Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism

[Soon]

Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism

posted by DAN SAVAGE on WED, JUN 30, 2010 at 9:05 AM


That's not fair, as Hanna Rosin at Slate will shortly point out. Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New—of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University—isn't just trying to prevent lesbianism by treating pregnant women with an experimental hormone. She's also trying to prevent the births of girls who display an "abnormal" disinterest in babies, don't want to play with girls' toys or become mothers, and whose "career preferences" are deemed too "masculine." (Bioethics Forum link: Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb?

Read more: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bio...#ixzz0sOSR2FXI) Unbelievable:

So no more Elena Kagans, no more Donna Shalalas, no more Martina Navratilovas, no more k.d. langs, no more Constance McMillens—because all women must grow up to suck dick, crank out babies, and do women's work. And the existence of adult women who are not interested in "becoming someone's wife" and "making babies" constitutes a medical emergency that requires us to treat women who are currently pregnant with a dangerous experimental hormone. Otherwise their daughters might grow up to, um, be nominated to sit on the Supreme Court, serve as cabinet secretaries, take 18 Grand Slam singles titles, win Grammies, and take their girlfriends to prom.

And we can't have that.

Two things: Gay people have been stressing out about the day arriving when scientists developed treatments to prevent homosexuality. The preventing gay sheep freak out is here, Twilight of the Golds is here, and I recall—but can't quickly find a link for—a "fellow" at the Family Research Council or the American Family Association who backed in-utero hormone treatments to prevent homosexuality. Well, here we are—the day appears to have arrived. Now what are we going to do about it?

And will the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee invite Maria New to testify at Elana Kagan's confirmation hearings? New could argue that Kagan—childless, unmarried Kagan—is unfit to serve on our highest court because her "low maternal interest" pegs her as abnormal, well outside the "maternal mainstream." Maybe GOP senators would be mollified if Kagan knocked back a few bottles of dex during her confirmation hearings?

[Manul]

Paging Dr. Mengele.

[Soon]

Originally Posted by Manul

Paging Dr. Mengele.

Yeah, I am pretty disturbed. I keep reading/thinking about it -- I'm stunned and in a bit of disbelief that this is ACTUALLY occurring.

[Melissa]

The mind boggles. When I first read the headline I thought it was a joke. Even now, I keep thinking, really? Surely not? Have you tried to verify this story? I keep thinking National enquirer and Star Magazine! I mean that's how out of this world and absurd this is.

Melissa

[Soon]

Originally Posted by Melissa

The mind boggles. When I first read the headline I thought it was a joke. Even now, I keep thinking, really? Surely not? Have you tried to verify this story? I keep thinking National enquirer and Star Magazine! I mean that's how out of this world and absurd this is.

Melissa

Yeah, I had the same reaction.

It is all horrifically spelled out in this Bioethics Forum article:

Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb?

Alice Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, Anne Tamar-Mattis, 06/29/2010

[Jesse]

You have got to be kidding me!!!

[Jet]

*shaking my head*

[Toughy]

The real true problem with this is that it is being done outside of Institutional Review Board oversight. No one should ever ever be involved with experimental drug trials that are not under IRB review. Experimenting on a fetus without IRB approval should be criminal.

Dexamthasone is a powerful glucocorticosteroid. It has approved uses and works damn well as an anti-inflammatory and as an immuno-suppressive drug.

[suebee]

If we can glean one small positive thing out of this - my girl's first comment was: "Well at least they seem to be agreeing that orientation is biological in nature."

[Soon]

Originally Posted by cybersuebee

If we can glean one small positive thing out of this - my girl's first comment was: "Well at least they seem to be agreeing that orientation is biological in nature."

I don't know if that is automatically a good thing as was pointed out in a quote posted by Melissa from the Bioethics article:

..."suggests a reason why activists for gay and lesbian rights should be wary of believing that claims for the innateness of homosexuality will lead to liberation. Evidence that homosexual orientation is inborn could, instead, very well lead to new means of pathologization and prevention, as it seems to be in the case we’ve been tracking."




Anyway, I take issue with sexual orientation being ALWAYS deemed a biological fact for everyone in the LGBT community. Sexual fluidity (especially in women) has been been proven and, for me, I have made some pretty solid choices as opposed to being swept along by any
predetermined biological or innate orientation.

Also, to attain equality, one shouldn't have to prove the innateness of sexual orientation.

[waxnrope]

Originally Posted by Manul

Paging Dr. Mengele.

