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Babies Abducted in Canadian Hospitals | rabble.ca

2012-04-28T21:19:00.001-04:00

In Canada, only HEALTHY mostly Caucasian, pregnant girls and women, were targeted and systematically rounded up by government social workers and falsely imprisoned in warehouses for pregnant young women. These warehouses were referred to as "maternity homes." Non - Caucasian pregnant girls and women were left alone because their babies were not in demand by infertiles. Infertiles DEMANDED healthy Caucasian newborn infants and the governments of the day from post WWII until the 1980s committed criminal acts in order to supply this demand.
Infertile couples were provided access to these government funded and religious run maternity facilities to inspect and choose their "pregnant girl."
The pregnant young women were subjected to lectures from infertiles who explained why they couldn't have a baby and how much a baby would mean to them.
The pregnant minor's parents were lied to about the physical, sexual and psychological abuse these pregnant young women would be subjected to.
The babies were then abducted from their legal mothers under an illegal hospital protocol that targeted single mothers for their healthy white infants. These healthy white pregnant girls and young women (usually experiencing their 1st pregnancy) were exploited for their reproduction and used to supply the insatiable demand of infertiles who had lined up for babies on government adoption waitlists - the same government department that was exploiting and abusing these pregnant young women.
The government via the medical profession and hospitals, social workers and religious organizations colluded and conspired to abduct the babies from these mothers on the delivery table to meet the demand. These professionals who had first sworn an oath to "first do no harm" breached their code of ethics and committed criminal acts in order to facilitate the abduction of these infants.
These pregnant girls and women WERE NOT aware that they were being systematically targeted for their babies. They completely trusted the professionals and could not believe for one moment that there was an ulterior sinister motive to abduct their babies at birth.
All of the parties, and in particular the medical profession should be held criminally accountable for abducting these mothers' infants and aiding and abetting in the transfer of these same babies to unrelated strangers.

via rabble.ca

The 2-Year Window | Mother Jones

2012-04-23T08:58:00.001-04:00

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In The New Republic this week, Jon Cohn has an eye-opening piece, "The Two Year Window," about advances in the science of early childhood development. It opens with a description of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a study that removed infants from warehouse-style orphanages in Romania and adopted them out:

It was ten years after the fall of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose scheme for increasing the country's population through bans on birth control and abortion had filled state-run institutions with children their parents couldn't support.... The new government remained convinced that the institutions were a good idea—and was still warehousing at least 60,000 kids, some of them born after the old regime's fall, in facilities where many received almost no meaningful human interaction. [Neuroscientist Charles Nelson] prevailed upon the government to allow them to remove some of the children from the orphanages and place them with foster families. Then, the researchers would observe how they fared over time in comparison with the children still in the orphanages.

…Prior to the project, investigators had observed that the orphans had a high frequency of serious developmental problems, from diminished IQs to extreme difficulty forming emotional attachments. Meanwhile, imaging and other tests revealed that some of the orphans had reduced activity in their brains. The Bucharest project confirmed that these findings were more than random observations. It also uncovered a striking pattern: Orphans who went to foster homes before their second birthdays often recovered some of their abilities. Those who went to foster homes after that point rarely did.

This past May, a team led by Stacy Drury of Tulane reported a similar finding—with an intriguing twist. The researchers found that telomeres, which are protective caps that sit on the ends of chromosomes, were shorter in children who had spent more time in the Romanian orphanages....It was the clearest signal yet that neglect of very young children does not merely stunt their emotional development. It changes the architecture of their brains.

…"The concept of disrupting brain circuitry is much more compelling than the concept that poverty is bad for your health," says Jack Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician and chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. "It gives us a basis for developing new ideas, for going into policy areas, given what we know, and saying here are some new strategies worth trying."

What's new here isn't really the idea that experiences in early childhood are important. In fact, in the era following the Second World War, the idea that habits established early in life are permanent was, if anything, belabored too much. "If mothers did not nurture their infants properly," Jerome Kagan wrote in 1999, criticizing this widespread belief, "their children would be vulnerable to a dull mind, a wild spirit, and a downward spiral…This view of development rests on the assumption that every experience produces a permanent physical change somewhere in the central nervous system, and therefore the earliest experiences provide the scaffolding for the child's future thought and behavior."

What Kagan was criticizing, though, was primarily the idea that particular styles of parenting were necessary to produce well-adjusted children. Generally speaking, that turns out not to be true: You don't need to play Mozart to your baby or jump through hoops to make sure she's properly "attached." Most middle-class kids turn out okay even though they're exposed to a wide variety of parenting styles.

But Cohn's piece is about something different: It's about kids whose infancy is, to put it bluntly, fairly appalling. And not just in warehouses in Bucharest. Diana Rauner visited child care facilities in Chicago while she was working on her doctoral dissertation and "described facilities where infants were strapped in car seats, 'watching The Lion King all day,' while the older kids were 'circling the room almost like sharks' and throwing things at the infants, because they had nothing else to do." That kind of environment, it turns out, can cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level, and it's probably a lot more common than you think.

You can see more of the evidence for the importance of early childhood in the chart on the right, which I posted earlier this year. It comes from James Heckman, probably the preeminent researcher in this area, and it shows average achievement test scores for different classes of children. All show the exact same dynamic: Gaps show up as early as age three and persist pretty much forever. Some of this is due to genetic differences, but not all of it. It's also due to differences in children's early environments. The lesson is simple: If you want to have a real impact on how kids do in school, you have to get to them early.

But even this understates the benefit of intensive early interventions. The payoff, in general, doesn't come in higher test scores, anyway. A large and growing body of research suggests that it comes in other behaviors: for example, the ability to delay gratification, the ability to hold a job, the ability to control your temper, and the ability to stay away from drugs and alcohol.

The problem, of course, is that early intervention costs money. Lots of money. According to Cohn, we currently spend about $11,000 per student in K-12 and about $4,000 per child under the age of four. That's crazy. But if we wanted to equalize that spending, how could we do it? One option is just to raise more money. But if we spent $11,000 for every child under the age of four, that would come to over $100 billion per year in new spending. There's no way that's going to happen.

Another option would be to take the pot of money we already spend and equalize it: spend about $9,000 per child all the way from ages 1-18. Unfortunately, this is hardly any more likely: If we tried to reduce the amount we spend on K-12, teachers unions would go ballistic, ed reformers would go ballistic, and suburban parents would go ballistic. If I were a benevolent dictator, I'd do it anyway, because it would almost certainly be a far better use of our existing money. But I'm not, am I?

Still, this is an area that cuts across party lines and deserves far more attention than it gets. The evidence has been mounting for a long time that intensive early interventions produce a huge bang for the buck, far more than what we spend in primary and secondary schools. The problem is that the bucks have to be spent now, and the bang doesn't arrive for another decade or two. Where's Bill Gates when you need him?

via motherjones.com

from the article, dated Nov 2011: "Orphans who went to foster homes before their second birthdays often recovered some of their abilities. Those who went to foster homes after that point rarely did."

Parents Regain Custody of Son After Six Year Legal Battle | fox4kc.com – Kansas City news & weather from WDAF TV – FOX 4

2012-04-20T15:31:00.001-04:00

Parents Regain Custody of Son After Six Year Legal Battle

Posted on: 6:11 pm, February 21, 2012, by Rob Low

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RAYTOWN, Mo. — Seven years after he was born, a Raytown boy is finally living with his biological parents. Noah Bond’s birth father fought all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court to get his son back.

Until August of 2011, Noah was living in Texas with a couple who wanted to adopt him and who had raised him since he was an infant. But the birth father, Craig Lentz had never agreed to the adoption and his girlfriend, Ebbie Bond says she only did so under duress.

Noah Bond is now seven-years-old, but his birthday in December was the first he ever spent with his parents. It was December 2004 when Craig Lentz filmed the birth of his son when his girlfriend gave birth. But during a bout of what she says was postpartum depression, Ebbie Bond agreed to give up custody.

Lentz’s name wasn’t on the birth certificate so he had no legal standing to stop the process.

“When we went to get it, there was no record that Noah was ever born.”

More than six years of legal battles followed with Stuart and Megan Taylor, who refused to talk with us the one time we caught up with them outside of court.

“Somehow the Taylor’s had changed Noah’s birth certificate without ever having an adoption and that if I died in the accident there would be no record that he was ever born and he would’ve just disappeared into Texas and that would’ve been that,” said Craig Lentz.

The accident Lentz refers to was a car crash on Highway 350 in June of 2010. He died on the operating table twice only to survive months of painful rehabilitation and more delays to his expensive custody battle.

“If you’ve got a college education and you’re able to raise a million dollars and you have a strong faith in god that you may eventually get part justice,” Lentz said.

Justice for Craig and Ebbie came in August when Craig was finally awarded permanent custody of Noah.

“I knew a time when I missed him so much and I wanted to see him every day and every child I ever saw reminded me of him and know I can get up in the morning and see him, see his face I don’t just have to imagine his face,” Bond said.

Now, in first grade, Noah’s parents say he’s adjusted well with the help of therapy.

“These people played keep away for six and a half years and now Noah’s returned to us, they wouldn’t even participate in the therapy that was ordered by the court,” Lentz said.

FOX 4 asked Noah if he wondered why he wasn’t living with his biological parents when he was living with the Taylor’s in Texas. Here’s how he responded.

“I didn’t know they were my mom and dad,” he said.

When the Taylor’s handed Noah off in August they left him a letter explaining they would be cutting off all contact.

“He needs to attach to Craig and Ebbie and the family he will be a part of,” Taylor said.

“I didn’t think I could love him more but my love has just deepened so much from actually being able to take care of him,” Bond said.

Craig Lentz was allowed visitation with Noah over the last six years but it was limited and Ebbie Bond wasn’t allowed to see him at all because legally, she had given up custody. But there’s nothing to keep her from seeing Noah since now that Craig has custody and the two are still a couple.

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via fox4kc.com

BBC News - Little boy lost finds his mother using Google Earth

2012-04-17T10:26:00.001-04:00

13 April 2012 Last updated at 19:26 ET

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Little boy lost finds his mother using Google Earth
By Robin Banerji BBC World Service

Continue reading the main story

In today's Magazine

Recognition finally for a warrior priest's heroics

How dangerous are swans?

