Who is a parent? Parenthood in Islamic ethics

This paper relates to the particular difficulties which have arisen in Ireland with regard to asylum-seekers who have Irish-born children. Irish Constitutional law and Irish legislation dictates that children born in Ireland are to be granted Irish citizenship. Until recently, the effect of this legislation had been interpreted in light of the Constitutional guarantee regarding the protection of the family unit with the result that the non-EU national parents and families of children born in Ireland generally qualified for Irish residency. However, a recent decision of the High Court, which emphasised the need to protect the ‘integrity’ of the Irish asylum system, held that the immigrant parents of Irish-born children were not entitled to remain in the State. This paper contends that the Irish High Court not only circumscribed the rights of Irish-born children whose parents are non-EU nationals, it (re)inforced the notion that the effective protection and imphlementation of the citizen rights of Irish-born children will depend on the nationality of their parents, a notion which runs contrary to the non-discrimination provisions of national and international law regarding the rights of the child and the protection to be accorded to the family unit.

The modern development of social relations and reproductive technologies has brought new questions and actualized interest in the situation of plurality on the father’s side. The problem that needs to be resolved is the search for a balance of interests of interested persons with a discrepancy between biological and legal paternity, taking into account the rights of the child, the search for an optimal solution. A European researcher focused on the ideal family model drew attention to the fact that it often does not correspond to social reality, which creates problems and does not always serve the interests of the child. The extension of the rights of the biological father is also considered in the context of legal protection of the sense of quality of life. The purpose of this work is to identify and study the rights of the biological father, to find a balance of interests and rights in the relations developing in the family sphere. The authors identified the interests of the parties, determined the objective rights of interested persons, determined the limits of the exercise of the rights of the biological father to establish paternity in the absence of a registered marriage with the mother of the child. Conclusions are drawn about the trends in the development of legal regulation, the need to maintain a balance of interests of persons in modern real relationships, taking into account the interests and rights of the child. It is noted that the identified problems are characteristic of different states; legal regulation based on a single presumption in different states has differences in the details and variants of behaviors established by the legislator. The conclusions drawn can be used as a basis for the development of concepts of fatherhood, proposals for the development of legislation regarding the exercise of personal rights of fathers and children, taking into account the balance of rights and interests of individuals.

Adverse pregnancy outcomes in AMA and obese patients associated with advanced reproductive technology (ART)

The aim of this article is to present the position of Islamic ethics and bioethics on the issue of the value of life. To better illustrate this topic the article is divided into two parts. In the first, the authors provide an overview of ethics, and relate it Islamic bioethics, including its sources and inspirations, while in the second, the authors examine the value of life as depicted from the perspective of Quranic ethics and Islamic bioethics of both the Shi’a and the Sunnis. Although the text has a propedeutic character it is important because it adds another theological-philosophical layer to the complex bioethical discussion that lies at the heart of the current dispute about the value of human life.

All religions should develop convincing responses to emerging bioethical problems stemming from medical and technological advancements. Additionally, believers need to know their faiths' interpretations of bioethical issues to be able to make medical decisions in line with their religious values. Therefore, Islamic bioethics should provide Muslims with conclusive and credible answers regarding newly rising problems in health care by revisiting the religious norms and decrees. However, the diversity in the Islamic denominations, the traditionalist aspect of the Sunni jurisprudence demanding strict compliance with the scriptural texts, the lack of unanimously accepted authority, and the limited number of academic works in Islamic bioethics (at least in English) complicate exploring new standards or rules for new ethical matters. In this view, the present paper aims to delineate two primary Islamic theological schools and propose al-Ghazali's maslaha as a general framework to analyze bioethical issues in the Sunni tradition. Maslaha allows exercising discretion in light of the protection of five fundamental values: religion, life, reason, lineage, and property. Maslaha has the potential to enable Sunni Muslims to appraise contemporary ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas through an Islamic view and make more autonomous decisions by having religious guidelines.

Children with development disabilities are guaranteed at the international and national full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. They exercise their rights in the family and community in which they live. Therefore, the family and the community, as well as public policies, are factors that affect the life and realization of the rights of children with development disabilities. The aim of the paper is to gain insight into the community support for children with development disabilities and their families as well as into the realization of the rights of children with development disabilities in the city of Vukovar from the perspective of their parents. The qualitative research was conducted with parents of children with development disabilities. The results indicate the following challenges faced by parents of children with development disabilities living in the city of Vukovar: late diagnosis, lack of public and community services and professionals, lack of understanding and support in the family and community, lack of information about the rights of children and parents, challenges in the field of education, absence of parents' right to balance professional and private life, lack of leisure time for parents and fear of parents for the future of the child.