Mengele? How about Jack Kavorkian! Where is Octavia Butler when we need her? Well, she's dead, but she sure could do right by a bit of her dystopian fiction with this idea. Patooey! Just abort my arse! Wait, we can go to the religious right for support!!!

[Melissa]

Originally Posted by HowSoonIsNow

Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism

posted by DAN SAVAGE on WED, JUN 30, 2010 at 9:05 AM


That's not fair, as Hanna Rosin at Slate will shortly point out. Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New—of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University—isn't just trying to prevent lesbianism by treating pregnant women with an experimental hormone. She's also trying to prevent the births of girls who display an "abnormal" disinterest in babies, don't want to play with girls' toys or become mothers, and whose "career preferences" are deemed too "masculine." (Bioethics Forum link: Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb?

Read more: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bio...#ixzz0sOSR2FXI) Unbelievable:

So no more Elena Kagans, no more Donna Shalalas, no more Martina Navratilovas, no more k.d. langs, no more Constance McMillens—because all women must grow up to suck dick, crank out babies, and do women's work. And the existence of adult women who are not interested in "becoming someone's wife" and "making babies" constitutes a medical emergency that requires us to treat women who are currently pregnant with a dangerous experimental hormone. Otherwise their daughters might grow up to, um, be nominated to sit on the Supreme Court, serve as cabinet secretaries, take 18 Grand Slam singles titles, win Grammies, and take their girlfriends to prom.

And we can't have that.

Two things: Gay people have been stressing out about the day arriving when scientists developed treatments to prevent homosexuality. The preventing gay sheep freak out is here, Twilight of the Golds is here, and I recall—but can't quickly find a link for—a "fellow" at the Family Research Council or the American Family Association who backed in-utero hormone treatments to prevent homosexuality. Well, here we are—the day appears to have arrived. Now what are we going to do about it?

And will the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee invite Maria New to testify at Elana Kagan's confirmation hearings? New could argue that Kagan—childless, unmarried Kagan—is unfit to serve on our highest court because her "low maternal interest" pegs her as abnormal, well outside the "maternal mainstream." Maybe GOP senators would be mollified if Kagan knocked back a few bottles of dex during her confirmation hearings?

Ok, I went back to the source of the quote. Dan Savage is misquoting to a certain extent but the source article does say Maria New is labelling heteronormative behavior as "normal" and appears to be suggesting her treatment will "normalize" girls. Yikes.


Very interesting quote from this article by Alice Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, Anne Tamar-Mattis, 06/29/2010 that is alerting us to Maria New's research.


" While everyone has been busy watching geneticists at the frontier of the brave new world, none of us seem to have noticed what some pediatricians are up to. Perhaps it is because so many people are fascinated by the idea of a “gay gene” that prenatal “lesbian hormones” have slipped past public scrutiny. In any case, we think Nimkarn and New’s “paradigm for prenatal diagnosis and treatment” suggests a reason why activists for gay and lesbian rights should be wary of believing that claims for the innateness of homosexuality will lead to liberation. Evidence that homosexual orientation is inborn could, instead, very well lead to new means of pathologization and prevention, as it seems to be in the case we’ve been tracking."



Read more: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bio...#ixzz0sOmcTNRX

Melissa

[UofMfan]

Dr. Maria New, a highly regarded pediatric endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, is among a handful of physicians worldwide who have studied the treatment. New does not offer the treatment in her position at Mount Sinai, but follows children she treated previously or who have had the treatment provided by other doctors. She declined to be interviewed for this report, but on her website and in publications, New says the data so far show that the treatment is safe and effective in preventing ambiguous genitalia.

However, New's more recent studies have caused more consternation, because — as she describes it — treated girls behave in ways that are considered more traditionally girlish.

In a 2008 study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, New and her colleagues administered a sexual behavior assessment questionnaire to 143 women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia who were not treated prenatally. They found that most were heterosexual, but the rates of homosexual and bisexual women were markedly higher in women with the condition — especially those with the most severe conditions — compared with a control group of 24 female relatives without congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

And, in a paper published earlier this year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleagues reported on data from 685 pregnancies in which the condition was diagnosed prenatally, acknowledging the potential effects of the treatment for reducing traditionally masculine behavior in girls. Prenatally treated girls were more likely to be shy, they wrote, while untreated girls were "more aggressive."

Moreover, the authors said, failure to provide prenatal therapy seems to lead to traditionally masculine gender-related preferences in childhood play, peer association and career and leisure choices.