'Pushy parent' syndrome in ancient Rome

The truth about Greek Porsche owners

An Indian boy who lost his mother in 1986 has found her 25 years later from his new home in Tasmania - using satellite images.

Saroo was only five years old when he got lost. He was travelling with his older brother, working as a sweeper on India's trains. "It was late at night. We got off the train, and I was so tired that I just took a seat at a train station, and I ended up falling asleep."

That fateful nap would determine the rest of his life. "I thought my brother would come back and wake me up but when I awoke he was nowhere to be seen. I saw a train in front of me and thought he must be on that train. So I decided to get on it and hoped that I would meet my brother."

Saroo did not meet his brother on the train. Instead, he fell asleep and had a shock when he woke up 14 hours later. Though he did not realise it at first, he had arrived in Calcutta, India's third biggest city and notorious for its slums.

Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

I do not think any mother or father would like to have their five year old wandering alone in the slums and train stations of Calcutta”
End Quote Saroo Brierley

"I was absolutely scared. I didn't know where I was. I just started to look for people and ask them questions."

Soon he was sleeping rough. "It was a very scary place to be. I don't think any mother or father would like to have their five year old wandering alone in the slums and trains stations of Calcutta."

The little boy learned to fend for himself. He became a beggar, one of the many children begging on the streets of the city. "I had to be quite careful. You could not trust anyone." Once he was approached by a man who promised him food and shelter and a way back home. But Saroo was suspicious. "Ultimately I think he was going to do something not nice to me, so I ran away."

But in the end, he did get off the streets. He was taken in by an orphanage, which put him up for adoption. He was adopted by the Brierleys, a couple from Tasmania. "I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia."

Saroo settled down well in his new home. But as he got older the desire to find his birth family became increasingly strong. The problem was that as an illiterate five-year-old he had not known the name of the town he had come from. All he had to go on were his vivid memories. So he began using Google Earth to search for where he might have been born.

"It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, 'Does this match?' And when you say, 'No', you keep on going and going and going."
Google Earth image that helped Saroo find his way home

Eventually Saroo hit on a more effective strategy. "I multiplied the time I was on the train, about 14 hours, with the speed of Indian trains and I came up with a rough distance, about 1,200km."

Continue reading the main story
Find out more

Saroo Brierley spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service

Listen to the programme

More from Outlook

More from the BBC World Service

He drew a circle on a map with its centre in Calcutta, with its radius about the distance he thought he had travelled. Incredibly, he soon discovered what he was looking for: Khandwa. "When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up. I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play."

Soon he made his way to Khandwa, the town he had discovered online. He found his way around the town with his childhood memories. Eventually he found his own home in the neighbourhood of Ganesh Talai. But it was not what he had hoped for. "When I got to the door I saw a lock on it. It look old and battered, as if no-one had lived there for quite a long time."

Saroo had a photograph of himself as a child and he still remembered the names of his family. A neighbour said that his family had moved.

"Another person came and then a third person turned up, and that is when I struck gold. He said, 'Just wait here for a second and I shall be back.' And when he did come back after a couple of minutes he said, 'Now I will be taking you to your mother.'"

Continue reading the main story
Lost and found

1981: Saroo is born

1986: He loses his family and ends up living on the streets of Calcutta

1987: He is adopted by an Australian couple and grows up in Tasmania

2011: He finds his home town on Google Earth

2012: He is reunited with his mother in Khandwa

"I just felt numb and thought, 'Am I hearing what I think I am hearing?'"

Saroo was taken to meet his mother who was nearby. At first he did not recognise her.

"The last time I saw her she was 34 years old and a pretty lady, I had forgotten that age would get the better of her. But the facial structure was still there and I recognised her and I said, 'Yes, you are my mother.'

"She grabbed my hand and took me to her house. She could not say anything to me. I think she was as numb as I was. She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost."

Although she had long feared he was dead, a fortune teller had told Saroo's mother that one day she would see her son again. "I think the fortune teller gave her a bit of energy to live on and to wait for that day to come."

And what of the brother with whom Saroo had originally gone travelling? Unfortunately, the news was not good. "A month after I had disappeared my brother was found in two pieces on a railway track." His mother had never known whether foul play was involved or whether the boy had simply slipped and fallen under a train.

"We were extremely close and when I walked out of India the tearing thing for me was knowing that my older brother had passed away."

For years Saroo Brierley went to sleep wishing he could see his mother again and his birth family. Now that he has, he feels incredibly grateful. He has kept in touch with his newly found family.

"It has taken the weight off my shoulders. I sleep a lot better now."

And there is something to make him sleep better - with memories of Slumdog Millionaire still fresh, publishers and film producers are getting interested in his incredible story.

Saroo Brierley spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service

via bbc.co.uk

Steve Carter, 35, discovers he was kidnapped by mother when he was a baby while searching online | Mail Online

2012-04-17T10:17:00.001-04:00

'I got chills when I saw it was me': Man, 35, discovers he was kidnapped by mother as a baby while searching missing persons website

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 13:21 EST, 16 April 2012 | UPDATED: 13:55 EST, 16 April 2012

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Found: Steve Carter has discovered he was a missing child 34 years after he and his mother vanished when was was six months old

Steve Carter had always had questions about his childhood: why was his birth certificate created a year after his birth; who were his real parents?
Yet the 35-year-old, who was adopted aged four, was stunned when a simple internet search revealed a past that threw up even more questions.
After reading about Carlina White, an Atlanta woman who discovered she was snatched from a Harlem hospital as a baby, Carter decided to conduct his own search.
And he was stunned when he found a picture on missingkids.com of what a baby named Marx Panama Barnes would look like now - and realised it was him.
'I got chills,' Carter, who lives in Philadelphia, told People magazine. 'I was like, "Holy c**p, it's me".'
He discovered that he had been born in Hau'ula, Hawaii, but had gone missing with his mother, Charlotte Moriarty, when he was six months old.
His mother had disappeared before, but after she failed to return after three weeks, her partner and Carter's father, Mark Barnes, reported the pair missing.
Speaking to People magazine, Barnes said he never knew what had happened to his girlfriend and baby son on June 21, 1977.
'I spent about a year and a half going crazy driving around the island,' Barnes, now 61, said. 'It was rough.'
Now Carter has discovered that his mother took him to a stranger's home, where she gave police a fake name and birth date for her son.

Questions: Carter, then known as Marx Panama Barnes, vanished with his mother Charlotte Moriarty, who dropped him into state care before disappearing again. She has never been found

She was taken to a psychiatric hospital and Carter was put in protective care, People reported. But she vanished a few days later - and has never been found.
With Moriarty missing and a fake name stunting any investigation, Carter became a ward of the state and he was placed in an orphanage 30 miles from where he had lived with his parents.

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Three years later, he was introduced to Steve and Pat Carter. 'It was love at first sight,' Pat said.
Yet despite a comfortable upbringing with the couple in a south suburb of New Jersey, he was racked with questions about his childhood. It led him to his life-changing discovery online.

Discovery: Carter (left, at three weeks old) was adopted aged four and moved to New Jersey. He looked online for clues to his past and found a picture (right) as he would look aged 28 on a missing children's site

He took a DNA test that confirmed the boy in the picture was him, but he admitted he was 'terrified' about meeting his long-lost relatives.
His adoptive mother Pat said she was threatened by the news. 'I felt like we'd taken someone else's child, though that wasn't true,' she said.
In February, months after the DNA test confirmed his identity, he called Jennifer Monnheimer - Moriarty's daughter and his older half sister.

Monnheimer, 43, was eight and living with her father in New Mexico when her mother and brother vanished.

'Truthfully I thought they were dead,' she said. 'I was really numb.' She added she had grown up 'scanning crowds' for her missing family.
It was due to Monnheimer that the picture had even appeared on the missing children's website.

Location: Carter went missing from his home in Hau'ula, Hawaii. His adoptive parents moved to New Jersey

In 2001, she convinced Hawaiian officials to re-open the investigation into the disappearances and they created the photo of her brother.
'If it wasn't for her, it would still be a cold case,' Charlene Takeno from the Missing Child Center in Hawaii told People.

Carter has yet to meet his father, Mark Barnes, who now lives in California and has two daughters at college - and who has always wondered about his son since his disappearance in 1977.

When Carter called him in February this year, he was speechless: 'All I could say was, "Wow. Oh wow. Wow".'
Carter, who now works for a medical software company in Philadelphia and is married, said he had often wondered where he came from as a child.
Now, as the discovery begins to settle in, he looks forward to reuniting with his father and sister this summer. 'It's good to know where you've come from,' he said.
CARLINA WHITE: THE STORY THAT SPARKED A SEARCH

In 2011, Steve Carter read the story of Carlina White and was inspired to look on missing people websites.
White was snatched from a hospital in Harlem, New York where she was being treated for a fever when she was just 19 days old.
It is believed a woman dressed as a nurse - but who was not an employee - took her during the night.
She was raised as Nejdra Nance by Ann Pettway in Bridgeport, Connecticut, just 45 miles from where her parents had lived.
She moved to Atlanta, Georgia after high school, where she became suspicious about her identity.
She believed she did not look like her mother or siblings and struggled to obtain a social security card.
White searched missing children's websites and was stunned when she found her picture.
She was reunited with her biological parents, biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson - 23 years after her disappearance.
Pettway was arrested in January 2011 and has been indicted on a kidnapping charge. She told authorities she had kidnapped White after several miscarriages made her concerned she would never have a child.
White is now reportedly estranged from her biological parents and continues to go by the name Nejdra Nance.

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The man who fathered 1,000 children: They're middle-class, living in Britain - and only a few have any idea about the extraordinary story surrounding their birth | Mail Online

2012-04-17T09:11:00.001-04:00

The man who fathered 1,000 children: They're middle-class, living in Britain - and only a few have any idea about the extraordinary story surrounding their birth

By Tom Rawstorne

PUBLISHED: 19:31 EST, 16 April 2012 | UPDATED: 02:11 EST, 17 April 2012

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The final months of World War II, and Dr Mary Barton was carefully drafting an article for publication in the British Medical Journal.
For the previous few years she had been pioneering the artificial insemination using donor sperm of women whose husbands were impotent or infertile.
Hers was one of only a handful of clinics in Britain offering the then highly controversial treatment, and she was eager to share the story of her successes with the wider world.

