Abortion rights protest following the Supreme Court decision for Whole Women's Health in 2016

Book Review: Mary Ziegler’s ‘Abortion and the Law in America’

By James Toomey

If you want to understand America, you must understand our politics of abortion. And if you want to understand our politics of abortion, you must read Mary Ziegler’s recent legal history, “Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present” (2020).

In comprehensive detail and in a singularly fair and thoughtful way, Ziegler tells the story of American regulation of abortion from the Supreme Court’s historic Roe v. Wade decision to the present, and looks ahead to an uncertain future. Through vignettes of activists who have dedicated their lives to one side of the debate or the other, Ziegler shows that, notwithstanding the superficial constancy of the abortion debate — one side proclaiming the constitutional, essential rights of the fetus, the other the similarly irreducible right of bodily autonomy — the character of the debate, and the kinds of arguments made, have shifted over the course of the last fifty years.

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Biomarker Epistemology, Cognitive Decline, and Alzheimer’s Disease

By Matthew L Baum

This past Sunday, a group of researchers reported in the journal, Nature Medicine, a preliminary technique that uses variation in blood levels of 10 fats to predict the likelihood that elderly individuals would develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer’s Disease in the following 2-3 years. The sample size was small and the results may not generalize beyond the narrow age-range and demographics of the study group (i.e. the assay is far from ready for “prime time”), but the study is an important first step towards a lower cost (vs PET imaging) and less invasive (vs spinal tap) predictive biomarker of cognitive decline*. Its publication has also triggered a flurry of discussion on possible ethical ramifications of this sort of blood biomarker. I will not attempt to address these ethical issues specifically here. Rather, I seek to highlight that how ethically troubling one views the technology to be may depend partly on the sort of knowledge one thinks these biomarkers reveal (applied epistemology at its best).

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