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Controversy surrounds promotion of prenatal dexamethasone
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Newsweek magazine
Posted: July 12th, 2010
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/02/the-anti-lesbian-drug.htm...
Genetic engineers, move over: the latest scheme for creating children to a parents specifications requires no DNA tinkering, but merely giving mom a steroid while shes pregnant, and presto - no chance that her daughters will be lesbians or (worse?) uppity. Or so one might guess from the storm brewing over the prenatal use of that steroid, called dexamethasone. In February, bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University and two colleagues blew the whistle on the controversial practice of giving pregnant women dexamethasone to keep the female fetuses they are carrying from developing ambiguous genitalia. Dreger and her colleagues pluck numerous brow-raising statements from the writings of pediatric endocrinologist Maria New of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who has long promoted prenatal dexamethasone. New has indeed argued that prenatal androgens can affect a womans sexual orientation, her interest in becoming a mother and housewife, her interest in traditionally masculine careers, andin childhoodwhether she plays with dolls or trucks. A book that Harvard University Press will publish in September, called Brain Storm: Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, argues that studies claiming to find innate, sex-based brain differences are seriously flawed.
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