British scientist Bertold Wiesner, with baby son Jonathan, 'fathered 1,000 children' by donating sperm at his own London fertility clinic with his wife Mary Bartons in the 1940s

Sure, she admitted, there had been some problems — but nothing insuperable. 'The greatest difficulties in AID [Artificial Insemination by Donor] arise from the fact that, to most balanced men, the task of donation is unpleasant,' she wrote.
'Hence but a very small panel of donors has been established so far. Fortunately, the number required at any given time is not great.'
She continued that 'in theory', just 0.01 cubic centimetres of sperm would be enough to get a woman pregnant. 'It follows that a fecund donor submitting two specimens weekly could, with ideal conditions, produce 400 children weekly (that is 20,000 annually).'

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Jump forward to 2012 and Barton's theorising has come face to face with reality. In Wakefield, it is in the form of Peter Mott, a 67-year-old retired university lecturer. In London, there is David Gollancz, an eminent 59-year-old barrister. And in Toronto, Canada, there is Barry Stevens, a documentary film-maker.
Though they only discovered it relatively recently, all three of them belong to the 'Barton Brood' — children conceived at Dr Mary's clinic.
But it goes far further than that, because all now know that they share the same donor father. His name was Bertold Wiesner, a man who just happens to have been Barton's husband.

Peter Mott, taken when he was a child, from Wakefield. Peter was one of the many offspring of Bertold Wiesner

For what is fast becoming evident is that the theoretical difficulties the doctor wrote about in 1945 over finding suitable donors were very real.
As was her observation that one donor could be spread a long way.
Incredible though it sounds, it now seems highly likely that Wiesner fathered up to 1,000 children at his wife's clinic — two-thirds of all of those born.
So far, a dozen half-siblings sired by Mr Wiesner have been identified. And while more emerge every year, the worrying truth is that the vast majority will die without ever knowing who their biological father was.
Barton insisted on total secrecy about what she was doing, telling the parents they should never let their children find out how they had been conceived or identify the donors. To guarantee this, the records from the clinic are understood to have been deliberately destroyed.
Her actions were well-meaning, such was the stigma of infertility and AID at the time.
But what the experiences of the Barton Brood demonstrate is that, over time, ethical attitudes can change. And that it can take many years for the unexpected repercussions of scientific and medical advances to emerge.
Today, any child born since 2005 in this country has the legal right to obtain the identity of their donor when they reach the age of 18.
But the majority of the Barton Brood have no idea of their parentage. Unless their mother or father ignored Mary Barton's advice and told them, they are still, all these years later, completely in the dark about who they really are. On top of this is the very real risk of incest.
'One of the things that is pretty well certain is that some half-sisters and half-brothers will have met and will have had sexual relations and will have produced children,' says the Brood's Mr Stevens. 'I think there is a strong possibility that it has already happened.'
It may seem improbable that any of the 1,000 siblings brought up in a country the size of Britain could have unwittingly met up, let alone slept together. But Mr Stevens points out that, since their parents all came from the same social class and often had similar interests, they could well have encountered one another. 'It is one final surprise that could yet well emerge from this,' he warns.
The story of the Barton clinic is quite simply extraordinary.
Mary Barton's motivation to work in the field of infertility came from time spent in India as a medical missionary. There she witnessed with horror the way in which women would be punished or even killed for being childless.
Although it was taboo to suggest that it might be the husband, and not the wife, who was infertile, Barton knew this was often the case, and on returning to London set about finding a solution.
While there had been successful AID births documented during the 19th century, the practice was viewed in Britain as something 'unnatural', even when used in the breeding of farm animals. (After Barton's paper was published in the British Medical Journal, the then Archbishop of Canterbury called the clinic's activities 'the work of Beelzebub', and called for it to be shut down.)

Peter Mott, now 67, was one of the 1,000 children Wiesner may have fathered as one of the primary donors for his Barton Clinic

So Barton initially operated virtually underground, and found her clients in great secrecy by word of mouth. She was aided by Wiesner, her second husband, an Austrian-born expert on hormones. Within weeks of them setting up their practice in London's fashionable Portland Place, dozens of childless couples were beating a path to their door. They were almost exclusively from the middle or upper classes, as Barton's fees were beyond the poor.
For Barton and Wiesner, though, the main problem was not finding customers, but donors from suitable 'stock'.
The BMJ article explains the selection process they employed.
'Our choice has favoured men of intellectual attainments whose family history indicated that the members of at least two preceding generations were not only intelligent but also endowed with good capacity for social adjustment,' wrote Mary Barton.
'The donor should have at least two legitimate children ... He must be of mature age (30 to 45) so that his character, viability and other qualities can be properly addressed.'
They were looking for donors from a certain social class — a social class that in Forties England was unlikely to agree to take part in such a grubby and amoral exercise.
As a result, the couple ended up recruiting donors from among their own acquaintances, often from the medical or scientific community.
Even so, the number of men willing to help were few. The clinic claimed to have set an upper limit of 100 children per donor (current rules allow donors to father children with no more than ten women).
But what is now clear is that this limit was breached with abandon — and not just by Wiesner.
'My father had a first-class brain. He was a very clever, mercurial character to whom science was the be all and end all. I don't think he set out to be a kind of Genghis Khan, siring thousands of children'

Eleven years ago, one of the clinic's donors was identified as the late Dr Derek Richter. He was a brilliant neuro-chemist and founder of the Mental Health Research Fund and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
In November 1945, Dr Richter, then aged 38, was privately recruited as a donor by Wiesner, an acquaintance.
By 1948 his sperm had been used to sire more than 100 children. We know this because before his death in 1995, Dr Richter graphically described his involvement in the project in his privately published memoirs.
'It was in 1948, when the experiment had been running for more than three years, that I received a letter from Dr Wiesner informing me that several hundred women had now been treated successfully,' the married father of three wrote.
'I had proved to be one of their best donors: according to their records, I was now responsible for 100 of the infants that had been born in this way.'
What is significant is that Dr Richter continued as a donor until 1951, possibly siring several hundred children.
The figure for the overall number of births achieved by the clinic is difficult to pin down, but it has been estimated at roughly 60 a year over a 25-year period, 1,500 at a minimum (Wiesner died in 1972, aged 70, his wife 11 years ago).
Just a tiny minority of those 1,500 children have discovered they were conceived at the clinic — most of them informed by parents or relatives — and recently 18 of them underwent DNA tests. Their DNA was compared against that from the children of Dr Richter and Wiesner. The tests found that four were related to the former and 12 to the latter. Two could be linked to neither.
Among the dozen is Mr Stevens. For more than a decade he has been working to get to the bottom of what went on at the clinic. He first learned that he and his sister Janice had been conceived there after their father, himself a distinguished doctor, died in 1970.
'My mother confessed that as a young couple she and Dad had not been able to conceive children of their own, so they turned to a fertility clinic,' he said — though she could not remember the clinic's name.
The siblings let the matter lie for 30 years until Janice's daughter, about to start university, grew worried that she knew little about her genetic history. Through the internet they contacted other donor insemination 'activists' including David Gollancz, who pointed out that Barton's was one of the very few clinics active at that time in London.

Wiesner's son Barry Stevens, who for more than a decade has been working to get to the bottom of what went on at the clinic

Mr Stevens's mother immediately recognised the name and soon afterwards he and Mr Gollancz met up. A DNA test showed them to be half-siblings.
It was not until 2007 that further tests linked them to Wiesner. But in another twist, Mr Stevens then discovered that his sister's biological father was Dr Richter.
Does he think Mary Barton knew what her husband was doing? 'He was the one who found the donors,' Mr Stevens told me, 'so it's possible he didn't tell his wife and she believed the donations were coming from a lot of different men.'
Why did Wiesner do it?
'He was a guy who sailed pretty close to the wind,' said Mr Stevens. 'He would just try anything. I do think he should have been more restrained but I don't condemn it. The number of children is a bit excessive. It was a little reckless, but I am pleased to be descended from such a creative man.'
He is also pleased, he adds, to have found so many new relatives, and says the half-siblings generally meet up once a year.
Among them is Mr Gollancz, who was informed of his biological background shortly before his parents divorced when he was 13.
'I know the suggestion is that he could have fathered hundreds or even thousands of children, but there is simply no way of knowing for sure.'

He has since campaigned to stop sperm donors being anonymous and argues that any donors should be detailed on birth certificates.
He admits to some unease at the scale of Wiesner operation. On the other hand, he says meeting half-siblings he has tracked down has been life-enriching. 'But it's frustrating too,' he adds, 'as there are all those other siblings out there whom I'd like to meet. I'd love to hire a huge marquee and invite them all to a party.'
Among the half-brothers Mr Stevens has already met is Peter Mott. Now aged 67, Mr Mott would have been one of the clinic's earliest successes. His father Mark was friends with Wiesner and the pair set up a company called LAB Laboratories.
Neither Mr Mott's mother nor father told him he was the product of donor sperm before they died. He only discovered the truth in 2002 when he was contacted by Mr Stevens, who had come across details of the company and thought there was a chance that Mark Mott might himself have been a donor.
DNA tests in fact showed Wiesner was Mr Stevens and Mr Mott's biological father.
'Thinking about it, I always felt like there was no resemblance between me and my father,' said Mr Mott. 'I used to look at him and think, “I look absolutely nothing like you in any way”.
'When I found out it was sort of a relief. Not in a bad way, but just this “Ahh, yes, of course”, feeling, like everything fitted. All of my half-siblings are alike in some way. We either look alike, or we have similar personalities. There are quite a few teachers among us, and we're all quite literary.'

Another son David Gollancz, who was informed of his biological background shortly before his parents divorced when he was 13

He adds: 'When I first met my other siblings, it was very exciting. I find it fascinating to find out about my biological family; a lot of us treat it like an academic project.'