"The majority, no matter how severe, are heterosexual," said Meyer-Bahlburg, who has collaborated with New on some of the studies. "But the rate of CAH women attracted to females increases with their degree of androgen exposure during prenatal life."

Studies have not yet been conducted to examine whether the hormone treatment would reduce the rate of lesbianism, Meyer-Bahlburg said.

"I would never recommend treatment in order to take lesbianism away if that is someone's predisposition," he said. "Any treatment can be misused. That could happen here. But this is not the focus of the treatment. The focus is to make surgery unnecessary."

shari.roan@latimes.com

OK so after reading this article I am thinking that a lot of bad can come from it, especially from the right-wing nuts and religious zealots that think homosexuality can be "cured"

It is scary to read this. The parts I highlighted form an excerpt of the article are the ones that are giving me food for thought. I am still priocessing.

[UofMfan]

So I copied my post here, since I focused on the "lesbian" part of the article, it seems more appropriate for this discussion.

[waxnrope]

It is a metaphorical abortion. Killing the the future promise of another person. Destroying that which might have been possible. Let's serve that reasoning to the right wing anti-abortionists.

[Soon]

A Prenatal Treatment Raises Questions of Medical Ethics

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...#ixzz0wjEH50eC

[Soon]

The Sad Lengths Some Go to Avoid Having a Lesbian Daughter


Alice Dreger, on the Hasting Center blog, alerts us to Dr. Maria New, who's been giving the experimental medication dexamethasone (dex) to pregnant women concerned their child might have congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH, an adrenal condition that results sometimes in intersexuality in girls, rarely in death, sometimes in life-long medication, but has also been associated with tomboyishness and lesbianism) without informed consent. It's not approved for use by pregnant women, it doesn't cure CAH so much as reduce some of the masculinization associated with it, and there are studies showing that it results in birth defects in animals.

Dreger, who's been working to get the off-label use banned, also found that New is selling the treatment as a way of preventing daughters from growing up lesbian and making sure that girls will be willing to enjoy sex submit to men and produce babies:

[New and colleagues] go on to suggest that the work might offer some insight into the influence of prenatal hormones on the development of sexual orientation in general. "That this may apply also to sexual orientation in at least a subgroup of women is suggested by the fact that earlier research has repeatedly shown that about one-third of homosexual women have (modestly) increased levels of androgens." They "conclude that the findings support a sexual-differentiation perspective involving prenatal androgens on the development of sexual orientation."

Dreger goes on to describe how these doctors' goal is to make girls conform to the heterosexist expectations of their parents:

And it isn't just that many women with CAH have a lower interest, compared to other women, in having sex with men. In another paper entitled "What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?" Meyer-Bahlburg writes that "CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups."

In the same article, Meyer-Bahlburg suggests that treatments with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls' behavior to be closer to the expectation of heterosexual norms: "Long term follow-up studies of the behavioral outcome will show whether dexamethasone treatment also prevents the effects of prenatal androgens on brain and behavior."

In a paper published just this year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleague, pediatric endocrinologist Saroj Nimkarn of Weill Cornell Medical College, go further, constructing low interest in babies and men - and even interest in what they consider to be men's occupations and games - as "abnormal," and potentially preventable with prenatal dex:

"Gender-related behaviors, namely childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences in adolescence and adulthood, maternalism, aggression, and sexual orientation become masculinized in 46,XX girls and women with 21OHD deficiency [CAH]. These abnormalities have been attributed to the effects of excessive prenatal androgen levels on the sexual differentiation of the brain and later on behavior." Nimkarn and New continue: "We anticipate that prenatal dexamethasone therapy will reduce the well-documented behavioral masculinization..."

"The challenge here is... to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody's wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother. And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl."

There's a lot to be said in a debate about whether it's ethical to try to medically prevent a child from growing up queer or gender-nonconforming or just interesting in something other than child-bearing. But when the goal is to eliminate part of human diversity in order to make some people feel more comfortable, there doesn't seem to be much need for discussion: this is a simple crime against humanity.

It'd be easy to write off New, et al., as people who aren't even close to reaching that goal so we shouldn't be concerned (they're working on one treatment that'll work on, at most, one-third of women, with no hard data as of yet to show that it works, with a treatment that will remain inaccessible to most parents), if it weren't for the fact that they aren't the first, won't be the last, and definitely aren't the only medical professionals working on this.

