21 August 2011

Educational

Just because I’m writing my dissertation doesn’t mean I can’t wonder about other things.

1. Legal and cultural aspects of adoption

There are a lot of ethnic European people nowadays who adopt outside their ethnicity (Take a closer look at Hollywood if you don’t believe me). But the other day I was wondering if there were actually non-ethnic Europeans who adopt ethnic European children. I initially talked about this with a friend of mine and she explained a little bit of the cultural aspect with regards to ethnic Asian families and adoption. She concluded that it would be unlikely to adopt outside your own ethnicity as an Asian.

The other point I was wondering was whether when you apply for adoption you can tick a box for the ethnicity of your future child. And if that box/option would suddenly disappear once a non-ethnic European couple would come into the office. After another conversation with yet another friend I found this one, which supported some of the points she was making about there being less ethnic European children in the system than those with other ethnic backgrounds.

Raising Katie 

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2. Biological children of same-sex parents

A couple of days ago I remembered that quite a while back I saw in passing some news report or something like that about science now being able to help same-sex parents to have a child that is both’s biological child.

So I actually started wondering – in my very limited scientific knowledge terms – if this would mean that two women (with their XX chromosome) would only be able to have a girl, while two men would be able to have boys and girls and a child with YY chromosomes.

So, with the help of one biotechnologist and one microbiologist the following answers came up.

XX + XX = XX

Though note that the BT  informed me about variations to that.

YY according to the BT is male and viable.

The MB on the other hand gave the following answer to my question and occasionally did not agree with what the BT said:

You can have XX males and XY females but I think a YY child would probably be an unviable foetus, it would probably spontaneously abort. There’s more genetic information in an X chromosome and so that’s probably why at least one is needed in a foetus but I dont think that a child would be able to survive without one, hence why there’s never been any reports of YY children before. There must be some natural selection reason as to why it is disadvantageous to have two Y chromosomes…

I think when you say they’re giving biological children to same-sex parents they’re probably using egg and sperm cells but removing the nuclei and replacing them with the nuclei of the parents. You could leave an X chromosome in the egg and make an XYY child which is called a “super-male”, but they’re supposedly of lower intelligence and more violent and likely to end up in jail…  Does that answer your question? I dont think it would be a boy, I think it would be unviable…

If anyone knows any better or more please feel free and obliged to update the answer!!

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3. Women and slaves

I must have read too much on slavery and apartheid lately that I was actually becoming interested in whether there had been ethnic European women who got pregnant by ethnic Africans during the times of slavery. Because we are all aware of male slaveowners fathering children with female slaves – either by rape or ‘mutual consent’.

A quick research didn’t really give much of an answer except that it was rather unlikely and that in most cases the women either got raped or claimed to have been raped by the man. And that if someone found out about this the slave would usually be killed – though in one case it said that the woman had had the man sent to a different plantation before their relationship was made public and could hence save his life. The women in such scenarios would usually be sent away. The child would either be aborted or given to be raised by an ethnic African family and become a slave itself. This was contrary to the law which stated that the status of the mother would define the status of the child.

Again, feel free to correct or improve my initial findings.