Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism

[Medusa]

Originally Posted by EnderD_503

IEdit, speaking of dystopian fiction, has anyone else just got a Handmaid's Tale flashback?

YES. I can hear Atwood having a seizure right now and for some reason I want to burn anything resembling a red cape all of the sudden

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Heart

I have been saying for YEARS that hammering on the point that orientation is purely biological is only going to lead to a Nazi-like focus on purification. Terrifying.

Here is a piece I wrote, a couple of years ago, which is a chapter in the book I am writing on this very subject:

http://www.dreadedmemes.org/Dreaded_...the_Genes.html

The long and short of it is this:

Is homosexuality biological? Almost certainly. Does it mean what we think it does for gay rights--perhaps, perhaps not. Strictly speaking, from a rights-based perspective, it does not because we *routinely* protect people's choices. Religion, for instance, is one of the most sacrosanct of protected classes and religion is *entirely* a choice. No one is born a particular religion--into a religious family, yes or a religious culture, yes, there may even be a biological basis for religiosity but being Buddhist or Pagan or Christian is entirely a choice and we protect that choice.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by EnderD_503

I consider sexual orientation as a whole to be biological in origin. While the biological nature of sexuality may be a piece of the puzzle as far as what spawned this research to eliminate homosexual and bisexual tendencies, I can't see any scientific basis for such an elimination to occur.

That's because there is absolutely no scientific justification for such an elimination. Homosexuality is almost certainly biological--I would be absolutely stunned if it were not because, just off the top of my head, I can think of two paths Nature might take to get there--and there is no reason to treat it as a pathology since it is not.

Instead of saying that people shouldn't so insistantly claim homosexuality and bisexuality as biological, - which almost seems like a form of self-oppression for the sake of self-preservation - we should be questioning what scientific basis there is for such a "cleansing," if any? Personally I can't see one, and the desire of certain scientists to limit humanity to one sexuality solely for the purpose of procreation and "normality" seems like it is far more influenced by the remnants of monotheistic religious ideology than science itself.

It is. Science can help us understand why homosexuality occurs (and it IS an interesting question) but it cannot tell us what our ethics around it should or could be. This woman's research is *entirely* motivated by religiosity with absolutely no basis, none what-so-ever, in any kind of scientific rigor.

Edit, speaking of dystopian fiction, has anyone else just got a Handmaid's Tale flashback?[/QUOTE]

I have been having Handmaid's Tale flashbacks for about two years now. Every time I see the Tea Party or hear conservatives Republicans going on about 'restoring America', I think that we are blithely cruising toward the world that Atwood described.

Cheers
Aj

[Soon]

The Anti-Lesbian Drug

..............


<snip>


....Both cases—cutting a clitoris surgically, feminizing a brain through hormone treatments—reflect an almost desperate attempt by some doctors and scientists to keep their patients from straying from gender norms. It may all be well-intentioned, a reflection of the view that a nail that sticks up will be hammered down and so it is better to conform. What makes both the clitoral surgery and the prenatal steroids so cringe-inducing, however, is that they seems like throwbacks to the 1950s, not only culturally (when there was really only one way to be female, and it came with an apron and kids) but scientifically (when anatomy and biochemistry were destiny). If the hue and cry over what Dreger has uncovered shows anything, it is that although many of us thought the modern, scientific west had moved beyond those views, many in the medical and scientific community have not.

[lipstixgal]

Scary and terrifying!! to say the least!

[UofMfan]

Dr. Maria New, a highly regarded pediatric endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, is among a handful of physicians worldwide who have studied the treatment. New does not offer the treatment in her position at Mount Sinai, but follows children she treated previously or who have had the treatment provided by other doctors. She declined to be interviewed for this report, but on her website and in publications, New says the data so far show that the treatment is safe and effective in preventing ambiguous genitalia.

However, New's more recent studies have caused more consternation, because — as she describes it — treated girls behave in ways that are considered more traditionally girlish.

