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Babies and Beasts
THE ARGUMENT FROM MARGINAL CASES
Daniel A. Dombrowski
University of Illinois Press, 1997
    
      Both its defenders and detractors
        have described the argument from marginal cases as the most important
        to date in defense of animal rights. Hotly debated among philosophers
        for some twenty years, the argument concludes that no morally relevant
        characteristic distinguishes human beings–including infants, the
        severely retarded, the comatose, and other "marginal cases"--from
        any other animals.
      Babies and Beasts presents
        the first book-length exploration of the broad range of views relating
        to the argument from marginal cases and sorts out and evaluates its various
        uses and abuses.
      Daniel Dombrowski analyzes
        the views of many who are prominent in the debate--
        Peter Singer, Thomas Regan, H. J. McCloskey, Jan Narveson, John Rawls,
        R. G. Frey, Peter Carruthers, Michael Leahy, Robert Nozick, and James
        Rachels are included--in a volume that will be essential to philosophers,
        animal rights activists, those who work in clinical settings, and others
        who must sometimes deal with "marginal cases."
 
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front cover of Babies In Bottles
Babies In Bottles
Susan Merrill Squier
Rutgers University Press, 1994
There is a forgotten history to our current debates over reproductive technology - one interweaving literature and science, profoundly gendered, filled with choices and struggles. We pay a price when we accept modern reproductive technology as a scientific breakthrough without a past. Babies in Bottles retrieves some of that history by analyzing the literary and popular science writings of Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, Charlotte Haldane, Aldous Huxley, and Naomi Mitchison - writings that include representations of reproductive technology from babies in bottles to surrogate mothers. It is to these images, fantasies, practices, and narratives of scientific intervention in reproduction that we must look if we want to understand what acts of ideological construction have been carried out, and are currently being performed, in the name of reproductive technology. Susan Merrill Squier shows how the imaginative construction of reproductive technology helps to shape our contemporary practices. Susan Merrill Squier is Julia Gregg Brill Professor in Women's Studies and English at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City, editor of Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, and co-editor of Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation.
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front cover of Charlotte's Rose
Charlotte's Rose
A. E. Cannon
University of Utah Press, 2011

Charlotte’s Rose—justifiably back in print—tells the story of a young Welsh girl, Charlotte Edwards, who, soon after her mother dies, sails with her father from England to the United States to become part of a company of Mormon handcart pioneers—emigrants with no horses or oxen who themselves pulled the heavy carts filled with their belongings. These were arduous journeys. While on the Mormon Trail, Charlotte befriends a young mother who later dies in childbirth. Though only 12 years old, Charlotte assumes responsibility for the infant and carries her to Utah. Over the course of their journey together, Charlotte becomes deeply attached to the baby she calls Rose, which makes Charlotte’s choice at the novel’s end particularly poignant.

The author, A. E. Cannon, is adept at creating vivid, multifaceted, believable characters and has crafted a story of pioneers that will seem relevant to today’s young people. The reader will quickly be drawn into the story as Charlotte struggles to navigate the trials of an adolescent moving into adulthood. Although this is a book about Mormon pioneers, it is in fact about the larger American experience of immigration—a drama still unfolding today­—and Charlotte’s coming-of-age journey will resonate with readers young and old.
 

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