THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ... : ABORTION POLITICS & THE REGULATION OF ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY
Abortion and assisted reproductive technology (“ART”) may seem paradoxical in reproductive health: a woman seeks to terminate a pregnancy in the first, while a woman goes through herculean attempts to attain one in the latter. In fact, they share fundamental concerns: women’s health and autonomy. Both include medical procedures, with potential health risks and benefits, and both help a woman choose whether and when to become a mother. Abortion and ART share another commonality: when these issues enter public and political discourse, consideration of women’s health often recedes into the background. This response to articles by June Carbone and Jody Lynee Madeira suggests that issues central to the development of abortion-related regulation and jurisprudence have the potential to drive the development of ART and related law.
The Inauspicious Regulatory Beginnings of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis
With recent advancements in the field of genetic engineering and its biotechnology applications, scientists have been able to develop new technologies to assist in human reproduction. While seemingly presented as a medical utopia (the answer to infertility, the end to genetic diseases, etc.), assisted reproductive technologies (ART) also present serious ethical and regulatory challenges. The lack of a strong regulatory framework in the United States raises immediate ethical concerns about ART: “family balancing” through sex-selective abortions, eugenic practices, and the implications of outsourcing surrogacy to developing countries, to name a few. In addition, these ethical challenges fall squarely into the realm of biopolitical debates. Not only does the state exert power over the life and bodies of its citizens in other spheres, the government’s regulation of reproduction (or the lack thereof) even influences who its future citizens will be, with potentially dystopian results.
Transient nonlinear thermal stability analysis of metro cable under pulse power
The load of metro cable system varies a lot from morning rush hours to the evening closure time. With many trains hopping in the rush hours, the long term and economical short term thermal stability become a big issue as a result of the large difference between thermal time constant and the electrical time constant of cable. Based on a 10kV three-core XLPE metro power cable model, the theoretical thermal capacity was calculated according IEC standard. Then, a Finite Element Method (FEM) was employed to analyze the transient electro-thermal phenomena, taking into account various types of power loss in cable system and the non-linear electrical conductivity of the conductor. Finally, the thermal distribution inside the cable was presented as a function of time, and the maximum thermal capacity was predicted in metro cable.