First up, Ace has a post about a story treating the soaring demand in the UK for . . . elective genitoplasty, or as he puts it, ”designer vaginas”:
Rising numbers of women are asking the NHS to provide cosmetic surgery on their genitals, doctors said on Friday.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, they said the number of ”labial reductions” carried out in NHS hospitals had doubled to 800 a year over five years.“More and more women are said to be troubled by the shape, size or proportions of their vulvas”, wrote Lih Mei Liao and Sarah Creighton from London’s UCL Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Institute for Women’s Health.
…
The authors said women seeking surgery were being influenced by idealised images of genitalia shown in pornography and on private genitoplasty Web sites.
So, I imagine the same women who want their upper lips to look as pregnant as Angelina Jolie’s gourami face after having been whacked full-frontal with a 2×4, simultaneously want their nether ones svelted. I suppose that this is a matter for the NIH, because it affects their psychological well-being.
*GASP* Is that a Jean-Claude Cocteau original? I’ve never done one before. May I?
At the same time, we have this slippery-slope report on the intersection between high-tech in-utero visualization and insane self-regard:
In England, it now seems, a baby can be aborted for not being pretty enough. Maybe this was inevitable as genetic screening and techniques such as ultrasound advanced.
The London Daily Telegraph Web site reports that the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has licensed a fertility clinic to screen embryos for a genetic defect that causes a severe squint.
A squint? The aborting of babies with undesired characteristics is hardly new. In China, where people have a strong preference for boys, so many female babies have been aborted that a serious imbalance between the sexes exists. Babies with fatal conditions have been aborted. We now seem to have invented cosmetic abortion.
The man to whom the license was granted, professor Gedis Grudzinskas, was asked whether he would screen babies for hair color. He replied that hair color “can be a cause of bullying, which can lead to suicide. With the agreement of the HFEA, I would do it.”
As medical genetics advances, it will become possible to predict more and more characteristics of an unborn child—hair color, height, likelihood of obesity, perhaps intelligence. Presumably, it will then be possible to try again and again until you get your ideal baby.
Will anyone want the stem cells from an aborted, sub-prime baby?
Meanwhile, as the husband of a red-haired woman, I’d also like to point out this article, which pretty much explains “the Celtic Condition”: Color Vision Drove Primates to Develop Red Skin and Hair
UPDATE: Mona shows up at Unqualified Offerings to quite agree with Jeff’s post from yesterday (on CIA-media anti-administration complicity, also responded to by TBogg), in what can be fairly characterized, I think, as a textbook example of tendentious argumentation. My opponent believes that category X ought to be installed in position Y. I find someone who self-describes as category X whose views disagree with those of my opponent, and go with it. Hey, Andrew Sullivan thinks he’s a true conservative. Fred Phelps believes he’s not an asshole. Mona thinks she’s intelligent. It would be a simpler, but less entertaining world if it were not so.
Man, I’m still having cold chills at the notion of a “Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA)…”
Yes, Government medicine, where the same people who run the post office and the department of motor vehicles run your hospital…
Once you’ve accepted abortion as morally acceptable, the slippery slope carries one down into cosmetically dictated abortions.
Pope Paul VI predicted this, virtually, in Humanae Vitae, which argued that sex-without-procreative-possibility would lead to sex-for-any-reason.
I guess we’ve made it.
Priapse they should just practice more. I’m betting he offers botox as a cure.
Perhaps the fact that your genes are producing such hideous things should suggest that maybe you shouldn’t be procreating in the first place.
(that’s directed at the designer vagina fans, not you Diana)
Ars longa, labia miniscula
Hah …
Doctor Mengele.
Paging Doctor Mengele.
BECAUSE THE CAMELTOE!
As long as she doesn’t leave a snail trail when sliding down the banister…
…and if she can go up the banister without using her hands or legs, that’s right out.
And who could have possibly forseen this.
Someone’s gonna make a fortune on the movie rights there, B Moe. Can you say franchise?
Or, Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe and Find True Happiness?
I had not idea such machines really existed.
You just slip into those handcuffs, while I break out the Frey filaments.
Of course, it’s not female genital mutilation if you ask them to do it. Under anesthesia.
I’ve actually got a very interesting essay from a bioethicist lying about that implies that once abortion becomes acceptable for any reason, you’re a hop, skip, and a jump away from infanticide on the same grounds. The only moral difference lying in the societal consequences of killing living babies–otherwise, said ethicist reasoned, the two cases are the same from a consequentialist standpoint.
Scary stuff.