Meanwhile, Wiesner's son from his marriage to Barton, 68-year-old Jonathan Wiesner, who now lives with his wife Judith in Woodbridge, Suffolk, has never before publicly spoken about his father's activities.

But last week he told me that he had always assumed that his father had been a donor, although he had never directly asked him about it.
'We knew as children where sperm came from and that a donor was needed if a woman's husband was infertile. We didn't know my father was a donor, but then we didn't know that he wasn't. But as I grew up, I assumed that as he was a scientist, then he would have been involved in the process.'
He said he was not surprised when, six years ago, he was asked to provide a DNA swab to see if any of his half-siblings could be identified. Mr Wiesner, an estate manager on a business park, said he readily agreed to provide a sample of saliva, and later of blood, which were DNA tested and proved he was related to them.
He said he had since been introduced to six half-siblings and they had enjoyed several get-togethers, including picnics.
'It has been a real pleasure to meet them all,' said Mr Wiesner. 'It is much more of an emotional journey for them. It is fascinating to talk to them and give them the pleasure of hearing about their biological father.'
He added: 'My father had a first-class brain. He was a very clever, mercurial character to whom science was the be all and end all. I don't think he set out to be a kind of Genghis Khan, siring thousands of children. He was the one in charge of getting donors and I am sure he was one of several people.
'He had a lot of very intelligent, scientific friends, and I believe they would have donated if asked.
'I know the suggestion is that he could have fathered hundreds or even thousands of children, but there is simply no way of knowing for sure. Many of the children he fathered probably have no idea that their birth was a result of artificial insemination.
'It was all done anonymously, long before DNA tests were invented. I am sure my father thought there was no way that this would ever come out.'
Nor could his wife, Mary Barton, ever have anticipated the repercussions of her academic interest in linking women with sperm donors all those years ago.

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when so many of these children prospered and became academics, it really illustrates the important role the father's breeding and education plays. I would be very cautious about using an anonymous doner. - EPhil, Frankfurt, 17/4/2012 08:08 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As stated in the article, the people using the 'services' of this clinic were usually middle- or upperclass. These people were in positions to make sure the child(-ren) would get a good education, which in those days was the norm. So really: is it genetics or social standing that aloowed for them to get a good education? Nature vs nurture or social standing.... Though I don't condone useing the same donor so often, I applaude Mary Burton for doing this in the 40's, alowing infirtile couples to have a child. She really was a pioneer in her field and I think a lot of infirtility treatment found its origen there...

- Sandra, the Netherlands, 17/4/2012 12:13

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Mac, Bangkok, Thailand - I think the donors are generous. They allowed couples, who could not produce their own children, to enjoy a family. What is reckless is men who father children with multiple women and don't support any of them. These children were brought up with Mother and Father figures (despite only mum being a biological parent.) Owd Tyke, Devon - Whilst everyone is entitled to their opinion it would help if you got the facts right before posting your views. This is not 'genetic engineering'. Genetic engineering is manipulating DNA (for example adding genes into a genome.) There are pros and cons but Genetic Engineering is far from 'Very disturbing'. I could site so many examples of it benefiting society. One example is genetically engineered bacteria producing insulin. By inserting the human gene from insulin into bacteria, easy to purify insulin is made available for diabetics. Previously we relied on purifying small amounts of cow/pig's insulin from these animals.

- Annabelle, London, 17/4/2012 11:29

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I have a friend, when she was young, older members of her family refered to her as a Barton. That was between themselves, when talking about the family, she thought it refered to her g. grandfathers remarrage or some such. When she was tracing her family history she could find no Barton in the family. She is quite well qualified academically, now retired she wants to get her doctorate, she studied physics and maths so that she could teach her children. Will forward this article to her.

- Bunty, Ipswich, 17/4/2012 11:20

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What an adorable photo the second one is!

- Vicky , South East, UK, 17/4/2012 10:23

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Selective genetic engineering. Very disturbing.

- Owd Tyke, Devon, 17/4/2012 10:04

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And another point. I think there is something wrong with any man who will willingly father a child in this way. A child he will never know. Dressing it up with weasel words - just a 'sperm donor' - doesn't change the reality. You are fathering children that you can't know, care for, protect, love . . . why? Big ego?

- Mac, Bangkok, Thailand, 17/4/2012 09:54

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Well, let's hope that narcissism isn't hereditary.

- Mac, Bangkok, Thailand, 17/4/2012 09:41

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He must have been one hell of W#@__R......LOL

- Tony, Derbyshire, 17/4/2012 09:19

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Well, I can't help feeling that if any half-brothers or sisters have met and had relationships, sometimes ignorance is bliss and it's best that they do not know. Same with the parentage - perhaps it's more of a blessing than a curse that a lot of people have no idea that their "fathers" were not their biological fathers after all. - Su , NZ, 17/4/2012 05:38>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>At the time this totally misguided 'clinic' was run, they had no idea about DNA and genetic illnesses. What these two did was the height of arrogance - what made Bertold Weisner such a paragon that his genes should be scattered about, with no thought for the consequences? A few 'achievers' have been named as resultant progeny - how many more will emerge in the future, having married unknown relatives, as disabled or otherwise compromised? We have a problem in this country where one particular culture habitually marries first cousins - and the resultant genetic mess as a result of that is well documented.

- Bemused, West Sussex, 17/4/2012 09:08

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So how many siblings or descendants have met, married and had children together not knowing they are related? 1000 children born from one donor is a scary prospect.

- Angela, Am I still living in England only some days I am not so sure., 17/4/2012 08:35

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via dailymail.co.uk

Medical Daily: Surprisingly "Minor" Memory Trick Successful at Preventing Addicts from Relapsing

2012-04-15T15:20:00.001-04:00

Some of the existing therapies try to help addicts unlearn their addiction and habit with techniques like showing them videos of people injecting and making them handle syringes while not under the influence. While these techniques reduce cravings at clinics, they are unsustainable after addicts return to their usual surroundings.

Because traditional treatment often fails, clinicians resort to drug related therapies that often have unpleasant side effects, to help reduce associative memories.

The study, published April 13 in the journal Science, showed that it is possible to decrease the likelihood of relapse by rewriting memories associated with triggers that cause cravings, thereby eliminating reactions and the cravings that result for up to six months.

Lin Lu of the National Institute of Drug Dependence at Peking University in Beijing and his research team combined the traditional extinction procedures with a process called memory reconsolidation.

Researchers explained that during consolidations, information, which is retrieved from long-term memory storage, becomes stronger when reactivated. However information becomes temporarily unstable and therefore easy to alter for a short period of time after retrieval.

Lu and his team applied the concept to drug memories by first teaching rats how to self-administer cocaine and heroin so that the animals learned to associated a particular environment with a drug high. Afterwards scientists put the laboratory rats in the same environment, but without drugs.

The findings show that rats showed the least drug-seeking behavior when they were put in the drug-taking environment for 15 minutes, removed from it for 10 minutes and then put back into the environment for 3 hours.

Lin and his team then applied the same type of exercise to actual heroin addicts, by showing patients a 5-minute video of images of heroin use and other activities that often trigger relapse, either 10 minutes or 6 hours before administering the traditional hour-long extinction session, in which they were repeatedly exposed to the same images.

The findings show that those who had been shown the video 10 minutes before the extinction procedures exhibited less reaction to triggers both during the session and up to 180 days later, according to researchers. There was, however, no significant effect of craving in those who watched the video 6 hours before the session.

"The [memory] procedure decreased cue-induced drug craving and perhaps could reduce the likelihood of cue-induced relapse during prolonged abstinence periods," the authors wrote.

Researchers suggest that an explanation for the findings could be that brief exposure before drug-taking memory reactivation made the link between triggers of drug taking and getting high easier to be erased and replaced with a memory in which no such link exists.

Dr. Amy Milton, who researches memory and addiction at the University of Cambridge, told the BBC that the research was “very exciting” because it should that “such a minor" difference from current therapies could tap into an entirely different memory process and reconstruct the original memory.

“Full clinical studies are needed, but it could be really important for treatment of addiction,” Milton told BBC. “There is no theoretical reason it couldn't apply to other addictions such as alcohol. That's obviously very exciting.”
Published by Medicaldaily.com

via medicaldaily.com

Dr. Todd Sacktor Receives Merit Award From National Institute of Mental Health

2012-04-08T11:12:00.001-04:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y., April 6, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Todd C. Sacktor, M.D., distinguished professor of physiology and pharmacology and of neurology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, has received a MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for his research on memory.

Dr. Sacktor's research, which has been called "paradigm-shifting," has focused on determining the mechanism of long-term memory. He discovered the molecule protein kinase M zeta (PKMzeta) and with colleagues demonstrated that it is essential for memory storage. Using the agent ZIP (zeta inhibitory peptide), which cancels the effect of PKMzeta, he and colleagues showed that the drug erases memory in laboratory animals without harming their ability to learn future memories.

The prestigious MERIT award is offered to a limited number of investigators who have demonstrated superior competence and productivity during their previous research endeavors and who are likely to continue to perform in an outstanding manner in the future. Fewer than five percent of funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) investigators are selected to receive MERIT awards.

Dr. Sacktor's research not only revealed an important component of how memories are processed and stored, but also has broad implications for the possible treatment of memory disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, as well as chronic pain, dystonia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phantom limb syndrome. Most recently, Dr. Sacktor and colleagues discovered that PKMzeta can enhance or strengthen old memories.

The MERIT award program was initiated by the NIH in 1986 and has become a symbol of scientific achievement in the research community. The principal feature of the MERIT award is the opportunity to obtain up to ten years of research support in two segments, an initial MERIT award and a possible MERIT extension, relieving grant awardees of the need to prepare frequent renewal applications. Investigators cannot apply for MERIT awards, but rather are selected by the NIH through an internal review process. Selection of NIMH MERIT awardees is based on nomination by NIMH program staff, with concurrence and favorable recommendation by the National Advisory Mental Health Council.

