Give Free Love for Valentine's Day

Rather than caloric candy and soon-to-wither flowers, consider giving your loved ones a gift of heartfelt love this Valentine’s Day. Valerie Tarico, director of the Wisdom Commons, has developed these fun (and free) bioethically inspired gift alternatives:

Print a love quote or poem as a poster – over 150 selections.
Leave it on your kid's bed or your lover's desk or the kitchen counter. Or print out several and use them for placemats on Valentine's morning. Just click the printer icon after any quote. Here's what the posters look like.

Email a last minute Valentine wish.
Click on the mail icon after any quote or poem, say what you want to say, and send it off! A great option for your mom, or sister or nephew or anyone else who you remember (every year) at the last minute.

Forward the Daily Wisbit
Start the day right. Receive a bit of wisdom daily sent to your email address. For the next two weeks they're all about love. Sign up or see recent Daily Wisbits here.

The Wisdom Commons is a Women’s Bioethics Project initiative devoted to exploring, elevating and celebrating our shared moral core. Join us.

A Valentine's Day Gift to our Readers...

Whether you have a special someone with whom to celebrate today or whether you just are a special someone, we wish you a Happy Valentine's Day! And here are just a few links to stories that popped up when I googled Valentine's Day + bioethics:

- Love is a powerful drug: “Love is a drug,” says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.” “The ventral tegmental area is a clump of cells that make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and sends it out to many brain regions” when one is in love. “It’s the same region affected when you feel the rush of cocaine.”

- From the Situationist Blog: "It’s all about dopamine, baby, this One Great True Love, this passionate thing we’d burn down the house and blow up the car and drive from Houston to Orlando just to taste on the tip of the tongue.

You crave it because your brain tells you to. . . .Dopamine. God’s little neurotransmitter. Better known by its street name, romantic love. Also, norepinephrine. Street name, infatuation."

- Valentine's Day stories from NPR.

- And for those who prefer to celebrate, ahem, 'privately' or putting it another way, celebrate privacy, a little Valentine's Day gift from a federal court in Texas: A federal appeals court has struck down a Texas law that makes it a crime to promote or sell sex toys, stating that "Whatever one might think or believe about the use of these devices, government interference with their personal and private use violates the Constitution." Full opinion here.