A religious Korean couple with four healthy daughters (and no sons) desires a son. They request prenatal diagnosis solely in order to learn the fetus’ sex. They tell you, the doctor, that if the fetus is female they will abort it. Further, they say that if you will not grant their request for prenatal diagnosis they will have an abortion rather than risk having a fifth girl. Because the mother is in her late forties, you agree to the genetic diagnosis. The child turns out to be female and has the Downs Syndrome extra chromosome. What genetic counseling would you offer them as a friend and doctor?
(a)Problem definition
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1. All life is sacred so abortion is not to be taken lightly.
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2. Girls are equally precious as boys.
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3. In traditional patriarchal cultures, boys are strongly favored over against girls. Such a value is offensive to egalitarian sentiments!
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4. Downs Syndrome babies and their families need a lot of support and assistance. If the parents are not highly motivated to do all they can for their child, the prospects for the Downs Syndrome baby to have a happy life is remote.
(b) 4 Solutions
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1. Explore reasons for their objections to a female child. Abort baby if hostility to a female baby is deep seated.
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2. Reject abortion option.
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3. Accept abortion option on condition they discuss the issue first with a clergy person of their religious persuasion.
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4. Accept abortion option on condition that they first meet with a Korean genetics counselor at the nearby university to clarify all the issues for them before making a final decision to abort the fetus.
(c) Consequences for solutions 1-4
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1. The couple are even more determined to have the abortion.
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2. The couple go else where for an abortion. They try a traditional Korean methods of abortion that is successful but caused the mother later need surgery to save her life.
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3. The couple reluctantly had the child. As was traditional in their culture, the child was never taken out doors or seen by anyone outside the immediate family.
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4. The child was not aborted but given to a unique couple who were prepared to adopt a Downs Syndrome child. The child grew up to work happily sweeping and cleaning floors at the local McDonald’s restaurant.
(d) Plan and Measures for success
Choose solution 4
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1. Approach charitable funding agency to pay couples’ bill for the genetics counseling.
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2. Adoption agency approached to search for suitable adoptee parents.
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3. The adopting mother plans to give up her job to give the needed parenting.
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Measures:-No child abuse.
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-Downs Syndrome child happy and lives to its highest potential
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-Community resources support the family so the marriage is not threatened
5.Lesson Plans to integrate Science with Ethics in the Curriculum
We want to achieve the Deweyan goal of taking the formal syllabus and restructuring it so that students can choose a problem that is their own, have “a stimulus to attention...... to discipline ..... to control ....(and) a habit of considering problems”. What follows is “a working model (that) is not something to be copied; it is to afford a demonstration of the feasibility of the principle, and of the methods which make it feasible”. It was planned and taught while I was reflecting and reading for this unit. It differs only in that ethical reflection now plays an important role in the unit.
a) Devise a lesson that lasts one week.
For several years now I have taught classes that are designed to last a week. Monday is for introducing the theme or topic and includes review of key vocabulary, drawings, photographs, artifacts and a video. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, activities or experiments are planned that teach the content of the class. Students are given readings from the textbook that highlight important informational content by answering review questions at the end of three sections of reading. On Friday the class is concluded by checking for understanding of content and students are given “CAPT” type questions that use the content they have just reviewed but applied to real world situations and that test for higher order thinking i.e. are generally open ended questions. These are too difficult for most of my students to do on their own so they are done as whole class activity. Students practice writing whole sentence or paragraph answers. Their motivation to apply themselves is that they know that a selection of these questions will appear in an examination and that they are the kind of questions used by the State to test for mastery of thinking skills. An example of 10 questions is as follows:
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1. The cat shelter advertises free shots to hybrid cats. How do you know if your cat is a hybrid?
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2. Why is it that in “mixed marriages” the children will never be pure Caucasian or pure Negroid?
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3. Why are your sex cells (sperm or egg) the only cells in your body to have only one set of chromosomes?
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4. If you are tall but both your parents are small, what does it say about your parent’s genotypes?
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5. What do gambling and genetics have in common?
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6. Your mother planted a variety of red and white flowers. The flowers self-seed and next year you have red, white and pink flowers. What does this say about dominance in this flower’s genes?
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7. Genes for blood immune type consist of three alleles A, B and O. What do doctors mean by the word allele?
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8. How is it that doctors can study genetic diseases in your body just by looking at some of your white blood cells?
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9. What is different between the genes of the sperm cells as they leave a man’s body every day and the skin cells he shaves off every day?
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10. What would you tell your friend who asks you to explain what happened to her child to cause the child to have Down’s syndrome?
b) Devise a lesson plan that integrates evolution, genetics and sexuality
The themes and textbook readings are given at the outset for the whole marking period. Your curriculum might look like the following. This is just an example based on the particular texts that I feel are suited to my students needs and recent texts.
