DON'T FORGET YOUR SOMA, SWEETIE:

Debate grows over antidepressant use among preschoolers: By one estimate, preschool antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in past five years. (Elizabeth Armstrong, 4/08/04, CS Monitor)

Like many mothers across the country, Chris Battaglini has been closely watching her son's high energy since he was a toddler. "He was excitable," the stay-at-home mom in Lakeville, Mass., says of those anxious, early days. "He wasn't bouncing off the walls, but he wasn't able to focus."

By the time he started school, her son's restlessness became more problematic, and Mrs. Battaglini took him to a doctor. The 6-year-old was put on medication, something his mother is still adjusting to. "I'm not thrilled," she says. "But if it's something that's going to help him be able to focus ... then I'm willing to do it."

Battaglini's experience is part of a growing trend in America: preschoolers being medicated to control behavior.

It's always strange to hear transhumanists, liberals, libertarians and the rest complain when conservatives seek limits on biotechnology and bioengineering--you'd think they'd be more concerned that this is how it will be used, to diminish humanity.

MORE:
The doctors of myth and fantasy meet bioethics (Suzanne Fields, April 8, 2004, Townhall)

Science and ethics have always had an uneasy relationship, and we're drawn to observe it. We're fascinated by the fanatical Dr. Faustus, in whom the devil was constantly driving to break through the boundaries of mortality. Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll intended to put their genius in the service of others, but wind up making a mess of everything. Mythical though they are, they go where no man has gone before, creating monsters that swiftly slip beyond their control.

Though the stuff of fiction, they're nevertheless rooted in reality and are especially needed today to provoke thinking about the need to link scientific ambition and respect for the dignity of human life. We inhabit a time and place in human history rife with irresistible scientific experimentation that threatens to outrun the ability of traditional morality to regulate it.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the debates undertaken by the President's Council on Bioethics, which confront the changes in the biological revolution by seeking reflection on what Leon Kass, its chairman, calls "the full range of human goods at stake in bioethical dilemmas." That's why the 18 panelists include philosophers, lawyers, a journalist (who was trained as a medical doctor), political scientists as well as academic scientists and doctors of philosophy.

"For the Council, 'bioethics' is not an ethics based on biology," writes Leon Kass, chairman of the council," but an ethics in the service of bios - of a life lived humanly, a course of life lived not merely physiologically, but also mentally, socially, culturally, politically, and spiritually."

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2004 9:14 AM