contemporaries, Hobbes acknowledges only minimal differences between men and women, and argues that, because maternal protection and nourishment are necessary for its survival, the mother dominates the infant in the state of nature. How to explain that the mother loses this power of domination in the social or political order? Hobbes does not (...) explicitly say. However, some possibilities can be extracted from his texts. -/- Here, I will attempt to explain the loss of maternal power by examining Hobbes's discourse on the different modes of dominion and political rule in "De Cive" and "Leviathan." I will concentrate on their differences, drawing from Yves Charles Zarka's reading of them. Then I will approach the question of the mother and her position in the hierarchy of servitude in each of these texts, appealing to Carole Pateman's analyses as well as Zarka's. Finally, I will present what role the mother's dominion over her children plays in Hobbes's schema. (shrink)

This article reviews the effects of malnutrition on early brain development using data generated from animal experiments and human clinical studies. Three related processes, each with their own functional consequences, are implicated in the alteration of brain development. (1) Maternal undernutrition at the start of pregnancy results in reduced transfer of nutrients across the placenta, allowing the conservation of effort for future reproductive episodes. (2) Differential allocation to growing organs by the fetus in response to nutritional stress spares the (...) brain to a large though still limited degree, reflecting the organ’s relative contribution to survival and reproductive success. (3) Prenatal malnutrition disrupts developing neurotransmitter systems, which results in the expression of specific cognitive and affective traits. It is argued that the increasing size and therefore cost of the brain, in conjunction with increasing ecological instability and marginality, reinforced selection for maternally controlled growth suppression of offspring, reallocation of organ growth rates by offspring, and behavioral changes related to development of neurotransmitter systems. (shrink)

Background While prenatal surgery historically was performed exclusively for lethal conditions, today intrauterine surgery is also performed to decrease postnatal disabilities for non-lethal conditions. We sought to describe physicians' attitudes about prenatal surgery for lethal and non-lethal conditions and to elucidate characteristics associated with these attitudes. Methods Survey of 1200 paediatric surgeons, neonatologists and maternal–fetal medicine specialists. Results Of 1176 eligible physicians, 670 responded. In the setting of a lethal condition for which prenatal surgery would likely result in the (...) child surviving with a severe disability, most respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed that they would recommend the surgery. Male physicians were twice as likely to recommend surgery for the lethal condition, as were physicians who believe that abortion is morally wrong. Older physicians were less likely to recommend surgery. For non-lethal conditions, most respondents agreed that they would recommend prenatal surgery, even if the surgery increases the risk of prematurity or fetal death. Compared with MFMs, surgeons were less likely to recommend such surgery, as were physicians not affiliated with a fetal centre, and physicians who were religious. Conclusion Physician’s attitudes about prenatal surgery relate to physicians’ beliefs about disability as well as demographic, cultural and religious characteristics. Given the variety of views, parents are likely to receive different recommendations from their doctors about the preferable treatment choice. (shrink)

All primates except human beings have thick coats of body hair. This suggests the primate ancestors of human beings likewise had such body hair and that, for some evolutionary reason, lost their body hair. Various theories have been put forward but none is fully adequate. This article presents the “naked love theory.” This theory locates the origin of human hairlessness in the ancestral mother—infant relationship. In this view, hairlessness is ultimately the adaptive consequence of bipedalism. Because of bipedalism, ancestral infants (...) lost their prehensile feet and thus lost the ability to grasp the mother's fur with their feet, as do other primate infants. Early bipedal mothers were thus under pressure to carry the infant. Therefore infants survived only if mothers had a strong desire to hold them. Because of the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact, the desire to hold the infant would have been stronger in mothers possessing a hairless mutation that enabled them to give birth to hairless infants. Survival of these infants would have then been greater than that of hair-covered infants. The hairlessness that began to appear in this context of maternal selection was then reinforced by sexual selection in the male—female sexual relationship. This is because a hairless sexual partner would have enabled the hairless individual to recreate the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact in the mother—infant relationship. This theory then helps to explain the evolutionary origins of romantic love. (shrink)

