Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy: A Call for Uniformity

In the United States at this time, no uniform federal law exists regarding commercial surrogacy, and state statutory schemes vary vastly, ranging from criminalization to legal recognition with contract enforcement. The authors examine how commercial surrogacy agencies utilize the Internet as a means for attracting parents and surrogates by employing emotional cultural rhetoric. By inducing both parents and surrogates to their jurisdiction, agencies circumvent vast discrepancies in state statutory regulative schemes and create a distinct interstate business, absent an efficient regulatory framework or legal recourse in some circumstances. The authors propose a uniform federal regulatory scheme premised upon regulating interstate business transactions to create accountability and legal remedies for both the parents and the surrogate.     

Autopoietic Law and the 'Epistemic Trap': A Case Study of Adoption and Contact

This paper examines autopoietic theory with reference to functionally differentiated social sub-systems, particularly law, science, and politics. It sets out to 'test' the practical relevance of autopoietic theory in relation to ongoing debates about post-adoption contact and personal identity issues. Law has resisted social scientific pressure to regulate post-adoption contact in the context of a social policy approach, which emphasizes the relationship between identity development and genealogical continuity. I argue that law's response to this pressure relates to the particular nature of adoption as this is expressed through legislation and case law. Law's refusal to intervene in post-adoption contact reflects its self-referential operations and its attempts to avoid epistemic entrapment by a social scientific discourse. Applying autopoietic theory to law's practical operations in adoption clarifies its explanatory value, provides a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between law, politics, and social science and indicates areas that require theoretical refinement.     

The Words of Violence: Autobiographical Narratives of Abused Women

Personal narratives tell the stories of people’s lives as well as provide insight into the meaning of those experiences. These narratives both reflect and are influenced by the relationships within which an individual is embedded. In this study, autobiographical narratives for two groups of women were compared: women who had experienced habitual gender-based domestic violence in their couple relationships and women who had not. The language of narratives was analyzed by LIWC (Language Inquiry and Word Count procedure). Results showed that the language and structure of narratives by women with a history of domestic violence indicated greater stress and trauma, more incoherent space-time organization, and poorer relationship quality. Women who experienced violence wrote longer narratives that contained proportionately more negative emotion words and more references to cognitions and physical/body issues, and indicated more disorganized structure by means of incoherent use of verbal tense, more impoverished use of connectives, and greater use of negative sentence syntax and discrepancy words. They also included proportionately more pronoun references to ‘I’,‘You’,’ and ‘He’, indicating self vs. partner conflictual relationships. However, women who had experienced relationship violence for longer decreased their references to the emotions of fear and anxiety, suggesting adaptation to violence over time.     

Structural disadvantage and the concentration of environmental hazards in school areas: a research note

Research shows that environmental hazards are disproportionately located in poor and minority communities, but most of these studies examine the association between community demographics and the presence (and/or frequency) of one type of environmental hazard at a time. The current study extends the prior research by examining the concentration of multiple forms of environmental hazards and structural disadvantage of school areas. School area structural disadvantage is associated with an increase in the number of environmental hazards, but the magnitude of the association is relatively small. Implications for future research are discussed.

---

The recovery of latent fingermarks and DNA using a silicone-based casting material

There are many techniques available for the recovery of fingermarks at scenes of crime including the possibility of taking casts of the marks. Casts can be advantageous in cases where other destructive recovery techniques might not be suitable, such as when recovering finger marks deposited on valued or immobile items. In this research, Isomark (a silicone-based casting material) was used to recover casts of finger marks placed on a variety of substrates. Casts were enhanced using cyanoacrylate fuming. Good quality marks were successfully recovered from a range of smooth, non-porous surfaces. Recovery from semi-porous surfaces was shown to be inefficient. DNA was subsequently extracted from the casts using QIAamp Mini extraction kits, amplified and profiled. Full DNA profiles were obtained 34% of samples extracted.