SUNY Downstate Medical Center, founded in 1860, was the first medical school in the United States to bring teaching out of the lecture hall and to the patient's bedside. A center of innovation and excellence in research and clinical service delivery, SUNY Downstate Medical Center comprises a College of Medicine, Colleges of Nursing and Health Related Professions, a School of Graduate Studies, a School of Public Health, University Hospital of Brooklyn, and an Advanced Biotechnology Park and Biotechnology Incubator.

SUNY Downstate ranks eighth nationally in the number of alumni who are on the faculty of American medical schools. More physicians practicing in New York City have graduated from SUNY Downstate than from any other medical school.

This news release was issued on behalf of Newswise™. For more information, visit http://www.newswise.com.

Media Contacts:
Ron Najman
718-270-2696
ron.najman@downstate.edu

SOURCE Suny Downstate Medical Center
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via prnewswire.com

Woman, 68, perseveres in quest for donor father and her identity

2012-04-05T02:13:00.001-04:00

The voice on the other end of the phone was insistent:

"I don't know who my biological father was."

It was a story we'd heard before: a woman conceived with sperm from an anonymous donor, trying to find her true identity. But this call was different. The caller was wry, her voice crackly. She sounded — how should we put this delicately? — like a senior citizen.

Which it turns out she was. Vicki Reilly, of Bainbridge Island, is 68, born in 1943. Yes, "artificial insemination" was performed back then. Which Reilly knows comes as a surprise to many, who think sperm-donor children are all exactly that: young children.

"It ticks me off that people always talk about the kids," she said.

In recent years, she's read countless reports on how the baby-making industry is booming. She's seen stories of donor-conceived teens and 20-somethings finding half-siblings online.

What no one seems to talk about is people like her. People in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond, who were also donor-conceived, but who were born at a time when families didn't talk about such things. Back then, couples just quietly made appointments with "special doctors," and never breathed a word of it to anyone — including their children.

"There's a whole bunch of us out there," Reilly said, "and a lot of people searching."

Reilly is married, with four grown children (two biological, one stepson, and one foster son from Vietnam). She owned a picture-framing shop, ran a charter-boat business and was a Turkish translator. She has had a good life.

It may seem odd, then, that she is so consumed by this mystery, that it has caused her so much hurt. To Reilly, it hits at the core of her very identity.

"What are my roots?" she wonders. "Am I Native American? Italian? Where did my sense of humor come from?"

There are very real concerns about health history, as well.

Experts say there are likely hundreds of thousands of people who are donor-conceived but don't know it. And if you get right down to it, that's what ticks off Reilly the most: the secrecy.

Fertility industry

Nobody knows when donor sperm was first used. Naomi Cahn, a George Washington University law professor who's written a book on the fertility industry, says there are vague references going back to the 1400s.

"It's also got a very, very long history of secrecy," she said.

The first known recorded case was in 1884, when a doctor at a Philadelphia medical school inseminated a woman, under anesthesia, using sperm from his "best looking" student.

It took 25 years before the story was reported in a medical journal.

"At that time the procedure was so novel, so peculiar in its human ethics, that the six young men ... who witnest [sic] the operation were pledged to absolute secrecy," the report says.

The woman, who wasn't in on the secret, believed the resulting baby was her husband's. He was "delighted with the idea." He had acquired a sexually-transmitted disease in his younger days that made him infertile.

Back then, "you didn't talk about infertility," Cahn explained. In this regard, some families found artificial insemination preferable to adoption: "The woman gets pregnant, has a baby, and nobody needs to know," Cahn said.

Besides, the article goes on to state, it was a "scientific fact" that the origin of the sperm doesn't matter.

Absolute hooey, Reilly and other donor-conceived people say.

Something wasn't right

Reilly grew up in Michigan, always feeling something wasn't right. She knew her parents loved her. But her father was cold, distant — and so very different from her. "Like the swan and the ducklings," she said.

Her father was a conservative man with a straight way of looking at the world. Reilly was liberal and cynical, with a strong sense of humor. Her conversations are punctuated with a laugh like a firecracker.

"My poor dad never rocked the boat," she said. "I love rocking the boat."

No one's exactly the same as their parents, of course. But Reilly always felt — rightly, it turns out — that there was a secret she wasn't in on. It affected the way she looked at her family, and the world.

"You sort of feel like you don't belong and you're not sure why," she said. "I think genetics, biology, has a lot to do with who we are."

Reilly was never told, but even as a child, she began putting together clues. She remembers, at age 9, overhearing family friends ask her grandparents: Why didn't little Vicki have any siblings?

Reilly's father had the mumps, her grandparents explained, so her mother had to go to a special doctor in Chicago, 150 miles away.

Reilly remembers wondering: "Why, if he had the mumps did she have to go to the doctor?"

In high school, she learned that blue-eyed parents, like hers, couldn't have a brown-eyed child, like her. When questioned, her mother responded with a laugh, "It must have been the milkman!" she said. And that was that.

As a teen, Reilly had a vague idea about how prized horses were bred. "Either my mother had an affair," Reilly concluded, "or they used artificial insemination."

Until the 1950s, sperm had to be fresh, not frozen. There weren't commercial sperm banks like there are today.

Who would have donated the sperm in 1942, Reilly wondered? The doctor's intern? More likely, she figured, it was the doctor himself. Back then, it wouldn't have been unusual, Cahn, the professor, said.

Reilly remembered a photo of the doctor her mother held onto for decades. She also found letters he wrote to the family, inquiring after her. "Vicki must be such a big girl now," he wrote. "I'm anxious to hear all about her."

There were other clues, but Reilly didn't pursue the issue until her father died. Then, she took up an intense search. By this point, her mother had Alzheimer's and the doctor was dead.

If Reilly had been adopted, there would be court records and a birth certificate. Not so with donor sperm. Even today, most donors are told their identity will be kept secret. And many couples still don't tell their children, says Wendy Kramer, who founded the Donor Sibling Registry website for this very reason: to make the process less anonymous.

"Family secrets are toxic," she said.

To the industry and to donors, secrecy can be a good thing. However, that can lead to unforeseen issues.

For example, the industry is not required to track how many kids are born to each donor.

Through Kramer's website, she learned that one donor was so prolific, he fathered 150 children. (He was tracked by families via his "donor number.")

Even health information isn't always passed on to the families, Kramer and others say.

"It's one thing if you have a biological father who passes along a medical issue when he has two kids," Kramer said. But 150 kids? That's another thing entirely, especially since health information isn't always passed onto the families, Kramer said.

Law in Washington

Last year, a law took effect in Washington requiring sperm donors to provide identifying information and a health history. Sperm banks must keep it on file; donor children may request it after age 18.

The law has a loophole, however: The donor can ask for his identifying information to be kept secret.

"I really feel," Reilly said, "that anonymous sperm and egg donation is very, very wrong."

Bill Cordray, a donor-conceived Utah man, has long been outspoken about the issue. Growing up, Cordray said, he was so different from his three brothers that he could only conclude that his mother had multiple affairs.

He, too, felt his parents were keeping secrets. It turns out they were.

In 1983, at 37, Cordray said his mother finally told him the truth. She said she kept the secret to protect him. It didn't.

All it did was make him feel out of place for decades.

"They were keeping it (secret) for their own sake," he said. "To me, it was a selfish act. To not tell your child the truth about life is not right."

It took Cordray four years to find someone else like him; now he knows of thousands through a Web group he moderates. That's how he met Reilly.

Reilly has spent nearly 10 years trying to figure out the identity of her sperm donor. A few years ago, she tracked down the doctor's son and spent hundreds of dollars on DNA tests for the two of them. They did not come up as a half-sibling match. But she learned later it was the wrong kind of DNA test.

She still believes the doctor was her biological father. In 2010, she did another DNA test, through a genealogy website, which has matched her with hundreds of distant cousins who share her genetic makeup. The doctor's surname is listed among them, but she feels uncomfortable asking the doctor's son to do a newer DNA test.

"Before I pass on, I'd like to know where I came from," she said. "I just do. It's not idle curiosity, either.

"I want to know when I look in the mirror, who I am."

Maureen O'Hagan: 206-464-2562 or mohagan@seattletimes.com

via seattletimes.nwsource.com

Seattle, Washington, US

An Adopted Miami Shores Woman's Search for Her Korean Family Pays Off

2012-04-04T12:30:00.001-04:00

via miaminewtimes.com

Canada Budget 2012: Government shutters agency that oversees Canada's fertility and assisted reproduction industry | News | National Post

2012-03-31T11:11:00.001-04:00

By Tom Blackwell

It has triggered a boom in risky multiple births, created a generation of children with anonymous sperm-donor parents and spawned an underground trade in semen, eggs and surrogates.

Canada’s thriving fertility industry, however, will soon be left with virtually no official oversight, after the federal government decided this week to close down the oft-criticized regulatory agency for the field.

The government indicated in Thursday’s budget there is no point keeping Assisted Human Reproduction Canada (AHRC) open after a 2010 Supreme Court of Canada decision struck down much of the law it was supposed to enforce. The agency is slated to be shuttered by next March, its remaining functions taken over by Health Canada.

And though the court said large parts of the federal legislation fell under provincial jurisdiction, the provinces have shown little inclination to step into the breach.

Related
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Who decides the makings of a modern family?

Meanwhile, the issues that a Royal Commission argued almost 20 years ago urgently required regulation continue to percolate: the commercial trade in sperm, eggs and surrogates; the multiple births generated by in-vitro fertilization; the effect on children of having unidentified donor parents; and the long-term health impacts of fertility treatment on women and their offspring.

“I think the whole debacle is shocking,” said Françoise Baylis, a Dalhousie University bio-ethicist and former member of the agency’s board.

“When you have a piece of legislation, you can choose to make it work or not, and I don’t see there having been any leadership,” she said. “There has been close to 30 years invested in terms of effort, energy and money [on the issue] and it’s all for naught.”

The problem is not just provincial inaction, she noted. Health Canada has yet to write crucial regulations under parts of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act the court left intact — eight years after the legislation came into force.

On top of all that, the RCMP now appears interested for the first time in investigating violations of the still-active sections of the law – a criminal ban on the purchase of eggs, sperm and surrogate-mother services – despite confusion about what the sections mean.

