"So here we have an entity too alive to be dead, not mature enough to be a viable baby, yet human enough to be specially protectable." -- Paul Ramsey
A storm has been brewing over legal and ethical questions raised by experimentation on still-living human fetuses. The discussion is complicated by its connection with the issue of abortion: in recent debates, fetal research has become fetal politics. The Ethics of Fetal Research distinguishes between these two questions.
Paul Ramsey first outlines the various types of fetal research now being done and grants their...

This perceptive volume gives a detailed account of Chinese children at home and at school. Recently, thirteen American experts in child development visited China under the sponsorship of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China (supported by the National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies). They observed and interviewed children, teachers, educational administrators, and parents in twenty-eight schools throughout China. William Kessen, chairman of the delegation, has organized the notes...

Elections are at the heart of the American political system, but in 1976 only 54 percent of the voting age population went to the polls. The question of who votes matters greatly to everyone involved in politics and to all those concerned about the current and future state of American democracy. Based on data from the 1972 and 1974 Census Bureau surveys, Wolfinger and Rosenstone are able to identify for the first time those social and economic groups that are most likely to vote and to explain sensibly and convincingly those factors that influence voter turnout.

Can the United States provide a health care program that offers a comprehensive package of the highest-quality health benefits to all Americans while containing health care costs? In this important book, Dr. William L. Kissick says that it cannot: no society in the world has sufficient resources to provide all the health services its population is capable of utilizing.
Dr. Kissick was an active participant in the drafting of Medicare legislation in the 1960s and for the past twenty-five years has held joint positions in a medical school and a business school where he has specialized in...

Current welfare reforms-including recently enacted federal legislation-are largely symbolic politics, argue two experts in this important new book. According to Joel F. Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, the real problem we face is not the spread of welfare but the spread of poverty among the working poor, a group that includes most welfare recipients. The surest way to solve the problem is to create jobs and supplement low-wage work. The authors offer proposals that would make it possible for individuals to support themselves and their families through working and that would establish a safety...