This chapter develops an integrative view of children's rights based upon the natural law tradition in Christian thought. It reconstructs this tradition to address two questions: How should we ground the rights of children, especially in light of the rights of parents? What can Christianity contribute to answering that question? It argues that the natural law tradition emphasizes the biological relatedness and marriage of a child's parents as central to the rights of children, both legal and religious. It further contends that law and religion should cooperate in maximizing the possibility that the reproductive rights of adults are realized in ways that protect the rights of children to be raised by the parents who conceived them and to ensure that this happens within legally institutionalized marriage. The chapter shows the prominence of this view in major international human rights documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It also criticizes family law's move away from this natural law tradition and toward a diversity model.

Reviewed by: Body Talk: Rhetoric, Technology, Reproduction Jewell Mayberry Body Talk: Rhetoric, Technology, Reproduction. Eds. Mary M. Lay, Laura J. Gurak, Clare Gravon, and Cynthia Myntti. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2000. ix + 308 pp. The basic premise of Body Talk is that rhetoric is a social construction that has the power to create what we assume to be reality; however, this obvious tenet becomes possibly horrific when applied to the rhetoric of those reproductive technologies currently available and those still being developed. “Body talk” is the editors’ term for the intersection of reproductive technologies and the rhetoric that a culture uses to express them, and each of the twelve chapters explores the “clash” of medicine, technology, and culture during the production of “body talk.” This conflict is generally characterized throughout the text by Michel Foucault’s concept of “bio-power,” which he defines as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (4). Scientific advances in reproductive technologies allow society to be monitored, controlled, and improved to the point that individuals and their bodies become only parts of the system of knowledge, power, and discourse within a society, with cultural ideologies and norms filtering the choices and needs of the individual. This “normalizing” has serious repercussions for the individual and society as it creates the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and then grants the power to define and distinguish between the two only to those with “authoritative knowledge.” Authoritative knowledge, as opposed to experiential or embodied knowledge, is a discursive construct that blurs the line between social order and natural order, thus recursively adding persuasive power to itself. It is easy enough to recognize and often dismiss or minimize the implications of social construction in pop culture, in advertising, even in our individual gendered selves, but the carefully constructed rhetoric of the reproductive technologies discussed here is not so obvious. Yet, it is just as insidious and potentially dangerous. Technologies are never neutral tools; they are cultural forces, created and controlled for specific purposes. Thus, we must ask of all technologies, but especially reproductive technology, these questions: Who has access? How can it be positively used? What is the potential for abuse? How will it affect knowledge production and the distribution of power? Body Talk demonstrates the power of society to camouflage these issues through the calculated use of everyday rhetoric. Diepenbrock, for example, employs Kenneth Burke’s pentad to analyze case histories on the subject of reproductive technology published in women’s service magazines since 1977. Burke argues that we must think of rhetoric “not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identification that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill” (100). Thus, Diepenbrock explores how seemingly innocuous women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, and Ladies’s Home Journal have contributed to the success of the “fertility industry” by publishing case histories‚ often as much fairy tale, heroic quest, and religious miracle as true account. Such tales make childless/infertile women feel obligated to fulfill their obvious (by repetition and reinforcement) duty in life: to bear a child. Similarly, Lyn Turney discusses the politics of language in surgical contraception, where “internal mutilation” of a woman’s reproductive organs is euphemized in medical jargon as [End Page 200] “a simple procedure.” Likewise, Laura Shanner describes the “linguistic diminution” women often encounter at infertility clinics as the physical discomforts and medical risks are minimized and as the patients are objectified as “failures” because they cannot reproduce. These essays present some of the dilemmas and paradoxes inherent in a discourse concerning the value and quality of human life intersecting with the increasingly rapid development of new reproductive technologies (NRTs). Though Robbie Davis-Floyd ponders possibilities for better communication and understanding in the Afterword, there are definitely no answers supplied in this text. However, this collection is a valuable tool in recognizing the nature of the technomedical rhetoric in which we find ourselves immersed today and offers critical readings of that rhetoric for us to consider before more women “step onto the...

Review. The article disproves an opinion that is widespread in the science of family law that the legal status of the parents does not depend on whether they have registered their marriage, and if parents are not married to each other this does not affect the rights of the child. The author analyses the peculiarities of legal regulation of relations when the marriage between the parents is either registered or not registered, as well as other correlations with the fact of marriage registration. The author enumerates and summarizes the differences in the grounds for acquiring a legal status of a parent, peculiarities of exercising parental rights and performing parental duties. The author justifies the opinion that it is necessary to change a prevailing approach to understanding the ground for parental relationships. The author highlights advantages and disadvantages of the existing procedure of registration of parental rights and the birth of the child including assisted reproductive technologies. The paper defines the meaning of the fact of the marriage registration in determining the legal status of underage parents and applying specific rules with regard to the participation of underage parents in the upbringing of children. The author examines effective and broken legislative rules in the sphere of protection of the interests of children and parents upon termination by the parents their matrimonial relations. Particular attention is paid to the problems of enforcement of parental duty to provide maintenance to a child in the context of the conflict of interests of a child and a spouse of a parent who is not his or her second parent. The paper demonstrates the points of intersection in legal regulation if the payer of maintenance or alimony is acting in two specific family law statuses - namely, as a parent and a spouse. As a result, the author concludes that it is necessary to strengthen the legal status of children born out of wedlock and their parents. The author proposes directions of scientific research aimed at achieving the balance in protecting the interests of the participants of parental relations, as well as recommendations for improving enforcement practices and reforming family law in the sphere of protection of the rights of parents and children including laws on child maintenance.