“It’s a mess,” said Sherry Levitan, a Toronto lawyer who specializes in the area. “The industry is just tied up in knots. Everybody is worried abut the next phone call. People are very nervous because nobody knows where the line is.”

Even the RCMP seem somewhat in the dark. Ms. Levitan said she received a phone call recently from an Alberta officer investigating an alleged violation of the Act, actually asking her for help in finding the relevant sections. The lawyer said she ended up giving the policewoman a primer on the topic’s hazy legalities.

If anyone steps in at the provincial level to regulate the fertility industry, it seems likely to be the regulatory agencies for the medical profession, said Juliet Guichon, a bio-ethicist at the University of Calgary.

In fact, the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons has already issued practice guidelines on in-vitro fertilization, but the terse document failed to address two key issues: multiple births caused by inserting more than one embryo in women, and keeping records on sperm and egg donors for the benefit of the future offspring, Prof. Guichon said.

Provincial governments — not just regulatory colleges — must get involved, she said.

“The law is sick here because where it’s being decided, where it’s being made, is not a forum that can take the broad public-interest view,” she said.

The human-reproduction Act came into force in 2004, the product of years of debate that started with the Conservative-appointed Royal commission on new reproductive technology. Its 1993 report recommended legislation and an agency to oversee it, saying there was “an urgent need for boundaries around the entire field.”

An agency finally opened its doors in 2006, but soon became a butt of complaints, seemingly achieving little of its mandate, while Prof. Baylis and two other board members quit in protest.

AHRC said it was hamstrung by the lack of regulations, while the government in turn said it had to wait for a Quebec court challenge of the law, which eventually resulted in the Supreme Court judgement.

The court said parts of the act dealing with the provision of fertility treatments and record-keeping by doctors fell under the provinces’ jurisdiction over health care and were unconstitutional, while other sections were still legal.

One former law-school dean called the confusing, 5-4 split decision the judges’ worst ruling of 2010.

National Post

via news.nationalpost.com

Eating Placenta After Birth May Be Healthy, Study Suggests - International Business Times

2012-03-28T22:03:00.001-04:00

via ibtimes.com

Baboons kidnap puppies and raise them as their own

2012-03-17T17:35:00.001-04:00

via io9.com

Church in Quebec faces lawsuit on forced adoptions : Catholic World News

2012-03-15T19:39:00.001-04:00

A Canadian attorney is bringing a class-action lawsuit against the Catholic Church in Quebec, charging that Church officials placed undue pressure on single mothers to offer their children for adoption.
Attorney Tony Merchant expects to file similar lawsuits against both Church officials and governments in other Canadian provinces. He argues that in the 1950s-60s, hospital staffers and social workers pressured single women to give up their babies. “The beliefs the Catholic Church had about premarital sex and the judgmental approach the Church had made it particularly aggressive in pressuring women into putting their children up for adoption," he charges.

via catholicculture.org

California's dark legacy of forced sterilizations

2012-03-15T18:22:00.001-04:00

via cnn.com

Untreated depression and antidepressants may both affect unborn child - The Washington Post

2012-03-13T05:39:00.001-04:00

By Linda Searing, Published: March 12

THE QUESTION How might an unborn child’s development be affected if the mother takes antidepressants during pregnancy?

THIS STUDY involved 7,696 pregnant women, most of them 27 to 30 years old. Of the 669 women in the group who had symptoms of depression, 570 women took no antidepressants, and 99 took selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) antidepressants. During pregnancy, those in the SSRI group had fewer depressive symptoms than the other 570 women. All participants in the study had periodic sonograms to measure fetal growth, including body weight and head size, which is considered an indicator of brain development. Among the women with untreated depression, fetal growth overall was slower compared with the fetuses of all other study participants. Among women who took SSRIs, fetal weight gain was not different but head sizes were the smallest, on average; their babies also were twice as likely to be born prematurely. No link was found between symptoms of depression and below-normal birth weight.

WHO MAY BE AFFECTED? Pregnant women with depression. Among other concerns, women and their doctors have to balance the risks of not treating depression during pregnancy against possible side effects from the drugs.
CAVEATS Some of the data on SSRI use and depression symptoms came from the women’s responses on questionnaires. No antidepressants other than SSRIs were evaluated. Women taking SSRIs might have had more severe depression initially, which could have affected the results.
FIND THIS STUDY March 5 online issue of Archives of General Psychiatry (www.archgenpsychiatry.com).
LEARN MORE ABOUT women and depression at www.
nimh.nih.gov/health (click “publications,” then “women’s mental health”). For information about antidepressants, go to effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov (search for “antidepressants”).
— Linda Searing
The research described in Quick Study comes from credible, peer-reviewed journals. Nonetheless, conclusive evidence about a treatment's effectiveness is rarely found in a single study. Anyone considering changing or beginning treatment of any kind should consult with a physician.

via washingtonpost.com

Lessons from the past – adoption isn't the answer to child protection

2012-03-06T08:21:00.001-05:00

The release last Wednesday of the Senate’s Community Affairs Committee report on forced adoption resulted in almost unanimous condemnation of past adoption practices which saw young, unmarried women forced to give their newborns up for adoption. The question on everybody’s lips was how such cruelty could have been allowed.

One day earlier, an unrelated Victorian report was released that provides a very different take on adoption. The Protecting Victoria’s Vulnerable Children report recommends, among other things, the removal of barriers to adoption. This would allow more children to be placed for adoption, rather than being sent back to troubled families.

It’s ironic that two reports are released within a day of each other – one looking back critically at practices that promoted adoption and one looking forward that wants to increase rates of adoption. So is there a risk that the mistakes of the past could be repeated?

Parenting potential

The Victorian Inquiry argues adoption provides a child with a certainty foster care lacks. Therefore, in situations where there is no suitable family member to care for the child, he or she should be freed more easily for adoption.

If the adoption process was easier, the report suggests, more carers would be brought in to the system to fill the shortfall of foster parents.

But these recommendations assume that child protection workers can judge future parenting potential. And history shows this isn’t the case.

When legal adoption was first debated in the 1920s, politicians were well aware of the seriousness of the step they were taking. They conceded that circumstances could quickly change in the birth family or adopted family. The birth parents may come into an inheritance, or dramatically turn their lives around and be able to parent. On the other hand, the adoptive parents may fall on hard times.

These doubts disappeared over time. Social workers grew increasingly confident that they could predict who would make the best parent. By the 1950s, it was their view that young, single mothers were not in a position to support their children. It was therefore better to immediately separate the mother and child so the “girl” could “get on with her life”. And the child would find a home with a respectable married couple.

The Senate Committee heard convincing evidence that such confidence was sadly misplaced. What social workers saw as professional expertise, mothers condemned as injustice. People who were taken from an untested mother and placed in a family that turned out to be neglectful or abusive asked how adoption could have been in their best interests.

Apologising for past errors

The Committee was careful not to imply that such experiences were universal. Nevertheless, it recommended Commonwealth and state governments, church and community organisations apologise to those whose lives were harmed by adoption.

Counselling, memorialisation services, programs to improve records access and financial redress should be jointly funded by all those involved. These recommendations parallel services offered in the wake of previous apologies, although the government rejected financial redress.

The Committee’s report puts this alternative story of adoption onto the public record but argues that this history should not be confined to the past: “All those involved in current adoption practices … [should] take the findings … into account.”

The Inquiry notes that inter-country adoption (adopting children from abroad) is creating “supply chains” in some countries that are similar to those that operated in Australia. Adoption agencies have established maternity homes where single mothers have no choice but to relinquish their children. The Victorian recommendations, if implemented, have the potential to do the same.

Future risks

The Victorian Inquiry found no legislative barriers to increasing the number of children who adopted out, and could not understand why adoption was not more widely used. Perhaps the answer lies in an institutional memory of the practices condemned by the Senate report.

Our society produces very few children with no parents or extended family, even if their care is manifestly inadequate. What it does produce are families with multi-generational histories of poverty, neglect and abuse which leaves a legacy of the mental illness and substance abuse which lie at the base of most of the intransigent child protection cases.

And although these parents struggle with multiple problems, and are judged as a risk to their children, they don’t want to relinquish their parental rights.

A second danger is that freeing children for adoption would generate a demand, pressuring child protection workers to increase the supply.

Many of the problems of post-war new baby adoption arose from its very success. As more potential parents lined up at adoption agencies, social workers, consciously or unconsciously, increased the pressure on single mothers to consent to adoption. When mothers resisted, this pressure often moved towards coercion or even illegality.

We know that there is greater demand among adoptive parents for younger children. So what guarantees do we have that social workers will not succumb to similar pressure today? As the list of potential adoptive parents grows, it will not be easy to defend the right of a woman, whose other children are already in care, to have the chance to mother her new baby.

There’s no doubt that both children who cannot safely remain with their own families – and the substitute families who are prepared to offer them a home – need greater security than the child protection system is currently able to offer.

But does this justify the absolute break that adoption involves? Do social workers now possess the skills to decide unequivocally who will be the best parent for a child?

They certainly believed they did in the past, but the findings of the Senate report have shown conclusively that in too many cases they were wrong.

via theconversation.edu.au

Re-writing Australia's history of forced adoption

2012-02-28T00:54:00.001-05:00

28 February 2012, 2.33pm AEST

The victims of forced adoption want an apology from the Commonwealth government.
Nikkirk

Author: Susan Gair
Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Work and Community Welfare at James Cook University

A long-awaited Senate Committee report will tomorrow reveal whether the Commonwealth’s policies and practices played a role in coercing young, unwed Australian women to give up their newborn babies for adoption.

The practice, known more recently as forced adoption, was reportedly common in Australia between the 1950s and 1980s, with authorities failing to gain free and informed consent from thousands of young, unwed mothers before their newborns were removed.

The Senate Inquiry received hundreds of submissions, including many personal accounts of coercion, trauma and ongoing mental health problems associated with forced adoption.

Long and painful history

Legally, adoption was a confidential, irrevocable process where “unwanted” babies were placed predominantly with childless couples, relieving the state of the burden of their care. Close to 200,000 children have been adopted since the first Australian legislation facilitating adoption was enacted in 1896.