Benenson et al. postulate that human females evolved unique survival adaptations to facilitate maternal and grandmaternal care. This hypothesis is consistent with the broader hypothesis that female phenotypes are more ecologically optimal, but further evidence is needed to make a compelling case that sex differences in self-protection are not primarily the result of more intense sexual selection on males.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Variation of the Pindaric Break-off in Nemean 4Poulcheria KyriakouThe Pindaric break-off is a provocative technique, to modern tastes at least. It literally breaks the dramatic illusion in a radical manner and projects an ambiguous picture of the poet. On the one hand the artist seems not entirely in control of his demanding material; on the other, he appears fully aware of both the precepts of aristocratic interaction, the (...) guest-friendship relationship of poet and client, and his divine poetic gift that allows him to detect the best way to immortalize the victor and execute the song in the most impeccable fashion. It is characteristic that in extant Greek literature the break-off motif reappears only in Hellenistic poets who valued and exploited all means of putting together an out-of-the-ordinary poem.1 The modern scholarly consensus on break-offs clashes with older views which go back to the scholia.2 When Pindar uses break-offs, they function in a meaningful and elegant way and are not to be taken at face value as expressions of genuine on the poet's part or recognition of a problem in the composition. It is equally unhelpful to consider them a mere empty motif, a sort of formula employed to no particular end. This is not to say that the [End Page 17] break-off might not have been traditional in Greek choral lyric.3 Since so little of this profuse genre has survived, this possibility cannot be excluded and the technique is certainly employed by Bacchylides (5.100-1 and 10.41-42; cf. Simonides fr. 10).4 But the traditional character would not automatically rob the break-off of claims to literary import.Despite this general agreement, break-offs do remain among the most problematic Pindaric passages. For one, they are not uniform: in the so-called hush passages (e.g. O. 1.28-35, 9.35-41, 13.91, N. 5.14-18) the poet refuses to tell or continue a particular tale that he judges unacceptable on moral/religious grounds. These passages will not concern me here.5 Instead, I will focus on another type of break-off where Pindar states his intention to abandon the specific, usually mythic, thread he has been pursuing because time is pressing on and he should take up either the praise, i.e. the explicit praise, of the victor and his lineage or another myth deemed more appropriate for the "moment."6 Among odes with this type of break-off N. 4 holds a prominent position because it includes not just one but two break-offs and has generated much discussion on account of the first one:[End Page 18].(N. 4.33-43)At first sight it is surprising that this particular ode would present interpretive difficulties at all because it is one of the most elegantly and clearly articulated in the Pindaric corpus.7 When considered in its entirety, the ode's most pleasant characteristic is the near perfect structural and thematical symmetry, from the overall distribution and arrangement of stanzas and themes to details like number of lines devoted to specific motifs and verbal echoes that connect passages with each other. From a total of twelve stanzas six are devoted to the victor Timasarchus and his family and six to the achievements of the glorious Aeginetan heroes of the past, the Aeacids. The praise of the victor and his family is placed at the beginning and end of the ode, with three stanzas (N. 4.1-24) preceding and three (N. 4.73-96) following the mythic section (N. 4.25-68).8 The beginning of the ode deals with the victorious athlete (N. 4.9-24) and the end with his maternal uncle, Callicles (N. 4.79-90), both coupled with their fathers, Timocritus and Euphanes, who were competent musicians. Pindar also extols his own song in the first and last stanza. The mythic section narrates in some detail the victories of Telamon (N. 4.25-32) and Peleus (N. 4.54-68) which are separated by a catalog of other Aeacids, the first two being sons of Telamon (N. 4.46-48... (shrink)

There are limitations of obstetric estimation of neonatal outcome in extremely premature newborns. Predicting outcomes, survival, and morbidity are often uncertain, such as in cases of extreme prematurity, certain fetal anomalies, intrauterine growth restriction, and intrauterine infection. Informed consent, truth telling, the maternal–fetal conflict, decision making, and the fetus as a patient are the most important issues of obstetric and neonatal ethics. Because the boundary between utility and futility is not clear, the best interest of the mother, the (...) fetus, and the newborn will be subject of discussion every time. Here, we report a case of obstetric patient to discuss. (shrink)

Using historical data from the Utah Population Database, this analysis finds significant, consistent, but small adverse mortality effects for mothers after age 50 who had mostly sons. Examination of age-dependent effects indicates that this association increases with mother’s age. Additionally, mothers who had mostly daughters faced mortality risks that increased with age. Offspring sex composition did not have a significant effect on paternal mortality. Interaction analyses were conducted to examine the effect of offspring sex composition with regard to historical period, (...) residential location, socioeconomic status, and childhood survival. No other interactions were found to be statistically significant. Having mostly boys remained detrimental to maternal mortality regardless of childhood survival. (shrink)