ABSTRACT.This article examines parental advocacy for young children with disabilities using a subset of data drawn from a larger exploratory and descriptive study on parental advocacy for children with disabilities from birth to age 18 with a sample of 400 participants. Because this article focuses on parents of children from birth to age 6, only parents (n = 76) meeting this criterion were selected. Data were collected through an online survey, with a snowball sample generated through e-mail lists and social media groups. The survey included questions on demographics, types of advocacy settings, perceived effectiveness of advocacy efforts, and an example of a successful advocacy effort. Parental advocacy was most common in schools, medical clinics, social services, and social media and involved processes such as educating oneself about the child's condition and rights for services, educating others including professionals, and making persistent efforts. These findings suggest advocacy on behalf of children with disabilities starts early and is important from birth to age 6. Policy and social work practice should help parents with support, knowledge, and skills to be effective advocates for their children. Future research is recommended to explore the relationships between advocacy, empowerment, coping, and resilience in parents of children with special needs.

In Canada, brucellosis and tuberculosis threaten an estimated 4500 wood bison (Bison bison athabascae), a species considered at risk by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife In Canada (COSEWIC). To help rescue this species, our Wood Bison Reproductive Research group proposes to employ advanced reproductive technologies. Unfortunately, little is known about the reproductive physiology of the wood bison, which hinders the application of these reproductive technologies. In order to modify advanced reproductive techniques developed in cattle for use in wood bison, the large amounts of semen, embryos, and oocytes from wood bison required are not available. The purpose of this study was to compare semen collected from the more abundant and closely related plains bison (Bison bison bison) with that of wood bison. Semen from 3 wood and 4 plains bison were collected by electro-ejaculation during the summer of 2007. Andrological parameters of morphology and motility were recorded on fresh semen, extended semen, and post-thawed semen samples. A Student's t-test was used to compare the results of these two groups. Semen was cryopreserved using two commercially available cryopreservation media (Andromed and Triladyl, Minitube Canada, Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada). Sperm morphology and motility were not different between electro-ejaculated samples from plains and wood bison (P > 0.05). Also, no difference was found in the survival rate of sperm from the electro-ejaculated samples between plains and wood bison after freezing and then thawing using an egg-yolk based extender (Triladyl) or an extender containing no products of animal origin (Andromed). A difference between cryopreservation media was found; post-thaw motility of Triladyl-treated sperm was higher (29%) than that of the Andromed-treated sperm (12%). Due to lack of previous success with preserving electro-ejaculated semen in media free of animal-origin products, motility assays were performed to evaluate if spermatozoa retrieved from epididymides of plains bison can be cryopreserved in Andromed. Interestingly, cyropreserved epididymal spermatozoa had a higher motility than cryopreserved electro-ejaculated sperm after freezing-thawing procedures using a medium containing no products of source animal (respectively, 30% v. 7%). This result suggests that there may be a factor secreted by the reproductive accessory glands that interferes with the post-thaw survivability of bison sperm. In conclusion, this study supports the hypothesis that semen from plains bison behaves similarly to that of wood bison semen during cryopreservation and therefore could be used to establish protocols for advanced reproductive technologies in wood bison. This project was supported by Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development in Saskatchewan.

Down syndrome due to rare inherited 15/21 Robertsonian translocation: genetics and reproductive counseling

The review covers current options for ovarian tissue cryopreservation and transplantation and provides a systematic review of the existing literature from the last 10 years, taking into account all previously published reviews on the subject. The different cryopreservation options available for fertility preservation in cancer patients are embryo cryopreservation, oocyte cryopreservation and ovarian tissue cryopreservation. The choice depends on various parameters: the type and timing of chemotherapy, the type of cancer, the patient's age and the partner status. The different options and their results are discussed, as well as their putative indications and efficacy. The review concludes that advances in reproductive technology have made fertility preservation techniques a real possibility for patients whose gonadal function is threatened by premature menopause, or by treatments such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy or surgical castration.

Cardiac diseases complicating pregnancy

Women and the family of the future.