Seemingly ever improving medical technology and techniques portend the possibility of prenatally enhancing otherwise healthy, normal children-seamlessly enhancing or adding to a child's natural abilities and characteristics. Though parents normally engage in enhancing children, i.e., child rearing, these technologies present radically new possibilities. This sort of enhancement, I argue, is morally problematic for the parent: the expectations of the enhancing parent necessarily conflict with attitudes of acceptance that moral parenting requires. Attitudes of acceptance necessitate that parents are open to the essentially-individual choices of the child that will determine the kind of person he or she becomes. However, the intentional act of enhancing contradicts this openness by setting expectations on who the child becomes. Because of this, there is strong moral weight against parents' prenatally enhancing their children.

it seems to disallow all cases of a parent's helping a child get ahead, something that parents normally engage in with their children. I argue that typical practices of developing a comparative advantage in a child, as well as practices of societal competition in general, do not conflict because they involve circumstances that mitigate the universal character of reasons. Many ordinary cases of competitive advantage that we think of as unjust, in fact, can be explained by my argument.

The ability of some halophytes to accumulate salts may make them helpful in remediating soil contaminated with produced water and drilling mud from oil and gas exploration and production. Three inland halophytes, Atriplex acanthocarpa (two accessions) and A. canescens, were grown in pot culture in salt-contaminated soil, soil contaminated with salt and hydrocarbons, and uncontaminated soil collected from a Webb Co., Texas, gas production site. Electrical conductivity and soluble sodium of the soil extract were determined prior to planting and re-analyzed following harvest. Total sodium content in mature leaves was determined following harvest. Mature plant survival for all species in all soils ranged from 90–100%. In the salt-contaminated soil, post-harvest electrical conductivity and soluble sodium were significantly lower in the planted soils than in the unplanted soil. For each accession, biomass and plant mortality were greatest in the salt-contaminated soil. In both contaminated soils, the local ecotype of A. acanthocarpa had the highest concentration of tissue sodium and produced the greatest decrease in both electrical conductivity and soluble sodium. Field studies are necessary to determine the effectiveness of in situ application.

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What role does birth play in the debate about elective abortion? Does the wrongness of infanticide imply the wrongness of late-term abortion? In this paper, I argue that the same or similar factors that make birth morally significant with regard to abortion make meaningful viability morally significant due to the relatively arbitrary time of birth. I do this by considering the positions of Mary Anne Warren and José Luis Bermúdez who argue that birth is significant enough that the wrongness of infanticide does not imply the wrongness of late-term abortion. On the basis of the relatively arbitrary timing of birth, I argue that meaningful viability is the point at which elective abortion is prima facie morally wrong.