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Enlarge / Saturn stars in this near-infrared image taken June 25 by the James Webb Space Telescope. (credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STSci)
The James Webb Space Telescope has observed Saturn for the first time, completing a family portrait of the Solar System’s ringed planets nearly a year after the mission’s first jaw-dropping image release.
Webb’s near-infrared camera took the picture of Saturn on June 25. Scientists added orange color to the monochrome picture to produce the image released Friday.
The picture shows Saturn’s iconic icy rings shining around the disk of the gas giant, which appears much darker in near-infrared due to the absorption of sunlight by methane particles suspended high in the planet’s atmosphere.
Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?
A recent opinion piece by George F. Will, “Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice” in the Washington Post made the startling claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022) has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.” One might think exactly the reverse. The Dobbs decision energized voters, especially women and young people, resulting in numerous Republican electoral defeats across the country. However, Will argues that the return of abortion policy to the states gives voters the opportunity of choosing moderate restrictions on abortion. Since most Americans support early abortion while opposing late-gestation abortion, Will thinks that a 15-week ban on abortion would be an acceptable compromise.
Why 15 weeks? Two reasons can be given. Almost all abortions in the US—93%—occur within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For this reason, making abortion illegal after 15 weeks would not, it would seem, impose serious burdens on most people seeking abortions.
Another reason is that several European countries limit abortion on request to the first trimester, leading some US lawmakers to suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with theirs. This is disingenuous, to say the least. While elective abortion is limited in some European countries, it is not banned afterwards, but is allowed on other grounds, including economic or social reasons, or a threat to the woman’s physical or mental health. Moreover, in most European countries, patients do not have to pay for abortion; it is covered under universal health coverage. The fact is that the trend in Europe has not been to limit abortion, but to expand access to it. Countries in Europe “… have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices.”
Were states to guarantee access to abortion prior to 15 weeks, a 15-week ban might be acceptable. However, even before Dobbs, many women in the US lacked access to abortion, due to a dearth of providers, especially in rural areas. They often had to travel many miles to find an abortion clinic, which meant that they had to arrange childcare if they have other children or take time off work. Delay is also caused by the need to raise money for an abortion, which is not paid for by Medicaid in most states, except in cases of rape, incest, or a life-threatening condition. To be sure, even if there were none of these roadblocks, some women would still not be able to have early abortions because they do not know that they are pregnant, due to youth, being menopausal, chronic obesity, or a lack of pregnancy symptoms. Any time limits will pose hardships for some people. But if access to early abortions were guaranteed, a compromise on a 15-week limit might be worth it.
I suspect that time-limit advocates are not particularly interested in making sure that women who have abortions get them early in pregnancy. They want to place roadblocks in the way of getting abortions, full stop. That these roadblocks increase the numbers of late abortions is of little concern to them, however much they wring their hands over late abortions. Abortion can be reduced by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, something that has been shown to be achieved by access to contraceptives and science-based sex education in the schools. Remember when pro-lifers emphasized those methods? Me neither.
“Some US lawmakers suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with European countries. This is disingenuous, to say the least.”
My second concern is with abortions sought after 15 weeks. The reason for a late abortion may be that the woman has a medical condition that has not developed, or has not been detected, until later in pregnancy. In such cases, the pregnancy is almost always a wanted pregnancy, and the decision to terminate imposes a tragic choice.
It may be responded that all states allow abortions to be performed when this is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, and many allow for abortions to protect her from a serious health risk. The problem is that these exceptions conflict with standard medical care, especially in the case of miscarriage. Once the woman has begun to miscarry, the failure to remove the fetus is likely to cause her sepsis, which can be life-threatening. However, in states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors cannot perform an immediate abortion, which is the standard of care in such situations. They have to wait until her death is imminent and, in some states, they cannot remove the fetus until its heart stops.
Ireland’s restrictive abortion law was repealed after a woman who was denied an abortion during a miscarriage died from septicemia. To the best of my knowledge, no woman in the US has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An OB-GYN in San Antonio had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.
Conservatives often portray those in the pro-choice camp as advocating abortion until the day of delivery, for trivial reasons. This is deeply unfair. If they want us to compromise on time limits, they should be willing to guarantee access to abortion before 15 weeks. They should be willing to compromise on pregnancy prevention through contraception and sex education. And they should agree to drop all restrictions on late-term abortions that make legislators, rather than doctors, in charge of deciding what is appropriate medical care for their patients.
Featured image: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash (public domain)
"Researchers have only so many hours in a day; if they can spend one less hour on a research article because we have implemented improved workflows and better technology, that’s one more hour they can spend on research to try to save my life, and the lives of all ALS patients." In today's post, Bruce Rosenblum shares his experience as a clinical trial participant and how that contributed to scholarly publications.
