In November 1998, Michigan voters rejected Proposal B, a citizen initiative that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Although polls had long indicated overwhelming support for PAS, support for Proposal B declined before the election. We analyzed exit-poll data to characterize opponents, supporters, and cross-over voters. We then compared our results with those from earlier research that examined attitudinal and socio-demographic influences. We found that many presumptive PAS supporters did not vote for Proposal B. These data may call into question prospects for similar initiatives.

This article pursues two goals. It sets forth a framework for incorporating life sciences materials into introductory or advanced courses in international relations. It also presents a format for processing these materials in the classroom. In pursuit of these aims, the article addresses problems commonly encountered when initially undertaking a more balanced biopolitical approach to international relations, and sets forth proposals designed to treat these problems.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has prompted numerous gender and sexuality controversies. We describe and analyze those involving assisted reproductive technologies (ART). ART in the United States has been regulated in piecemeal fashion, with oversight primarily by individual states. While leaving state authority largely intact, the ACA federalized key practices by establishing essential health benefits (EHBs) that regulate insurance markets and prohibit insurance-coverage denials based on pre-existing conditions. Whatever their intentions, the ACA’s drafters thus put infertility in a subtly provocative new light clinically, financially, normatively, politically, and culturally. With particular attention to normative and political dynamics embedded in plausible regulatory trajectories, we review—and attempt to preview—the ACA’s effects on infertility-related delivery of health services, on ART utilization, and on reproductive medicine as a factor in American society.

I first met Tom Wiegele sometime in the early 1970s. Our chats about kindred interests became increasingly frequent thereafter, whether they occurred at professional meetings, by phone, or by letter. By 1976, when we spent some time together at the IPSA Congress in Edinburgh, I had become greatly impressed with his talents and dedication as a scholar, and with his commitment to promoting biopolitical study.

The ethologically oriented method of social analysis developed by Edward Westermarck is applied to the subjects of charitable behavior, the welfare ethic, and the link between them. Westermarck dealt with these topics, but not in the depth he accorded the subjects of incest aversion, the incest prohibition, and the connection between them. Westermarck's approach to analyzing incest behavior and regulating institutions is also useful in the case of charitableness and the welfare ethic. Westermarck would have analyzed the welfare ethic as an institution derived from human nature — secundam naturam — in addition to an authoritative discipliner of behavior as proposed by Freud. Evidence is presented that this is the case with the welfare ethic in modern societies. This evidence includes the sensitivity of welfare to ethnic diversity. The latter decreases public altruism, whether expressed as charitableness to beggars, national charities, or public goods. The parochial leaning of charity and the welfare ethic is allowed for by Westermarck's empirically grounded ethics. Despite the passage of nearly a century, Edward Westermarck can still be an instructive guide to the biosociological enterprise. This continuing relevance shows what could have been, and can still be, done with the conceptual tools offered by an evolutionarily informed sociology.

In response to former President George W. Bush's funding limitations on human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, California voters in 2004 passed Proposition 71, the most expansive state-funded medical research initiative in United States history. This study examines California's experiment in the life sciences, a particularly fitting analysis now as President Barack Obama has freed up additional federal funding for hESC research. In addition to exploring the general pitfalls of states, rather than the federal government, serving as principal players on hESC science and the perceived flaws in California's program, the analysis considers the strengths of state activism and of California's enterprise. On balance, given the Bush administration's policy on hESC research, the U.S. benefitted from state innovation. Moreover, even with the new federal regulatory policy on hESC research, California should be able to mesh its program with the federal initiative and remain a prime mover in this arena. The essay draws on informal interviews with key actors in California and on Capitol Hill in 2008 and 2009.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling in the Johnson Controls case that fetal protection policies that exclude women from workplaces deemed hazardous to the fetus are in clear violation of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Amendment, the issue of fetal health remains on the policy agenda. This article summarizes the rationale behind fetal protection policies and the current scientific evidence over workplace hazards. It also discusses the disparate court response to these policies before Johnson Controls and the confusing regulatory framework. Finally, it makes a case for including consideration of the paternal contribution to fetal injury in the workplace and calls for a balanced approach to accommodate both women's rights to employment and society's interest in healthy children.