Check out my egg donation digital project! It’s the one and only part of a documentary? Hah, enjoy!

This interview is a perfect representation of how a young female could be drawn into egg donation because of the lack of information given about the process and health concerns. It also shows that it would be quite tempting to donate eggs because of the price tag. This is directly connected to my thesis because it proves that egg donation advertisements are misleading and cover up the fact that egg donation is dangerous and dehumanizing.

Where to even begin? I am seriously quite frustrated with myself in the fact that I can’t come up with a solid idea for a digital compliment to my research paper. I’m specifically writing about chimpanzee heart xenotransplantation-something I find incredibly controversial and interesting! So it seems like it wouldn’t be that difficult to come up with a kick ass project idea, and yet….nada.

My plan so far(really hoping I come up with something more comical/entertaining) is to create a video that compares chimpanzees with humans to really make it evident just how similar the two really are. I’m hoping it aids from an emotional standpoint to really concrete my thesis, which will be something along the lines of, “It’s not okay to kill off an endangered species just to help us live a little longer, especially one almost as intelligent/similar to us!”

But seriously-if anybody has any ideas as to how I could make this at all less sleep-jerk inducing let me know. Much appreciated 🙂

Thank you Kim for bringing up the treatment of animals because it gave me an idea of what to write about for my blog post!

EVERYONE READ THIS: http://eloquentanimals.wordpress.com/farm-factories/

Over the weekend I was reading Chapter 7 for philosophy and it brought up how cows intended for veal were treated. It said they were placed in such confined areas that they can’t lay down, can barely move their head, and stand in their own filth. They’re also malnourished in order to keep their meat so tender. They also can’t produce any sort of cud to chew on due to the fact that they don’t feed these cows hardly any roughage. The list goes on with the countless cruelties they must endeavor  on a daily basis until the day they are taken to be slaughtered.

(look at their poor little faces!)

This is just not okay! Ever since I looked up that dairy cow cruelty video that Phillip had talked about in class I have been more and more sickened by what happens to the animals that we rely on as food sources. Did you know that there were no laws regulating the treatment of dairy animals? What is that?! ALL animals deserve good treatment, and above all, the ones that provide us with nutrition. What I think is overall so terrible about all of this is the fact that so much of the pain and suffering that these animals go through isn’t necessary.

I’m no vegetarian and I hope I don’t sound heartless in saying this, but when animals are killed swiftly without being dragged out or tortured, after a lifetime of wandering pastures and what not I believe that to be ok. It’s the circle of life and it’s just how the world works. They deserve to lead a decent existence though before they are slaughtered. Let them be animals, living things.

It’s so horrible how selfish we are! When dealing with living things, there needs to be a serious crack down on the treatment of these beings. The greed of the people that just want to make as much money as possible without caring how they go about doing that need a serious reality check.

Due to the incredible wall of frustration I was faced with when writing the first paper I immediately began to dread the second. After receiving the prompts for the second paper though and brainstorming a bit about it already I can say the dark cloud above my head is clearing up! All I’ve achieved so far is a tangled mess of my thoughts while we frantically wrote down everything that came to mind during class. Just this small edge is all I need though to approach this paper full throttle.

I think most of my troubles with the first paper was the fact that I was too close to it, it was too personal a subject for me to easy write about for a school assignment. My mind is much more focused going into this paper and that relieves a lot of the stress of writing it. Now all I have to do is sift through that furst burst of ideas and opinions and zero in on exactly what I want to write about.

A few weeks ago I was scrolling through my newsfeed, which is depressingly congested with pointless, uninteresting, boring posts, and I stopped when I came across a picture of a blonde girl posing with her skateboard. The caption was what really caught my eye because it was a quote from the girl saying that she wanted to get a group of skateboarders together to deliver food to the needy some day. I saw that the photograph had come from a Facebook page titled, “Humans of New York”. So I decided to visit the page and see what it was all about.

