Slashdot Mirror
Korean Lab Worker Forced to Donate Her Own Eggs
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang had attained international fame by successfully cloning a human embryo, but he accomplished his feat by pressuring a lab worker into donating her own eggs. Consequently, Gerald Schatten, a cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has severed his ties with Mr. Hwang and cited gross breaches of ethics."
Questionable ethics from somebody working towards human cloning?
Why doesn't this surprise me?
I don't know. Prejudice maybe?
In more advanced countries, we name the laws after the wrong committed.
ie: It's "sex with a minor", not "Statutory Rape" since whether or not it was rape is not the problem being dealt with (it's a separate problem). The problem being dealt with is that, in fact, sex with a minor occurred. If the minor were raped, then a secondary charge of "raping a minor" would be enforced.
In some countries (notably my own) it is not considered rape should a 16 year old have sex with a willing 15 year + 11 month old.
Similarly, we call "improper practices" exactly that, "improper practices". We don't call it "forcing" or "coercion" because we don't know if that's true or not. There's every chance that a doctor so engaged in her duty might actually be willing to donate her eggs to further her research -- it doesn't seem unlikely that it could be so.
The title should be "Korean Lab Worker uses Improper Practices to Further Research".
I just wish people would use say what they mean and mean what they say, dammit. Thank God the laws in most countries are much more clear.
The tag is misleading at best, if not an outright troll. There is no indication that the donor was pressured or coerced in any way. In fact there is no indication of any wrongdoing except for an allegation by the American scientist, with no offering of proof. Do we know what HIS motives were?
Whoever greenlit this should have caught it-- for God's sake the article itself is a blurb, it would take 30 seconds to read. If you're against human cloning there's plenty of fodder for your argument, you should not be allowed to use Slashdot as your pulpit to demonize the other side.
That's why prostitution isn't a legitimate job.
No, the reason prostitution isn't a legitimate job (in the USA anyway) is because America has a very puritan view when it comes to sex (and see's the depiction of violence to be much more acceptable then the depcition of consensual sex) and the American government loves to invade people's bedrooms.
Don't think for one minute prostitution being illegal is because of protecting women's rights. If it was truly about that, then the government would set up standards of health, working hours, working conditions, pay, etc that people must follow if they are in the prostitution industry.
statutory rape laws protect women who are too young to have the capacity to consent, whereas a researcher in a genetic lab would have all the information she would need to consent to an egg donation
Obviously women are weak-minded and are unable to grasp the situation in order to protect their rights and themselves.[/sarcasm]
Before sperm donations could be paid for, the men working at the clinics would often donate their own sperm in order for there to be enough supply of sperm, because demand was so great and there simply wasn't enough unafilliated men donating to meet the demand there was for sperm. No blanket laws or guidelines had to be made to stop these men from donating their sperm. They knew exactly what they were doing. The same thing should be applied to women.
The idea of men or women being coerced into donating sperm or ovaries in order to keep their jobs is despicable. But If you're going to make a blanket policy to protect one sex, then you should protect the other as well. Otherwise you say the "protected" sex is too weak to protect themselves and make decisions, while the "unprotected" gender isn't important enough to be protected.