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Medical Research: Cell Division

Fifty years ago, a microbiologist named Leonard Hayflick developed a strain of cells named WI-38 from the lungs of an aborted fetus. The strain of cells have been used to produce life-savings vaccines worldwide, but have also had a history riddled with controversy: “The cells have played ‘a very critical role in studying cellular senescence,’ […]

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What Choice?

The problems within the pro-choice movement: “Some of these leaders and their similarly aged deputies have been reluctant to pass the torch, according to a growing number of younger abortion-rights activists who say their predecessors are hindering the movement from updating its strategy to appeal to new audiences. This tension had been brewing for years, […]

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Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives

A look behind the scenes of Texas’s decision last year to cut funding for family planning and wage “an all-out war on Planned Parenthood”—and what that may mean for the future of women’s health care: “It was a given that reasonable people could differ over abortion, but most lawmakers believed that funding birth control programs […]

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Brazil’s Girl Power

That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has […]

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The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy

As Jenny lay on the obstetrician’s examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn’t want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was […]

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