The Social Trends Institute (with locations in Barcelona and New York City) is doing fascinating work. Their e-newsletter today updates readers on two of their recent experts meetings:
Do we consider that active or inattentive children should be medicated until they adapt their behavior to fit a certain norm, or do we accept that a certain range of behavior ought to be outside the purview of medical care? If the latter, how is that range determined and who gets to determine it?  Some might respond that bioethicists, whose field was created in response to scientific and medical abuses, get to debate and determine such limits. If that’s true, what’s at stake for bioethics? And is the field of bioethics adequate to resist the more pernicious forces of medicalization? Or is bioethics better described as a kind of “engine of medicalization?”
Questions such as these were addressed by STI’s latest Culture and Lifestyles Experts Meeting, Construction of New Realties in Medicine held in Barcelona (April 15-17, 2010).Â
Sociologists and demographers have long been accustomed to dissecting the data from the increasingly dramatic fertility decline in the developed world. In general, the economic, technological, and social sources of falling fertility rates are well understood. This meeting addressed the less well-understood sources of falling fertility rates by looking at how cultural changes-in views toward children, popular conceptions of the good life, and beliefs about gender roles-have played a central role in fertility decline. In addition to exploring the consequences of falling fertility rates for children, adults, and civil society, particular cultural and policy responses to low fertility were suggested and discussed at length. Whither the Child? Causes, Consequences, and Responses to Low Fertility was held on March 11-13, 2010 in Barcelona.
Categories: Childbearing, Childhood