If you haven’t heard of, or visited this page before, you definitely should! The page is run by a photographer who wanders around the city taking pictures of people that catch his eye. The blurb that explains what the page is about reads, “The photographic census of NYC. One street portrait at a time.” Visiting the page is kind of like being sucked up by a webpage vacuum. I can, and have, fallen into many “Humans of New York” holes where I scroll through all the interesting pictures and read about the individuals that also inhabit this city.

I love this page so much because it’s not at all like a normal census! Not only do you actually get to see the amount of variation that surrounds us, but you also get a feel of what the peoples’ personalities are like because often times the captions will be quotes of the photograph’s subjects, or observations from the photographer. This is one of the best ways to get a feel for who people really are because it’s just random captured moments of peoples lives’. It’s very raw and there’s no room for pretending to be somebody you’re not. It’s incredible how New Yorkers are such a large collection of characters.

https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork?fref=ts

My revising has gotten as far as rereading my paper over and over trying to make sense of the point I am trying to make. I had a lot of trouble delving into this essay to begin with because I chose to write about a topic that I have a lot of conflicting opinions about. We all have personal experience with forgiveness and I believe that sometimes when you are so close to a subject it makes it harder to take a stance on.

The biggest problem I’m having with approaching my essay is figuring out what the appropriate order would be to make it flow the best. I think the root problem of that is the fact that I’m having trouble sticking to one direction. I’m going to try writing on a sheet of paper my thesis, and then scribble down all the things I have to say about it and then go from there. I think that will help me add some structure to my paper.

I’m excited to see the final product of my work. I know how passionate I am about the topic of forgiveness and I think that is shown through my paper, I hope it is at least! I’m really going to work hard to pull the paper together and give it some direction and it turns out to be a persuasive piece.

When is enough enough? I cannot even believe that they would even think to kill an individual that was part of an endangered species to salvage a human life. There are 7,038,044,500 people in the world. The IUNC believes there to be between 170,000 and 300,300 chimpanzees still existing on this planet. It looks as though maybe we should be sharing our organs with them? But chimpanzees have yet to start wearing white lab coats or attempt to overthrow the human population. So this makes their lives mean less? It is just mind boggling that since the year 1500, 800 known species have gone extinct and we would think to expedite yet another. It’s just not okay!

I think the part that bothers me the most about all the crazy tactics we come up with to extend our lives, is the fact that eventually we’re ALL going to have to die. I mean honestly, when somebody’s time comes, that should be that. I understand that that’s a very morbid way to think about it but it’s the truth. Everything that is living, will one day day. We have no right to decide to prematurely end some other beings life to temporarily cheat death. I’m all for using science and medicine to do this, because that is not a trade of a life for a life.

It’s incredible that we have fallen under such a dominant mindset that just because we have the ability to use whatever we’d like, that we’re entitled to. It almost makes me sick to my stomach that we could be so cruel. I think there are many moral lines that have been crossed and we need to come up with some sort of checks and balances system to keep each other under control so we don’t go too far. This has got to stop.

Below I have attached a link to an article that relates to a process that I believe crosses moral lines as far as how we are using animals to further science. Check it out!

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/06/02/1644154.htm

Bioethics presents us rapidly advancing humans with moral guidelines as to what pushes the boundaries too far. These guidelines act as an anchor, which stops us from getting out of control, keeping us in perspective. I think it’s easy to disconnect from certain questionable experiments or situations that are occurring in our world, or excuse them by saying, “It’s for science.” It’s counterproductive to be creating all of this technology to improve upon our lives if we have to degrade certain people or animals in the process. I feel that the times in anyone’s lives that they are more likely to ignore their own moral codes, are when it’s in their best interest, or when they have extra pressures on them for any number of reasons. The statements that make up the general opinion about bioethics are not affected by emotions or pressure. They remain unbiased as a concrete division between right and wrong. It’s important to create a document such as the Declaration of Bioethics, which was made by many different individuals bringing all of their conflicting opinions and ideas and coming to conclusions about what falls within the realm of humanity. Bioethics are simply tools to keep our heads screwed on straight and to not get so lost and crazed in the race to advance.