The old stereotype of the gold-digging hussy who gets pregnant to trap a man into marriage seems to have faded, probably because women are not as economically dependent on men as they once were. But that’s not to say that pregnancy is no longer being wielded as a weapon: researchers who work in family planning and with victims of domestic violence say it is women who are now being threatened with pregnancy by their partners. (TIME)

Now that the FDA has approved ella (ulipristal acetate), a prescription-only emergency contraceptive, the debate about whether to prescribe such drugs is moving back to the doctor’s office. With it comes ethical and legal questions for physicians, particularly those who object to emergency contraception for various reasons. (American Medical News)

You can outsource just about any work to India these days, including making babies. Reproductive tourism in India is now a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry, with surrogacy services offered in 350 clinics across the country since it was legalized in 2002. The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe. Surrogacy can cost up to $100,000 in the United States, while many Indian clinics charge $22,000 or less. Very few questions are asked. Same-sex couples, single parents and even busy women who just don’t have time to give birth are welcomed by doctors. As a bonus, many Indians speak English and Indian surrogate mothers are less likely to use illegal drugs. Plus medical standards in private hospitals are very high (not all good Indian doctors left in the brain drain). (Slate Magazine)

More Polish women are traveling abroad to have an abortion to bypass strict laws outlawing the practice in their overwhelmingly Catholic country, a pro-choice group said on Thursday. (Reuters)

The government of Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has reversed steps toward protecting women’s health and reproductive rights, and backtracked on its intention to guarantee access to legal abortions, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Tuesday. (New York Times)

Question of whether eggs should be harvested from woman on life support plunges specialists into tough terrain. (The Boston Globe)

Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics (Volume 38, Issue 2, Summer 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles Include:

• “Embryo Stem Cell Research: Ten Years of Controversy” by John A. Robertson
• “Why Scientific Details Are Important When Novel Technologies Encounter Law, Politics, and Ethics” by Lawrence Goldstein
• “Old and New Ethics in the Stem Cell Debate” by Richard M. Doerflinger
• “Creating Embryos for Use in Stem Cell Research” by Dan W. Brock
• “Resolving Ethical Issues in Stem Cell Clinical Trials: The Example of Parkinson Disease” by Bernard Lo and Lindsay Parham
• “Allowing Innovative Stem Cell-Based Therapies Outside of Clinical Trials: Ethical and Policy Challenges” by Insoo Hyun
• Stem Cell Research and Economic Promises” by Timothy Caulfield
• “Diagnosing Consciousness: Neuroimaging, Law, and the Vegetative State” by Carl E. Fisher and Paul S. Appelbaum
• “Damage Control: Unintended Pregnancy in the United States Military” by Kathryn L. Ponder and Melissa Nothnagle
• “Teaching Health Law: Teaching Law and Medicine on the Interdisciplinary Cutting Edge: Assisted Reproductive Technologies” by Susan B. Apel
• “Recent Case Developments in Health Law” by Kate Wevers

JAMA (Volume 303, Number 23, June 16, 2010) is now available by subscription only

Articles Include:

• “Managing Financial Conflict of Interest in Biomedical Research” by Sally J. Rockey and Francis S. Collins
• “Quality of Care-How Good is Good Enough?” by Harold C. Sox and Sheldon Greenfield 

Book and Media Reviews Include:

• “Vital Conflicts in Medical Ethics: A Virtue Approach to Craniotomy and Tubal Pregnancies” by Ruth Townsend

The persistent question of children — “Where do babies come from?” — has always confronted parents. The answer to this has become more and more complex, while medical technology has traversed far ahead. Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) requires sympathetic responses from parents, professionals and society. One of the techniques of ART is surrogacy, an anxious, second-choice option for those who cannot conceive and give birth to a child. Most commissioning parents donate their gametes to create a child through surrogacy. Surrogates help those trapped in the awful math of sterility become parents, and the payment they receive is paltry as opposed to the hazards, distress and hardship they undergo. As per the rules in India, a healthy woman can become surrogate for a maximum of three times. Surrogacy is complicated by queries from all the important sectors — financial, legal, political, social and moral. We spoke to women on what it takes to fulfil one of humanity’s deepest longings — the desire to have a child. (The Hindu )

