Essays and Theses

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Displaying 21 - 30 of 38 items.

Thesis: Dismantling Legal Constraints to Contraception in the 1900s

By Lakshmeeramya Malladi

In the late nineteenth century, the Comstock Act of 1873 made the distribution of contraception illegal and classified contraception as an obscenity. Reflecting the predominant attitude towards contraception at the time, the Comstock Act was the first federal anti-obscenity law that targeted contraception. However, social acceptance of birth control changed at the turn of the twentieth century. In this thesis, I analyzed legislation, advocates, and literature pertinent to that social change to report on the events leading up to the decriminalization of contraception.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: People, Legal, Reproduction

Dissertation: Fetal Risk, Federal Response: How Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Influenced the Adoption of Alcohol Health Warning Labels

By Erica O’Neil

In the fifteen years between the discovery of fetal alcohol syndrome, or FAS, in 1973 and the passage of alcohol beverage warning labels in 1988, FAS transformed from a medical diagnosis between practitioner and pregnant women to a broader societal risk imbued with political and cultural meaning. In this dissertation, I examine how scientific, social, moral, and political narratives dynamically interacted to construct the risk of drinking during pregnancy and the public health response of health warning labels on alcohol.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Disorders, Reproduction, Legal

Thesis: A History of Cellular Senescence and Its Relation to Stem Cells in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

By Zane Bartlett

This study aims to provide information to answer the following question: While some scientists claim they can indefinitely culture a stem cell line in vitro, what are the consequences of those culturing practices? An analysis of a cluster of articles from the Embryo Project Encyclopedia provides information to suggest possible solutions to some potential problems in cell culturing, recognition of benefits for existing or historical culturing practices, and identification of gaps in scientific knowledge that warrant further research.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Processes, Publications

Thesis: Surprising Religious and Republican Roots to Planned Parenthood: An Arizona Case Study

By Claudia Nunez-Eddy

The social and political history surrounding Planned Parenthood Arizona illustrates the interplay between politics and the reproductive rights movement throughout the twentieth century. The contextualization of major historical events during the development of Planned Parenthood Arizona gives insight into the current political and religious beliefs regarding the reproductive rights movement.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Organizations, Places, Religion

Thesis: Substance-Exposed Newborns in Arizona: An Analysis of Medically, Ethically, and Legally Appropriate Federal and State Responses

By Chanapa Tantibanchachai

In an attempt to discover, analyze, and compile those complex issues with which community health workers should be knowledgeable, this project explores existing federal regulations regarding substance-exposed newborns, compares Arizona’s regulations to Minnesota’s, Virginia’s, and Washington’s, and analyzes prevailing literature in the field about the various implications associated with screening and reporting substance-exposed newborns to law enforcement authorities.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Legal

Thesis: The ‘History and Nature of Science’ in the Era of Standards-Based Reform

By Cera Lawrence

The goal of science education in the United States is promoting scientific literacy for all students. The goal necessitates understanding the nature of science-what science is as a body of knowledge, explanatory tool, and human enterprise. The history of science is one of the most long-standing pedagogical methods of getting at the nature of science. But scientific literacy also encompasses education in scientific inquiry, and in the relationships among science, technology, and society (STS), as well as fact and theory-based subject-matter content.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Outreach

Thesis: Abortion: An objective lens at the formation of the polarization and stigma

By Sepehr Abdi-Moradi

With all of the tension surrounding the moral significance of the abortion issue, the question arises: How did specific figureheads, events, and contributing factors lead to the generation of the stigma and polarization surrounding the dichotomy of pro-life versus pro-choice abortion stances in the United States of America?

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Reproduction

Thesis: Visualizing the Embryo: Establishing Procedures for Digital Image Production with the Embryo Project

By Neekta Hamidi

Until 2013, the Embryo Project Encyclopedia had not presented images in articles due to the fact that there was no formal protocol for developing images at that time. I have created an image style guide that outlines the basic steps of creating and submitting an image that can complement an Embryo Project article and can enhance a reader’s understanding of the discussed concept. In creating this style guide, I investigate similar protocols used by other scientific journals and medical professionals.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Outreach

Thesis: The Hwang Woo-Suk Scandal and the Development of Bioethics in South Korea

By Anne Clay

In 2004, the South Korean geneticist Woo-Suk Hwang published what was widely regarded as the most important research finding in biotechnology that year. In the prestigious American journal Science, he claimed that he had succeeded in cloning a human blastocyst, which is an embryo in its early developmental stages (Hwang et al. 2004). A year later, in a second Science article, he made the earth-shattering announcement that he had derived eleven embryonic stem cell lines using his cloning technique (Hwang et al. 2005). The international scientific community was stunned.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Ethics, People

Thesis: The Human Genome Project and ELSI: The Imperative of Technology and Reduction of the Public Ethics Debate

By Tito Brige Carvalho

Portrayed as the Manhattan Project of the late 20th century, the Human Genome Project, or HGP, not only undertook the science of sequencing the human genome but also the ethics of it. For this thesis I ask how the HGP did this; what was the range of possibilities of goods and evils imagined by the HGP; and what, if anything, was left out.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Ethics, Organizations

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