By mid-20th century, adoption was increasingly seen as western society’s answer to several emerging social problems – illegitimate children, single motherhood and infertility.

From the 1950s, babies of unmarried women were labelled illegitimate and, as such, the women were deemed “unfit” to mother. These young women could best serve society and themselves, they were told, if they relinquished their child for adoption. Then they could “get on” with their lives.

It seems that religious and welfare bodies agreed that the solution to illegitimate babies was adoption by a married woman who was “fit” to mother. From the 1950s to the 1970s, these organisations established homes across Australian to support and protect young, single pregnant women. But many of these women now have revealed the suffering they experienced at the hands of these institutions.

In many cases, the signed legal paperwork appears to show the birth mother’s consent for adoption. However, it’s common for women whose children were lost to them through closed adoptions between the 1940s and 1980s to recount traumatic stories of immense emotional pressure and coercion to sign.

Birth mothers were silenced when it came to speaking out about their hidden pregnancies, their treatment during the birth – which was frightening and traumatic – and their grief after losing their child. Their pain was seen as punishment for their immorality because of falling pregnant.

'Illegitimate' children were adopted by wedded or widowed women who were deemed 'fit' to mother. Junoic

Many of the women were young, vulnerable and experiencing personal crises. They were not informed of any legal rights to keep the child, and were made to feel inadequate, immoral and undeserving when it came to raising their own babies. Birth fathers were generally disregarded and blamed for corrupting innocent girls.

In some cases, single mothers may have been deliberately denied access to counselling services prior to giving consent. Adoption was upheld as the only option for these women because of a lack of financial and other support, and the stigma associated with illegitimacy and motherhood out of wedlock.

Adoptive parents were encouraged to raise the child as if it was born to them. The family was legally complete when the adoptive parents were named on birth certificates as the parents to whom the child was born.

Many adoptees say they experienced positive family relationships with their adoptive families. But many others have reported severe emotional disturbances and significant feelings of loss.

For adopted people, the grief associated with “not knowing who they are” is common and relates to the loss of identity, the loss of information about their origins, the loss of both birth parents, and for many, including Indigenous children, a loss of their culture of origin.

Research shows a high incidence of grief among birth mothers after the loss of their baby to adoption, and these feelings often intensify over time. Some of the women who experienced this grief following forced adoption practices in in Australia told their stories in the Four Corner’s documentary, Given or Taken, which screened last night on ABC1.

The Commonwealth’s role

Submissions to the Inquiry suggest the Commonwealth government has a case to answer in supporting forced adoption. This is based on the denial of the same financial support to unwed mothers that was available to other women who were widows, deserted wives and divorcees.

This was the case until the early days of the Labor Whitlam Government, when a universal single mothers' benefit was introduced to support all mothers in need, including unmarried women.

By withholding financial support until the 1970s, the submissions argue, the Commonwealth can be seen as condoning forced adoptions and contributing to the coercive policies and practices of state welfare, church and charity organisations.

Equally, up until the 1970s, reliable birth control was difficult to access and was disallowed by some religious groups. Termination of pregnancy was illegal under Commonwealth and state legislation. So while state legislation governed adoptions, some submissions to the Inquiry argued that the Commonwealth’s public and social policies endorsed a moral stance that enforced marriage or adoption to secure care for children.

Time for an apology?

Many submissions to the Inquiry argue the Commonwealth should play a leadership role in helping to heal the wounds of past wrongs in forced adoption. This would include publicly acknowledging the many stories of distress, trauma and violations of mother-child relationships as a result of forced, coerced, or unethical adoptions. Compensation could then be sought for the resulting trauma.

Evidence has been submitted to the Inquiry that some professionals involved in past adoptions might have acted unprofessionally, inappropriately, unethically and without informed consent to facilitate the adoption of children. While not wanting to find scapegoats for past wrongs, these actions should be acknowledged in an apology.

But not all those involved want an apology. Many just want the truth to be heard, acknowledged and accepted.

More practically, the Inquiry is likely to recommend a nationally funded framework of counselling, specifically tailored to support the well-being of those affected by forced adoption. This would be developed in consultation with the key stakeholders – birth parents, their extended families and adopted people – to provide ongoing emotional support.

via theconversation.edu.au

Given or Taken? - Four Corners

2012-02-27T09:16:00.001-05:00

Given or Taken?

By Geoff Thompson and Clay Hichens

Updated February 27, 2012 20:37:00

The heartbreaking story of forced adoption in Australia.

Video: Interview with Professor Shurlee Swain, Australian Catholic University (Four Corners)

Video: The Unmarried Mother - ABC TV 1965 (Four Corners)

Video: The Chosen Child - Four Corners, 1966 (Four Corners)

Video: Child of the Single Mother - Four Corners, 1970 (Four Corners)

Over five decades thousands of women gave up their newborn children for adoption. While they were supposed to make their decision freely, many claim they were coerced, bullied and their children were effectively stolen.

It's now a cornerstone of social welfare policy that children should, if at all possible, stay with their birth parents, in particular their mother. Not so in years gone by. Right up to the 1970s, having a child out of wedlock was frowned upon and young women who fell pregnant were actively encouraged to give up their babies for adoption. Authorities argued this was done with good intentions, but now a powerful Senate Committee has heard evidence that tells a very different story.

It now seems many young, single mothers were never given the option of keeping their child. Unmarried mothers automatically had their hospital records marked ready for adoption - even before giving birth. There is evidence that some were sedated. Others were denied access to their babies as they were making crucial decisions about their future. As a result, these women have suffered terrible emotional distress throughout their lives.

This week reporter Geoff Thompson talks to some of the women who lost their children. Crucially, they reveal the truth about the way they were treated in the hours after they gave birth:

"(A nurse) started strapping up my right wrist. I was puzzled, I didn't know what she was doing, and then she secured me to the side of the bed... I became unconscious. And I don't know how long I was unconscious for, but when I eventually came to, my son was gone."

The program hears allegations that sedatives were used to help control young mothers and push them towards relinquishing their babies. As one person who's examined a variety of evidence says:

"I have no doubt that some illegal activity occurred, I have no doubt that women were subject to what nowadays... we would call abuse; that forged consents occurred."

The program also hears from the nurses and social workers of the time who claim that, while there might be evidence of wrong doing, most hospital staff acted in good faith:

"Most of them would say, 'I don't have to see my baby do I?' And you'd say 'No, you don't have to'... a young woman could not be forced to sign those (adoption) papers, could not be."

Over the past decade individual hospitals and the West Australian Government have offered an official apology to the women who lost their children. Now the Federal Government must decide if its policies contributed to the suffering. It also has to decide what can be done to help those involved and if a national apology is needed.

"Given or Taken?" Reported by Geoff Thompson and presented by Kerry O'Brien goes to air on Monday 27th February at 8.30 pm on ABC 1. It is replayed on Tuesday 28th February at 11.35 pm and can also be seen in ABC News 24 on Saturdays at 8.00 pm, on iview or at abc.net.au/4corners.

via abc.net.au

This recent broadcast by Four Corners (abc.net.au/4corners) investigates the complaints and claims of unmarried mothers in Australia:
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/02/23/3438175.htm

Pope tells infertile couples to shun artificial procreation

2012-02-25T16:50:00.001-05:00

VATICAN CITY (AP) – Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday urged infertile couples to shun artificial procreation, decrying such methods as a form of arrogance.

Speaking at the end of a three-day Vatican conference on diagnosing and treating infertility, Benedict also reiterated church teaching that marriage is the only permissible place to conceive children. Matrimony "constitutes the only 'place' worthy of the call to existence of a new human being," he said.
The pope pressed the church ban against artificial procreation, saying infertile couples should refrain from any method to try to conceive other than sex between husband and wife.
"The human and Christian dignity of procreation, in fact, doesn't consist in a 'product,' but in its link to the conjugal act, an expression of the love of the spouses of their union, not only biological but also spiritual," Benedict said.
He told the science and fertility experts in his audience to resist "the fascination of the technology of artificial fertility. Benedict cautioned the experts against "easy income, or even worse, the arrogance of taking the place of the Creator," an attitude he indicated underlies the field of artificial procreation.
Sperm or egg donation and methods such as in vitro fertilization are banned by the church for its faithful.
The emphasis on science "and the logic of profit seem today to dominate the field of infertility and human procreation," the pope said.
But he added that the Church encourages medical research into infertility.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

via usatoday.com

Without saying so out loud, the Pope also makes it apparent that the natural children of single mothers and fathers are acceptable targets for the infertile "faithful" couple.

Identifying birth defects early creates new questions - Spokesman.com - Feb. 25, 2012