In a 2008 study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, New and her colleagues administered a sexual behavior assessment questionnaire to 143 women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia who were not treated prenatally. They found that most were heterosexual, but the rates of homosexual and bisexual women were markedly higher in women with the condition — especially those with the most severe conditions — compared with a control group of 24 female relatives without congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

And, in a paper published earlier this year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleagues reported on data from 685 pregnancies in which the condition was diagnosed prenatally, acknowledging the potential effects of the treatment for reducing traditionally masculine behavior in girls. Prenatally treated girls were more likely to be shy, they wrote, while untreated girls were "more aggressive."

Moreover, the authors said, failure to provide prenatal therapy seems to lead to traditionally masculine gender-related preferences in childhood play, peer association and career and leisure choices.

"The majority, no matter how severe, are heterosexual," said Meyer-Bahlburg, who has collaborated with New on some of the studies. "But the rate of CAH women attracted to females increases with their degree of androgen exposure during prenatal life."

Studies have not yet been conducted to examine whether the hormone treatment would reduce the rate of lesbianism, Meyer-Bahlburg said.

"I would never recommend treatment in order to take lesbianism away if that is someone's predisposition," he said. "Any treatment can be misused. That could happen here. But this is not the focus of the treatment. The focus is to make surgery unnecessary."

shari.roan@latimes.com

OK so after reading this article I am thinking that a lot of bad can come from it, especially from the right-wing nuts and religious zealots that think homosexuality can be "cured"

It is scary to read this. The parts I highlighted form an excerpt of the article are the ones that are giving me food for thought. I am still priocessing.

[UofMfan]

So I copied my post here, since I focused on the "lesbian" part of the article, it seems more appropriate for this discussion.

[waxnrope]

It is a metaphorical abortion. Killing the the future promise of another person. Destroying that which might have been possible. Let's serve that reasoning to the right wing anti-abortionists.

[Soon]

A Prenatal Treatment Raises Questions of Medical Ethics

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...#ixzz0wjEH50eC

[Soon]

The Sad Lengths Some Go to Avoid Having a Lesbian Daughter


Alice Dreger, on the Hasting Center blog, alerts us to Dr. Maria New, who's been giving the experimental medication dexamethasone (dex) to pregnant women concerned their child might have congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH, an adrenal condition that results sometimes in intersexuality in girls, rarely in death, sometimes in life-long medication, but has also been associated with tomboyishness and lesbianism) without informed consent. It's not approved for use by pregnant women, it doesn't cure CAH so much as reduce some of the masculinization associated with it, and there are studies showing that it results in birth defects in animals.

Dreger, who's been working to get the off-label use banned, also found that New is selling the treatment as a way of preventing daughters from growing up lesbian and making sure that girls will be willing to enjoy sex submit to men and produce babies:

[New and colleagues] go on to suggest that the work might offer some insight into the influence of prenatal hormones on the development of sexual orientation in general. "That this may apply also to sexual orientation in at least a subgroup of women is suggested by the fact that earlier research has repeatedly shown that about one-third of homosexual women have (modestly) increased levels of androgens." They "conclude that the findings support a sexual-differentiation perspective involving prenatal androgens on the development of sexual orientation."

Dreger goes on to describe how these doctors' goal is to make girls conform to the heterosexist expectations of their parents:

And it isn't just that many women with CAH have a lower interest, compared to other women, in having sex with men. In another paper entitled "What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?" Meyer-Bahlburg writes that "CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups."

In the same article, Meyer-Bahlburg suggests that treatments with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls' behavior to be closer to the expectation of heterosexual norms: "Long term follow-up studies of the behavioral outcome will show whether dexamethasone treatment also prevents the effects of prenatal androgens on brain and behavior."

In a paper published just this year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleague, pediatric endocrinologist Saroj Nimkarn of Weill Cornell Medical College, go further, constructing low interest in babies and men - and even interest in what they consider to be men's occupations and games - as "abnormal," and potentially preventable with prenatal dex:

"Gender-related behaviors, namely childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences in adolescence and adulthood, maternalism, aggression, and sexual orientation become masculinized in 46,XX girls and women with 21OHD deficiency [CAH]. These abnormalities have been attributed to the effects of excessive prenatal androgen levels on the sexual differentiation of the brain and later on behavior." Nimkarn and New continue: "We anticipate that prenatal dexamethasone therapy will reduce the well-documented behavioral masculinization..."