O artigo mostra como Winnicott, a partir de uma experiência assistencial de caráter institucional, soube observar o que era propriamente terapêutico para as crianças envolvidas, e formular os princípios em que essa ação terapêutica estava baseada, relacionando-os com a teoria que ele começara a desenvolver: a teoria do amadurecimento pessoal. Um desses princípios é o da sobrevivência, conceito-chave do cuidado materno e terapêutico. Na continuação, estão descritos alguns aspectos essenciais da capacidade de sobrevivência da mãe e do analista.The article starts (...) by showing that Winnicott, by considering the practice of institutional assintance, was able to find what was therapeutic for the children involved and to formulate principles upon which these therapeutic effects were based, putting them in the context of the theory he began to develop: the theory of personal development. One of these principles is survival, which is also the key concept for characterizing maternal and therapeutic care. After making that point, the article studies various essential aspects of the capacity of survival of both mothers and analysts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Mary C. RawlinsonShannon Hoff (bio)Mary C. Rawlinson, The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” New York: University Press, 2021, 215 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-19905-6Mary rawlinson shows that to be genuinely receptive to a philosophical text one must be creative, and she brings the Phenomenology of Spirit to (...) life with her reading. It speaks of and to experience, and she makes it resound as such, matching its aptitude with her own rich descriptions of the character of experience. The reader is bound to learn a lot from her careful and vivid analyses of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, where she displays her power to digest a text that is almost impossibly unwieldy. Both students and scholars of Hegel’s philosophy will find satisfaction here: her book will spark understanding and excitement in inexperienced readers and hone approaches to complex issues of interpretation in experienced ones.Rawlinson opens The Betrayal of Substance with the provocative thesis that Hegel “writes with both hands” (xv). On the one hand, he affirms the abundance of difference in life by insisting on the material realization of the abstract concept, on the life of the singleton (her translation of das Einzelne) as the site of this realization, and on the difference intrinsic to identities (xiii). On the other hand, she says, he aims at a science of logic beyond phenomenology, where singularity has been erased and difference comprehended, such that “nothing is other to it”; this is “an unrelenting insistence on an absolute [End Page 225] detachment from life” (53). Rawlinson tracks this severance of concept and life throughout the Phenomenology: in the abandonment of sensuousness in sense-certainty; in the thing’s dissolution in perception; in “the ‘loss of reality’ of the play of forces”; in the struggle to the death, where self-consciousness “risks life absolutely” (66); in stoicism and skepticism, which “install an absolute difference between life and thought” (47). The life of the singleton is severed from the concept by the production (on the part of the unhappy consciousness) of “ethics, culture, morality, and religion as institutional infrastructures sustaining the self-transcendence of the singleton in the ‘we’ of a community” (66); by reason’s erasure of singularity in its accomplishment of a universal consciousness (68); by perpetual reference to the Bacchanalian revel, that “frenzy of the group that survives [the singleton’s] collapse” (xxx). (Indeed, one of the book’s contributions is its illumination of the prevalence of the image of the revel in Hegel’s text.)In response, Rawlinson asserts the need for a double reading of this double writing: (1) to affirm the capacious narrative that dislodges “ready-made abstractions” and engages the “thick richness of life,” because that is where the truth lies (xxix–xxx); and (2) to oppose Hegel’s “completion” of the phenomenological project and the departure from it to logic, and with it the erasure of the singleton. The book reflects the style of this double reading at each turn, in turns rebellious and appreciative, at ease with its own ambiguity toward Hegel. Rawlinson produces three central pieces of evidence for her critique, three “dangling threads [that] refuse to be woven into the completed fabric of absolute knowing[:] sexual difference, the mortality of the singleton,... and the differences of style in art and literature” (xv). Her critique of Hegel’s abandonment of life sets in relief the critical centrality of Hegel’s identification of maternal love as “the most dangerous force with which the state must contend” (68): this love is a clear instance of affirmation of the singleton over the “we” in which it is submerged. Finally, Rawlinson opposes the idea that truth is “the fully realized series of shapes of knowing and figures of truth” in which “science will have been the truth of phenomenology” with the hypothesis instead that “phenomenology will prove to have been the truth of science” (xliv).Itself beginning several times, The Betrayal of Substance thematizes Hegel’s multiple beginnings and the insight ref lected thereby... (shrink)

This brief report raises the ethical dilemma encountered by an obstetrician involved in the care of a pregnant woman with life-threatening disease. This is a particularly difficult issue if the maternal well-being is in conflict with the survival of the unborn child.

Given an equal sex ratio at conception, the excess of human males at birth can only be explained by greater loss of females during pregnancy. It is proposed that the bias against females during human development is the result of a greater degree of genetic and metabolic “differentness” between female embryos and maternal tissues than for similarly aged males, and that successful implantation and placentation represents a threshold dichotomy, where the acceptance threshold shifts depending on maternal condition, especially (...) stress. Right and left ovaries are not equal, and neither are the eggs and follicular fluid that they produce, and it is further hypothesized that during times of stress, the implantation threshold is shifted sufficiently to favor survival of females, most likely those originating from the right ovary, and that this, rather than simply a greater loss of males, explains at least some of the variability in the human sex ratio at birth. (shrink)

Recently claims have been made for radical new insights in the field of invertebrate immunology that involve memory, specificity and/or maternal transfer of immunocompetence. For evidence these claims rely on phenomena, such as survival or reproductive capacity, observed at the level of the whole organism. The allure of these apparently revelatory hypotheses is that they are contrary to established views of innate immunity. They draw implicit analogy to adaptive responses in jawed vertebrates and the terminology used creates an (...) incomplete and misleading picture. We argue that the case for adaptive immunity in invertebrates based only on such phenomena is weak and flawed, as it can only be upheld if supported by descriptions of the underlying mechanisms. We caution against a reliance on this approach as a means of advancing this field—highlighting, as an example, some negative commercial implications of adopting this approach. BioEssays 29:1138–1146, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)