The Office of Human Dignity & Life Initiatives welcomes Reggie Littlejohn who will screen the documentary, "It's a Girl" onTuesday, April 7 at 2:00pm in the Hesburgh Center Auditorium. Ms. Littlejohn is the founder of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, an international coalition dedicated to opposing forced abortion, gender-selective abortion, and sexual slavery in China. She was also instrumental in the international effort to free blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who arrived in the United States. …
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Join us for our Spring 2015 Arthur J. Schmitt Lecture, "William Harvey and the Circulatory System," to be delivered by Nicholas Maistrellis on Wednesday, April 8, at 4 p.m. in McKenna 100. The lecture will be followed by a reception in the McKenna Atrium.
Nicholas Maistrellis is a tutor at St. John's College. He was a university fellow in the department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin.…
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Science influences ethics and policy-making. For example, a high incidence of embryo loss in the earliest stage of pregnancy is commonly used as a contributory justification for the intentional or foreseen loss of human embryos in fertility treatment and laboratory experimentation. However, establishing the natural fate of embryos during the first week post-fertilisation is challenging, and hampered by a lack of appropriate data. Many scientific sources are claimed to justify embryo mortality rates of 75% and higher. These include speculative calculations, demographic analyses, biochemical data and the unique anatomical studies of Dr Arthur Hertig. However, a critical re-evaluation of these data casts doubt on quantitative conclusions that are often repeated, and occasionally exaggerated, by both scientists and ethicists. In this talk Dr Gavin Jarvis, a pharmacologist from the University of Cambridge, will introduce and present those studies which provide the evidential basis for claims about early human embryo mortality, and highlight the effects that a misunderstanding of this issue may have on ethics and science alike.…
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