"The challenge here is... to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody's wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother. And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl."

There's a lot to be said in a debate about whether it's ethical to try to medically prevent a child from growing up queer or gender-nonconforming or just interesting in something other than child-bearing. But when the goal is to eliminate part of human diversity in order to make some people feel more comfortable, there doesn't seem to be much need for discussion: this is a simple crime against humanity.

It'd be easy to write off New, et al., as people who aren't even close to reaching that goal so we shouldn't be concerned (they're working on one treatment that'll work on, at most, one-third of women, with no hard data as of yet to show that it works, with a treatment that will remain inaccessible to most parents), if it weren't for the fact that they aren't the first, won't be the last, and definitely aren't the only medical professionals working on this.

I'm working through some of George Rekers's (the virulently anti-gay Baptist psychologist who was caught with a rentboy) old child psychology papers on preventing homosexuality in boys through what can only be described as psychological torture, which he was doing well after homosexuality was removed from the DSM and deemed a normal variation of human sexuality instead of a psychological disorder. But curing it is still some scientists' goal. They're probably uncomfortable with their own sexuality and are looking for a cure so because they think it'll make them feel better about themselves, and as long as there's homophobia and smart researchers with access to resources, they'll keep on working on it. Eventually they're going to stumble on something.

There are lots of reasons why this is bad when it comes to bioethics, reasons that should appeal to both the right and the left should this question ever become political. Alice Dreger discusses a few bioethical issues with engineering sexual orientation in Psychology Today, but here's the one that gets to the heart of the issue:

The fact is that children are inherently unpredictable, and so (surely) what it means to decide to be a parent is to agree that you will accept the uncertainty that comes with being a parent. Having a child is not like taking a spouse; there is no mutual agreement entered into. It is up the parent to make the commitment. And to make the commitment by saying, "I'm willing to have you, but only if you are a boy, and a straight boy at that, and a straight boy with blue eyes and a very high IQ" is, frankly, to not really make the commitment that parenting requires.

Am I suggesting that people who want to engineer their children's sexual orientations are unfit to be parents? Yes, I am. Being gay is not a terrible, tragic disease that requires prevention or treatment chosen for you by your parents.

I am reminded here of a colleague who works as a social worker on a craniofacial team at a children's hospital. She was telling me one day, despairingly, of having a consultation with a pair of expectant parents. Their fetus had been diagnosed with a cleft lip, one that would be reasonably correctable without major trauma. It was true the baby would be born with the odd-looking mouth, and that the child might always have a noticeable lip scar. But this was not a child with a fatal disease or anything. Yet the father was flipping out, saying to his wife and the social worker, "I can't handle this! I can't handle this!" He wanted to abort for this.

My friend and I both were both thinking: Come on! If you can't handle this, what are you going to do when your kid smokes a little dope? What are you going to do if she ends up pregnant at 16? What are you going to do if she sucks at math or suffers from a lot of acne? Sure, abort. But don't have any children if you can't handle this.

[xxfemmexx]

Wow.......... Thats all I can really say! Its not very often I end up speechless!

[Soft*Silver]

http://www.patient-safety.com/burt.htm

1966 to 1988...clitoral re-alignment so men would not have to perform foreplay. Done without permission of the women who went in for simpler surgeries.

"For 22 years in southwestern Ohio, Dr. James Burt, a gynecologist, not a licensed surgeon*, subjected thousands of women to bizarre, disfiguring operations involving clitoral circumcision and vaginal reshaping, which he called the Surgery of Love, sometimes performing the operation without their permission when they had been anesthetized for something else. He admitted in a book that he did it without their permission and yet was allowed to keep doing it for another 14 years after that admission."

all in the name of "fixing" women....

the last lobotomy to stop a woman from masturbating was done in the
1970's, btw...

[Soft*Silver]

CORRECTION: "In the U.S., the last documented clitoridotomy to reduce sexual activity occurred in 1958. The procedure was performed on a 5-year-old girl, reportedly to stop her from masturbating"

http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/fem...ent-forms.html

[FlowerFem]

What?? You can't be serious. I do alot of research in the field of genetics, can you tell me exactly where this article was published. I am checking on the validity of it, and I can't find it in any medical publication.