I'm working through some of George Rekers's (the virulently anti-gay Baptist psychologist who was caught with a rentboy) old child psychology papers on preventing homosexuality in boys through what can only be described as psychological torture, which he was doing well after homosexuality was removed from the DSM and deemed a normal variation of human sexuality instead of a psychological disorder. But curing it is still some scientists' goal. They're probably uncomfortable with their own sexuality and are looking for a cure so because they think it'll make them feel better about themselves, and as long as there's homophobia and smart researchers with access to resources, they'll keep on working on it. Eventually they're going to stumble on something.

There are lots of reasons why this is bad when it comes to bioethics, reasons that should appeal to both the right and the left should this question ever become political. Alice Dreger discusses a few bioethical issues with engineering sexual orientation in Psychology Today, but here's the one that gets to the heart of the issue:

The fact is that children are inherently unpredictable, and so (surely) what it means to decide to be a parent is to agree that you will accept the uncertainty that comes with being a parent. Having a child is not like taking a spouse; there is no mutual agreement entered into. It is up the parent to make the commitment. And to make the commitment by saying, "I'm willing to have you, but only if you are a boy, and a straight boy at that, and a straight boy with blue eyes and a very high IQ" is, frankly, to not really make the commitment that parenting requires.

Am I suggesting that people who want to engineer their children's sexual orientations are unfit to be parents? Yes, I am. Being gay is not a terrible, tragic disease that requires prevention or treatment chosen for you by your parents.

I am reminded here of a colleague who works as a social worker on a craniofacial team at a children's hospital. She was telling me one day, despairingly, of having a consultation with a pair of expectant parents. Their fetus had been diagnosed with a cleft lip, one that would be reasonably correctable without major trauma. It was true the baby would be born with the odd-looking mouth, and that the child might always have a noticeable lip scar. But this was not a child with a fatal disease or anything. Yet the father was flipping out, saying to his wife and the social worker, "I can't handle this! I can't handle this!" He wanted to abort for this.

My friend and I both were both thinking: Come on! If you can't handle this, what are you going to do when your kid smokes a little dope? What are you going to do if she ends up pregnant at 16? What are you going to do if she sucks at math or suffers from a lot of acne? Sure, abort. But don't have any children if you can't handle this.

[FlowerFem]

What?? You can't be serious. I do alot of research in the field of genetics, can you tell me exactly where this article was published. I am checking on the validity of it, and I can't find it in any medical publication.

[FlowerFem]

Many things in the article seem questionable. Let me just say, this is my field of expertise, so I feel compelled to respond. I hope I can help calm some frazzled nerves. At the risk of boring you to tears .
In order for a drug to be classifed as "experimental" and used on humans, the FDA has many requirements. One is that it be tested on animals first, for acute toxicity, exposure to unreasonable risks, preformance of the drug for it's intended purpose. This requires many clinical studies.
The article does not mention who developed this drug, or why, nor does it mention who is sponsoring the studies Dr Nice is conducting. Dr. Nice and her volunteers, seem to be the only ones interested in this "experimental" drug. I highly doubt a medical facility like Mt. Sinai would be so vulnerable, as to set themselves up for the obvious lawsuit that this seems to beg for.
Developers of drugs, such as a major pharmaceutical companies, use many outlets to test their drugs worldwide, to get the most accurate results possible. Just one DR. using an "experimental drug" would in itself , not pass FDA approval for the drug to be classifed as experimental in the first place, and therefore could not be used on humans.
Also, preclinical studies on animals, which is a requirement, could never prove the drug stopped potential animals from being lesibians, nor could a study show that a fetus lacked the desire for motherhood. . Since there is no way to prove the fetus was straight or gay, or lacked a desire to nurture or be a mother, in the womb, before they took the drug. The experiments if they even were conducted, would not be valid, and the subject matter would be so questionable, they would never warrant what is refered to as IND submission for the FDA. So they would never be approved for experimental use on humans.
The article seems to be missing some key information. Like where the preclinical studies took place. Who developed the drug, and who is sponsoring the human studies? Dr. Nice and a few colleagues seem to be conducting some studies, but who is sponsoring the studies?

[Toughy]

The 'experimental' drug is dexamethasone....a glucocorticoid type of steroid.............it's been around for years and this use is in the literature ........they are saying it's experimental because dexamethasone is not FDA approved for use in CAH....it is what is called 'off-label' use.

I have been prescribed the drug when I had pneumonia....

I'm not a big fan of wikipedia, but this is pretty good info.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/