Suchergebnisse

Many treatments for infertility require the use of donated gametes or embryos. Arguments have been made that all parties involved (donors, recipients, and children) should have open access to information about one another. The present article reports a survey of attitudes of 77 donors and 327 recipients in the state of Western Australia. Donors and recipients endorsed a register of nonidentifying information, but were less keen on a register of identifying information. They believed that medical personnel should have access to such registers, and that donors and recipients (but not children) should have access to nonidentifying, but not identifying, information. Typically, the sort of information respondents wanted to access pertained to health status and physical characteristics. Overwhelmingly, both donors and recipients saw gamete and embryo donation as more like blood donation than like adoption.

High school is a key venue for the development and expression of body image concerns in adolescent girls. Researchers have begun to investigate the role of school-based 'appearance cultures' in magnifying the body image concerns of students. To date, however, no research has examined girls' experience as participants within these cultures, and thus the opportunity to learn how girls account for the development and maintenance of these cultures has been missed. In interviews with nine girls attending an all-girls' school, the existence of a strong 'appearance culture' in the school was identified as a major influence on the body image concerns of students. Girls talked about the ways in which appearance-focused conversations, dieting, and weight monitoring occurred as part of the everyday interaction with friends and peers at school. They also identified many ways in which their school attempted to address body image concerns, although these attempts were often portrayed as ineffective, if not counter-productive. These findings suggest that attempts to address the body image concerns of students will need to be sensitive to the lived reality of appearance cultures within schools.