[FlowerFem]

Many things in the article seem questionable. Let me just say, this is my field of expertise, so I feel compelled to respond. I hope I can help calm some frazzled nerves. At the risk of boring you to tears .
In order for a drug to be classifed as "experimental" and used on humans, the FDA has many requirements. One is that it be tested on animals first, for acute toxicity, exposure to unreasonable risks, preformance of the drug for it's intended purpose. This requires many clinical studies.
The article does not mention who developed this drug, or why, nor does it mention who is sponsoring the studies Dr Nice is conducting. Dr. Nice and her volunteers, seem to be the only ones interested in this "experimental" drug. I highly doubt a medical facility like Mt. Sinai would be so vulnerable, as to set themselves up for the obvious lawsuit that this seems to beg for.
Developers of drugs, such as a major pharmaceutical companies, use many outlets to test their drugs worldwide, to get the most accurate results possible. Just one DR. using an "experimental drug" would in itself , not pass FDA approval for the drug to be classifed as experimental in the first place, and therefore could not be used on humans.
Also, preclinical studies on animals, which is a requirement, could never prove the drug stopped potential animals from being lesibians, nor could a study show that a fetus lacked the desire for motherhood. . Since there is no way to prove the fetus was straight or gay, or lacked a desire to nurture or be a mother, in the womb, before they took the drug. The experiments if they even were conducted, would not be valid, and the subject matter would be so questionable, they would never warrant what is refered to as IND submission for the FDA. So they would never be approved for experimental use on humans.
The article seems to be missing some key information. Like where the preclinical studies took place. Who developed the drug, and who is sponsoring the human studies? Dr. Nice and a few colleagues seem to be conducting some studies, but who is sponsoring the studies?

[Toughy]

The 'experimental' drug is dexamethasone....a glucocorticoid type of steroid.............it's been around for years and this use is in the literature ........they are saying it's experimental because dexamethasone is not FDA approved for use in CAH....it is what is called 'off-label' use.

I have been prescribed the drug when I had pneumonia....

I'm not a big fan of wikipedia, but this is pretty good info.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

[LediskoLove99]

Ridiculous!

Oh boy this is going to turn out horribly. I can feel it.

[violaine]

Otherwise their daughters might grow up to, um, be nominated to sit on the Supreme Court, serve as cabinet secretaries, take 18 Grand Slam singles titles, win Grammies, and take their girlfriends to prom.

And we can't have that.

-- or they might be aspie. ha.

not interested in any 'cure' for that either, by the way!

[paintedleofemme]

My blood pressure is so high right now its not even funny(I need a cig,not that thats good!) But really, trying to prevent homosexual woman? This woman needs to get bent, let me do it please! We have all kinds of children born into this world, children with mental and physical disabilities , whats next, a shot for them? It saddens me what some people use science for, like this, nothing good.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by paintedleofemme

My blood pressure is so high right now its not even funny(I need a cig,not that thats good!) But really, trying to prevent homosexual woman? This woman needs to get bent, let me do it please! We have all kinds of children born into this world, children with mental and physical disabilities , whats next, a shot for them? It saddens me what some people use science for, like this, nothing good.

Actually, these are different KINDS of things. If there is a cure for, just to name a few, multiple sclerosis, or cerebral palsy or Huntington's don't you think we *should* pursue it? Let's take, for instance, Huntington's because we *know* what causes it. Huntington's is caused by repeats of a particular sequence on a particular chromosome. Everyone has this particular repeat pattern but the problem arises if you have too many repeats. Now, since we know what the sequence is and we know what chromosome it lies on, if we could edit out the repeats and spare people a really unpleasant death shouldn't we do that? Editing out something like Tay-Sachs or Huntington's or, for that matter, sickle cell anemia would have demonstrable medical benefits and lives would be saved. That is not in the same ethical universe as someone who thinks that homosexuality is a biological 'error' and should be edited out.

Now, it may be a while before we can do the kind of genome editing I'm talking about but nothing in principle prevents it from happening and I see nothing ethically wrong with it. If one can prevent someone from contracting a disease should that be done?

Cheers
Aj