From the McClatchy-Tribune News Service in the Houston Chronicle and Employment Law 360 (free registration required):

A federal appeals court has ruled that the inability to have sex is a disability protected under federal anti-discrimination laws.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia came in the case of a U.S. foreign service candidate who was disqualified by the State Department after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The 2-1 opinion held that the woman’s inability to have sexual relations amounted to a disability protected under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits federal agencies from job discrimination against people who are disabled.

The new appellate-court ruling gives Piedmont, S.C., resident Kathy E. Adams another potential shot at serving overseas. More broadly, the ruling cracks open the courtroom door for additional legal challenges by those who are sexually incapacitated.

Adams wants to compel the State Department to hire her as a foreign service officer and provide back pay. She’ll now go before a jury and trial judge, unless the State Department relents first.

From NPR:

The health care system of the Netherlands reflects what is described as the nation’s pragmatic and stoic social attitudes about birth and death. The Netherlands has legalized euthanasia, permitting doctors to help patients die by giving them a lethal dose of medication.

“You could say it’s very much accepted by the general population that people can decide at the moment you would like to take steps to die and that you could help them,” says Paul Schnabel, a sociologist at Utrecht University.

It’s acceptable for people with painful conditions, such as cancer, to decide when they want to step out of it rather than prolong their medical treatment, he says. Ultimately, the health care system ends up saving money.

From ABC News, more reaction to the story about the parents who used new technology to screen their embryos for one without the BRCA1 gene.

Dr. Sherman J. Silber, director of the Infertility Center of St. Louis at St. Luke’s Hospital, says doctors have been prescreening fertilized embryos since 1990, when people first started trying to avoid having children with cystic fibrosis.

A similar phenomenon has taken place, Silber noted, in families that have had autistic children and would like to avoid having another.

“For autism already in couples that have children, they’re requesting [pre-implantation diagnosis] with sex selection, because, obviously, it’s so much more common in boys than in girls,” Silber said. “There are couples that have had several children with autism … that have been requesting sex selection just to have only females.”

Earlier stories here and here.

(Photo from Infertility Center of St. Louis at St. Luke’s Hospital)

From ABC News, the Boston Globe:

A Massachusetts woman has been charged with reckless child endangerment amid claims that she failed to provide appropriate care for her son who has cancer. Court documents say eight-year-old Jeremy Fraser, who also has autism, is near death because his mother, Kristen A. LaBrie, postponed his chemotherapy appointments and failed to administer the appropriate chemo at home.

Eric J. Fraser, LaBrie’s ex-husband and the boy’s father, said he did not know why she would withhold treatment. The pair had been battling over Jeremy’s care, with LaBrie contending in court papers that Fraser had abandoned his son before the cancer was discovered.

Child protection experts say there may be many reasons why a parent does not make sure a child gets followup cancer treatment, from not understanding the seriousness of the situation to problems with logistics and stress.

From the [Melbourne, Australia] Herald Sun, New Zealand Herald, [New South Wales] Daily Telegraph:

Australian newscaster Tracey Spicer (left) says she considered suffocating her mother in 1999 as an “act of mercy” to end her “immense pain and suffering” from pancreatic cancer. The revelation, in an opinion piece, stirred new controversy in a nation that is deeply divided over the recent convictions of two women in the death of a man with Alzheimer’s disease.

Spicer said her intention was to prompt a public discussion, not to persuade Australians either way about whether euthanasia should be legalized. In her commentary, she said, “I knew it was the right thing to do. But as I looked down at the woman who gave me life, I knew that I could not take hers.” Her mother died a few hours later.

(Herald Sun photo.)

From the NBC Today Show (video is here); ABC Good Morning America:

Skeptics discounted the claim of a “breast cancer free” baby produced by genetic screening, saying that the screening does not guarantee the child will not get breast cancer. Others expressed ethical concerns about the procedure and worried that it could mark the beginning of an age of designer babies.

“Damocles’ sword is still hanging over her head, as for every woman. She can still get breast cancer – maybe just not this specific kind,” said Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s medical editor.

Susan Love, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, agreed. “Since most breast cancer — 90 to 95 percent– is not hereditary, she still has a high chance of getting it, just as we all do. I think we are better to put our energies in trying to figure out how to prevent breast cancer in everybody than to pick and choose who we allow to be born.”

Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said genetic screening poses an ethical dilemma.

“Where is this going to take us in the future? How far will we go in letting people decide their babies?” Caplan said.

Snyderman urged a public discussion of the moral and ethical questions underlying prenatal genetic testing and selective termination, which she said are already widely available. Prospective parents are making prenatal selections based on sex, height, eye color and other factors, she said, as well as cloning.

See earlier post here.

From the [UK] Times, video on MSNBC:

A woman has conceived Britain’s first baby guaranteed to be free from hereditary breast cancer.

Doctors screened out from the woman’s embryos an inherited gene that would have left the baby with a greater than 50 percent chance of developing the cancer.

The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, said her husband has a strong family history of breast cancer that was caused by the BRCA-1 gene. The couple used in vitro fertilization to create 11 embryos, then used preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to select embryos that did not have the gene. Of the 11 embryos, six carried the gene. Two embryos that were free of the gene were implanted, resulting in a pregnancy.

The couple’s doctor said the technique allows parents to avoid “the potential guilty feeling of passing on this genetic abnormality to a child.”

Related post here.