2012-02-25T08:14:00.001-05:00

February 25, 2012 in Nation/World

Identifying birth defects early creates new questions

Blood test finds genetic details of fetus weeks into pregnancy

Lisa M. Krieger San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Raising the prospect of a world without birth defects, a Stanford University-created blood test that can detect Down syndrome and two other major genetic defects very early in a woman’s pregnancy will be available next week.
The simple blood test spares women the risk and heartache of later and more invasive tests like amniocentesis.
But it has startling social implications – heralding a not-distant future when many fetal traits, from deadly disease to hair color, are known promptly after conception, when abortion is safer and simpler.
The $1,200 test, which analyzes fetal DNA in a mother who is 10 weeks pregnant, is being offered to doctors Thursday by Verinata Health, a biotechnology company in Redwood City, Calif. It licensed a technique designed by Stanford biophysicist Stephen Quake.
“It’s a game changer,” said Stanford University law professor Hank Greely, who studies the legal and ethical implications of emerging technologies. The controversy over abortion “is about to be hit by a tsunami of new science.”
There are two converging trends, Greely said. “We’ve got politicians running for president who are really trying to whack away at reproductive rights at a time when the science is about to vastly expand the information that parents have about their fetus.”
A similar test is already available from the San Diego company Sequenom, and at least two other San Francisco Bay Area companies plan to offer noninvasive prenatal genetic testing.
The market is huge: 4.5 million U.S. births a year, of which an estimated 750,000 are “high-risk” due to age or family history.
The current crop of tests only seeks major abnormalities on three chromosomes: 13, 18 and 21. They can also tell whether a fetus is a boy or girl.
But perhaps within the next five years “it seems likely that a simple blood draw from the pregnant woman will be able to provide genetic results for a fetus about not just Down syndrome, but cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease and a host of other diseases,” Greely said.
“I don’t think many parents would abort a fetus because it is blond or because it doesn’t have the best genes to be an athlete,” Greely said. “But I do think it will greatly increase the number of fetuses aborted for mainly medical reasons and sometimes for nonmedical reasons, like sex, because it is so much easier to find out. And you find out faster.
“You can make the decision before anyone else really knows you are pregnant – and when abortions are less complicated, medically and socially.”
The test’s effectiveness was reported Thursday in the long-awaited findings of a Verinata-sponsored clinical trial published in the journal of the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
For women with insurance coverage, Verinata said it would provide documentation to support a claim. But in cases where the claim is denied or a woman is uninsured, it will negotiate a discount, it said.
It accurately detected all 89 cases of Down syndrome in 532 maternal blood samples. It also detected 35 of 36 cases of Edwards syndrome and 11 of 14 cases of Patau syndrome – two far more devastating chromosomal abnormalities.
The disease occurrence was high because women were selected for the research trial if they were considered high-risk due to advanced age, if their fetus tested positive through conventional tests for chromosomal defects, or if they previously had a baby with chromosomal defects. The test predictions were compared with the actual birth outcomes.
Quake became interested in this approach in 2004 when he first became a father, “and I saw the invasive tests to my wife and unborn child. I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ ”
He happened across a 1948 discovery about free-floating fetal DNA in maternal blood – called “cell free DNA.” But scientists then could not measure the genetic material precisely enough to make a diagnosis.
The new test counts the millions of DNA molecules from both the mother and baby and can detect excessive genetic material that signals a birth defect.
Katie Fischl Fuller, of Santa Clara, whose baby is due in March, said she would have welcomed the test.
“Amniocentesis is horrible. It’s very invasive,” she said. “A needle is inserted through your stomach into the uterus, which risks injuring the baby. Risk of miscarrying is 1 in 250 or 300 … when you can feel the baby moving, and you’ve already connected.”
Members of the anti-abortion community also said they would welcome the test if it is used to give parents time to prepare for the birth of a handicapped infant.
“But if it’s a search-and-destroy mission, where the baby is aborted, we are not in favor of it,” said Cecelia Cody, administrative director of California Right to Life in Walnut Creek, Calif.
“I don’t think the world is a better place without these babies. It’s getting close to Nazi eugenics, isn’t it, to decide who lives? If a baby is shown to have a cleft palate, do they die?”
“It is difficult to know how people will act on this information,” said Michael Katz, medical director of the March of Dimes.
Although the tests “are no longer experimental … it is the future. Soon all the other tests will be secondary.”

via spokesman.com

If you could erase your most painful memories with a pill, would you take it?

2012-02-22T19:25:00.001-05:00

Memories have a way of informing our identities, reinforcing our conceptions of who we are, and helping shape us into the people we will become tomorrow. In almost all cases, our memories — even the unpleasant ones — play a formative role in our lives; but they can also be so painful or traumatic that they become become debilitating.

In the latest issue of Wired, Jonah Lehrer provides us with a detailed look at a future where editing our memories could become a reality. We're not talking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind style brain-wipes; the memory-editing of the future will offer incredible precision, allowing us to address the neurological underpinnings responsible for everything from post-traumatic stress disorder, to drug addiction, to regret over a one-night stand.

Lehrer's feature explores in illuminating detail the status of research into "forgetting pills;" the incredible potential of such treatments; and the social, behavioral, and ethical hangups of rewriting one's personal history. We've included Lehrer's introduction here, but you'll definitely want to read the rest over on Wired.

Lehrer begins:

Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs of Baltimore, came across the accident by chance: A car had smashed into a pickup truck loaded with metal pipes. Mitchell tried to help, but he saw at once that he was too late.

The car had rear-ended the truck at high speed, sending a pipe through the windshield and into the chest of the passenger-a young bride returning home from her wedding. There was blood everywhere, staining her white dress crimson.

Mitchell couldn't get the dead woman out of his mind; the tableau was stuck before his eyes. He tried to tough it out, but after months of suffering, he couldn't take it anymore. He finally told his brother, a fellow firefighter, about it.

Miraculously, that worked. No more trauma; Mitchell felt free. This dramatic recovery, along with the experiences of fellow first responders, led Mitchell to do some research into recovery from trauma. He eventually concluded that he had stumbled upon a powerful treatment. In 1983, nearly a decade after the car accident, Mitchell wrote an influential paper in the Journal of Emergency Medical Services that transformed his experience into a seven-step practice, which he called critical incident stress debriefing, or CISD. The central idea: People who survive a painful event should express their feelings soon after so the memory isn't "sealed over" and repressed, which could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.

In recent years, CISD has become exceedingly popular, used by the US Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Israeli army, the United Nations, and the American Red Cross. Each year, more than 30,000 people are trained in the technique. (After the September 11 attacks, 2,000 facilitators descended on New York City.)

Even though PTSD is triggered by a stressful incident, it is really a disease of memory. The problem isn't the trauma-it's that the trauma can't be forgotten. Most memories, and their associated emotions, fade with time. But PTSD memories remain horribly intense, bleeding into the present and ruining the future. So, in theory, the act of sharing those memories is an act of forgetting them.

A typical CISD session lasts about three hours and involves a trained facilitator who encourages people involved to describe the event from their perspective in as much detail as possible. Facilitators are trained to probe deeply and directly, asking questions such as, what was the worst part of the incident for you personally? The underlying assumption is that a way to ease a traumatic memory is to express it.

The problem is, CISD rarely helps-and recent studies show it often makes things worse. In one, burn victims were randomly assigned to receive either CISD or no treatment at all. A year later, those who went through a debriefing were more anxious and depressed and nearly three times as likely to suffer from PTSD. Another trial showed CISD was ineffective at preventing post-traumatic stress in victims of violent crime, and a US Army study of 952 Kosovo peacekeepers found that debriefing did not hasten recovery and led to more alcohol abuse. Psychologists have begun to recommend that the practice be discontinued for disaster survivors. (Mitchell now says that he doesn't think CISD necessarily helps post-traumatic stress at all, but his early papers on the subject seem clear on the link.)

Mitchell was right about one thing, though. Traumatic, persistent memories are indeed a case of recall gone awry. But as a treatment, CISD misapprehends how memory works. It suggests that the way to get rid of a bad memory, or at a minimum denude it of its negative emotional connotations, is to talk it out. That's where Mitchell went wrong. It wasn't his fault, really; this mistaken notion has been around for thousands of years. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time-Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today-but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.

None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don't remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.

When CISD fails, it fails because, as scientists have recently learned, the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge. That's why pushing to remember a traumatic event so soon after it occurs doesn't unburden us; it reinforces the fear and stress that are part of the recollection.

This new model of memory isn't just a theory-neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction-and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.

And researchers have found one of these compounds.

In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.

[Wired]

via io9.com

Eternal Sunshine Drug Points the Way Toward Counteracting the Agony of Chronic Pain | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

2012-02-17T20:15:00.001-05:00

Eternal Sunshine Drug Points the Way Toward Counteracting the Agony of Chronic Pain

By Gary Stix | February 17, 2012

McGill researchers test a rat's pain threshold

One of brain researchers’ closest brushes with science fiction in the last 10 years came with the discovery of a chemical that could completely wipe out memory, a molecule that evoked a real-life version of the scenario depicted in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a couple undertakes a procedure to erase their memory of each other when the relationship falls apart.

Fortunately, the artificial amnesia occurred only in laboratory rats. But the experiment raised an obvious question: What would anyone do with a drug that essentially reformats your mental hard drive?

Who would be interested besides a neurotic Woody Allen trying to reboot his life, or a sadistic Josef Mengele type attempting to conduct the kind of scientific experiment that would be judged a war crime at The Hague?

A group of researchers have now come up with a more pragmatic answer to this question than incorporating the memory-erasing agent as a plot device in a cyberpunk novel

Neuroscientists at McGill University and collaborators have just reported in Molecular Pain that the chemical with the evocative acronym ZIP can selectively wipe out the nervous system’s “memory” of the chronic aches and pains that plague about one in four North Americans, apparently leaving other memories intact.

Pain that persists more than a few minutes leaves a memory trace—that’s why just a light touch is sometimes enough to produce a yelp of agony months after an injury. The archetypal example is the soldier with an amputated leg whose phantom limb still aches years after being severed.

In the experiment at McGill, ZIP administered to the spinal area of rats wiped out pain memories in hind paws that had become tender and hyper-sensitized from the application of capsacin, the compound that produces the burn of chili peppers.

ZIP is the Eternal Sunshine chemical that was spritzed into the memory-forming locus of rat brains to make the animals forget their past. One of the McGill co-authors, Todd C. Sacktor of SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, led the original research that discovered ZIP (zeta inhibitory peptide) along with the memory-preserving enzyme PKM-zeta, which it inhibits.

Years of experimentation and testing would be required to determine exactly where it should be administered to selectively wipe out pain memories without obliterating a lifetime of family recollections. And even then, ZIP will never be an over the counter drug. To be used in medicine, it would need to be injected into the spinal cord to reach the neurons involved with storing the pain memory.

Still, the experiment will leave neuroscientists with a better understanding of the molecular players involved in establishing pain memory. “It gives a clue as to a potential target for influencing persistent and chronic pain,” says Terence J. Coderre, a professor of anesthesiology and neuroscience at McGill who headed the research team.

Even if ZIP never makes its way down the lengthy drug development pipeline, it lays the groundwork for other chemicals that could permanently annul the pain memory that results in the persistent discomfort that turns walking, sitting or even lying down into a daily ordeal for so many.

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via blogs.scientificamerican.com

A baby's touch - Sunday Night - Channel 7 - Yahoo!7 TV - Yahoo!7 TV

2011-08-07T10:43:00.001-04:00

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A baby's touch

2011-08-07T10:37:00.001-04:00

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An amazing news video about healing