Bioethics (Volume 24, Issue 6, July 2010) is now available by subscription only

Articles Include:

• “Publication Ethics and the Ghost Management of Medical Publications” by Sergio Sismondo and Mathieu Doucet
• “Elective Twin Reductions: Evidence and Ethics” by Leah McClimans
• “A Study of Bioethical Knowledge and Perceptions in Korea” by Young-Joon Park, Sujin Kim, Aeree Kim, Seung-Yeon Ha, Young-Mee Lee, Bong-Kyung Shin, Hyun-Joo Lee, Soojin Park and Han-Kyeom Kim

Pakistan has passed laws that decentralise health care and ban sexual harassment in the workplace, raising hopes for improved women’s health. (The Lancet)

Sanger is one of the heroes of “America and the Pill,” a new cultural history of the birth control pill written by Elaine Tyler May, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota. Throughout her long career as a nurse and activist, Sanger was a tireless advocate for an oral contraceptive, calling as early as 1912 for a “magic pill.” By the time this dream was realized in 1960, six years before Sanger’s death, other contraceptives were widely available, but the pill stood out for three main reasons: First, it was the only form of contraception that was not directly linked to the act of sex (that is, no coitus interruptus necessary). Second, it was nearly 100 percent effective. Third, and most important for Sanger, women controlled it. Unlike with condoms or the rhythm method, men’s cooperation didn’t matter at all. They didn’t even have to know. (Washington Post)

Cath Elliott has called Marie Stopes’s new abortion advertisement “innocuous” because the only abortion- or pregnancy-related term it uses is “late”. Laurie Penny has interpreted the advert’s cagey language as “normalis[ing] free and frank discussion of reproductive issues”. But the advert is neither innocuous nor positive about open debate. It shows three women, each alone and worried about their unwanted pregnancy. It then provides the company hotline. (Guardian)

As an undergraduate at the University of Washington in the late 1990s, Wendie Wilson noticed some striking ads in the campus newspaper: appeals to young women to sell their eggs for what seemed to her exorbitant sums of money. But she had no idea what was involved until she herself decided to go through the process a few years later. (New York Times)

When Bill Clinton said in 1992 that he wanted to make abortion safe, legal and rare, many Americans applauded. Even if one dismisses this as rhetoric, it is a sentiment shared by the large middle and provides nearly everyone a thread of hope. But how does one get to “rare” in a sexualized world where choice is a sacrament? The only plausible answer is through education, but of what should that education consist? Most everybody over the age of 10 knows how to apply a condom these days. And moral education — the kind that might suggest remorse over the ending of a life — is frowned upon. (Washington Post)

Two weeks ago the Nebraska legislature passed two new extreme anti-abortion laws: The first bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on the assertion that the fetus can feel pain. The second bill requires abortion providers to screen for any characteristic thought to be “associated” with poorer health outcomes after abortion. Both laws represent extraordinary new attacks on abortion rights and the science of women’s health. (Science Progress)

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has advised two state governments to suspend a vaccination programme against cervical cancer following controversy over violation of guidelines during trials. (SciDev)

While the sale of solid organs has been illegal in the United States since 1984, compensation for sperm and eggs has been permitted under the guise of compensating “donors” for the time, exertion and risk entailed in the harvesting process. No legislation yet places any specific limits on such remuneration. However, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine rather arbitrarily established voluntary guidelines in 2007 that cap payments to egg “donors” at $5,000 generally and at $10,000 with “justification.” (Huffington Post)

Amnesty International may be best known to American audiences for bringing to light horror stories abroad such as the disappearance of political activists in Argentina or the abysmal conditions inside South African prisons under apartheid. But in a new report on pregnancy and childbirth care in the U.S., Amnesty details the maternal-health care crisis in this country as part of a systemic violation of women’s rights. (TIME)

In the spring of 2006, Heather Cox got an unexpected phone call from a Toronto fertility clinic. Three years earlier, she had donated eggs anonymously to a gay couple through the clinic. Now the same couple wanted a full sibling for their child. Would she consider providing eggs again? (The Walrus)

The case of a pregnant Florida woman hospitalized against her will is raising a legal, ethical and medical storm around this issue: Can a doctor’s order to quit smoking and rest in bed trump a woman’s right to control her own body? (St. Petersburg Times)