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.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.