To Have Is to Hold

What's wrong with trying to engineer your child's sexual orientation?

Or more specifically, what's wrong with taking a steroid, while you're pregnant, to try to increase the odds that your female fetus will someday grow up to be a straight woman who gives you grandchildren, and not a lesbian daughter more interested in puppies?

I have a funny feeling I'm about to get hit by various versions of that question, since Ellen Feder of American University, Anne Tamar-Mattis of Advocates for Informed Choice, and I just submitted a new post to Bioethics Forum revealing what we think is the first organized medical "paradigm" for attempting to prevent homosexuality in the womb.

Let me give five answers to that question. Maybe six.

Can You Hear Us Now?

Why is a Cornell doctor vibrating little girls' clitorises . . . and is this really medicine?

In a brief article entitled "Bad Vibrations" just posted at the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum, my colleague Ellen Feder and I express our shock over the follow-up techniques being used by pediatric urologist Dix Poppas at Weill Medical College of Cornell University on girls whose clitorises Poppas has cut down in size.

There's no point in my repeating here what we say at Bioethics Forum. Instead, I want to use this space to answer some questions I'm already getting from people about this scene.