The post Guest Post — Being Research Data appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Students wearing clear backpacks outside a school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018. A Michigan school district has gone even further and banned backpacks altogether.
I recently received a note from Prof. Nirmalya Chakraborty (Rabindra Bharati University) about an exciting new digital library. It includes three categories: Navya-Nyāya Scholarship in Nabadwip, Philosophers of Modern India, and Twentieth Century Paṇḍitas of Kolkata. You can find the site here: https://darshanmanisha.org
You can learn more about the project from the following announcement.
Anouncement
Introducing the Digital Library Project
By
Bhaktivedanta Research Center, Kolkata, India
Right before the introduction of English education in India, a new style of philosophising emerged, especially in Bengal, known as Navya-Nyāya. Since Nabadwip was one of the main centres of Navya-Nyāya scholarship in Bengal during 15th– 17th Century, many important works on Navya-Nyāya were written during this period by Nabadwip scholars. Some of these were published later, but many of these published works are not available now. The few copies which are available are also not in good condition. These are the works where Bengal’s intellectual contribution shines forth. We have digitized some of these materials and have uploaded these in the present digital platform.
As a lineage of this Nabadwip tradition, many pandits (traditional scholars) produced many important philosophical works, some in Sanskrit and most in Bengali, who were residents of Kolkata during early nineteenth and twentieth century. Most of these works were published in early 1900 from Kolkata and some from neighbouring cities. These works brought in a kind of Renaissance in reviving classical Indian philosophical deliberations in Bengal. Attempts have been made to upload these books and articles in the present digital platform.
With the introduction of colonial education, a group of philosophers got trained in European philosophy and tried to interpret insights from Classical Indian Philosophy in new light. Kolkata was one of the main centres of this cosmopolitan philosophical scholarship. The works of many of these philosophers from Kolkata were published in early/middle of twentieth century. These philosophers are the true representatives of twentieth century Indian philosophy. Efforts have been made to upload these works in the present digital platform.
The purpose of constructing the present digital platform is to enable the researchers to have access to these philosophical works with the hope that the philosophical contributions of these philosophers will be studied and critically assessed resulting in the enrichment of philosophical repertoire.
We take this opportunity to appeal to fellow scholars to enrich this digital library by lending us their personal collection related to these areas for digitization.
The website address of the Digital Library is: www.darshanmanisha.org
For further correspondence, please write to:
Enlarge / An image of a cell under a lab microscope. This procedure was not related to the new experiment with monkey embryos. (credit: Getty Images)
The early days of how an embryo develops are shrouded in mystery, because it pulls a kind of vanishing act. Once a sperm finds an egg, it begins a roughly weeklong journey to the uterus, becoming a tiny ball of cells along the way. When it reaches its destination, it attaches to the wall of the uterus, disappearing from view.
To shed light on the process, researchers are trying to create embryo-like structures derived from stem cells, rather than sperm and eggs, so they can observe early development in the lab. These three-dimensional balls of cells could offer clues to how diseases, birth defects, and miscarriages arise, without the practical and ethical concerns raised by using actual embryos. In the latest effort, researchers in China made these structures using stem cells from macaques and tried to establish pregnancies with them in female monkeys. The experiment is described in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Although other researchers have created “synthetic” embryos before, it’s the first time anyone has done it with monkeys—animals closely related to humans—and tried to get them to implant in the uterus.
What does the decline of the English major mean for society at large, and university presses in particular?
The post Fallout from the Implosion of Humanities Enrollments appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
John Lewis-Stempel visits Ashdown Forest in Sussex, England, to closely observe a 300-year-old oak tree (Quercus robur). From first light until midnight, Lewis-Stempel describes the animals, birds, insects, and flora that depend on it in careful detail. In addition to astonishing you with the sheer variety and volume of creatures that inhabit and visit the tree, this piece will gently slow your heartbeat. You’ll feel your shoulders loosen as you follow Lewis-Stempel’s keen observations. It’s exactly the type of relaxation meditation we can all use.
7.01 am
The leaves of autumn, brought down by the screaming Halloween wind, still lie around the tree in a thick sodden copper mat; the mould is soft on the pads of the returning vixen as she slinks down into her den among the tree’s roots, a rabbit clamped in her jaws from her night prowl. A present for her cubs.
5.16 pm
The ecology of the oak tree is a game of consequences: the newly emerged leaves of the oak are eaten by the pale-green caterpillar of the wintermoth, which, in turn, feeds the blue tit, whose brood has just hatched in yet another of the tree’s cavities; the sparrowhawk, terror of the copse, flashes between the tangled branches, to catch and feed on the blue tit.
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