ACT UP Philadelphia, Courtney Dailey
A testament to one of the few remaining ACT UP chapters left in the U.S., the Philly ACT UP continues to kick ass. They are grassroots activists who have been fighting against greed, racism, neglect and bigotry since 1987. The two-color offset printed poster, 11" x 17" (unsigned, unlimited edition) is available from the website of Justseeds/Visual Resistance Artists’ Cooperative, a decentralized community of artists who believe in the power of personal expression in concert with collective action to transform society. www.justseeds.org

“Egg Donor” or “Woman”?

Written by Evelyne Schuster
to The New York Times
January 27, 2003.

Re: New York Times OP-ED:
“How One Clone Leads to Another,”
by Leon R. Kass, Friday,
January 24, 2003

I t seems obvious that Leon Kass, President Bush’s chief bioethics adviser, cares more about human embryos than he cares about women in the context of human cloning. Indeed, while he insists that embryos will be routinely produced as a source for experimentation, he simultaneously avoids using the word “women,” preferring instead the words “egg donors.“ In his words: “research cloning would require a large number of human eggs and invites the exploitation of egg donors.” (Op-Ed , January 24). The choice of words is critical because it decisively affects the way moral questions are posed and answers are given. For sure, women are not reducible to “egg donors.” To identify them as such is to depersonalize women and make them irrelevant to the cloning process. But it is not only biotechnology that can commodify, dehumanize and depersonalize humans. The way we use the language can have similar results. It is disheartening that Kass who believes that human cloning is dehumanizing could not resist the very temptation he has denounced in his Human Cloning Report, to use words that obscure rather than clarify the moral questions raised by human cloning.

—Evelyne Shuster, PhD
— Medical Ethicist,
— Veterans Affairs Medical Center
—Philadelphia

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