Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.com
Website:http://www.mercatornet.com/
The Catholic Church has always opposed IVF and has developed a sophisticated critique based on its understanding of human sexuality. Its official Catechism states that IVF is "morally unacceptable" because it separates the marriage act from procreation and establishes "the domination of technology" over human life. It, too, is horrified at the fact that embryos are treated as raw material rather than human beings.
Date posted: 2024-08-31
The Olympics is all about setting records. Well, the first night was a bit of a fizzer, as no world records were set in the swimming - possibly because les genies gastronomiques dishing it out to the athletes went vegan. But the Olympic Opening Ceremony probably did set records for the number of complaints about its parody of the Last Supper and the mountain of self-serving, obfuscatory, double-tongued, oleaginous, smirking, mendacious BS to explain it away.
Date posted: 2024-08-10
Yesterday one of America's leading medical journals, JAMA*, published an editorial calling for more help for transgender youth to keep them from committing suicide. "In the time it has taken you to read this, a transgender youth has attempted suicide," it said.
Date posted: 2024-07-30
A bill allowing surrogacy has just passed both houses in the Oireachtas, Ireland's Parliament, and only awaits the President's signature before it becomes law.
Date posted: 2024-07-29
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, is scheduled to address a joint sitting of the US Congress on July 24. He will be the first foreign leader to speak to Congress four times. It will be an awkward time for politicians in both the US and Israel. President Biden is fighting for his political future both in his own party and against Donald Trump. Prime Minister Netanyahu could soon be forced out of office if his coalition collapses.
Date posted: 2024-07-13
The hottest issue in bioethics at the moment is paediatric gender medicine. Is it ethical for doctors to help children affirm their chosen gender identity? Is it ethical for doctors to suppress puberty in gender dysphoric children? Is it ethical for doctors to sterilize young males with estrogen and females with testosterone so that they can physically mimic the opposite sex? Is it ethical for doctors to surgically remove the breasts of girls under 18?
Date posted: 2024-07-03
The first Sunday in June this year was a global day of parades and processions, some publicised, others ignored.
Date posted: 2024-06-22
The American state of Michigan recently legalised commercial surrogacy. "This is the most pro-family thing that the Legislature has done," said Governor Gretchen Whitmer as she signed the legislation into law. Every American state has its own laws on surrogacy; until this year, a strict ban was in place in Michigan. Now it has joined the majority of states that permit some form of commercial surrogacy. The only states currently banning it are Nebraska and Louisiana.
Date posted: 2024-06-02
Is the Israeli Defense Force "the most moral army in the world"? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeated this slogan again and again.
Date posted: 2024-05-07
The Titanic sank after it collided with an unseen iceberg. Western societies with low birthrates are steaming straight towards an iceberg in broad daylight. But they refuse to change course. The problem is this. As birthrates drop, there are fewer and fewer productive workers and more and more unproductive elderly. The tax burden on the workers grows heavier and heavier. Pension funds will begin to run out of their reserves and benefits will shrink. The iceberg of a pensions crisis looms on the horizon in many countries. And there aren't enough lifeboats.
Date posted: 2024-04-19
After the Alabama Supreme Court's recent ruling that frozen embryos deserve the same protections as children, politicians have been falling over themselves to find ways to defend the US IVF industry. I'd like to convince you that IVF is a morally complex issue, so complex and tangled that it needs to be regulated. This is the case whether or not you believe that frozen embryos are "extrauterine children" living in a "cryogenic nursery", in the words of the Court.
Date posted: 2024-03-09
Vladimir Putin is preening himself as the white knight of traditional values jousting against the dark dragon of wokeness. In fact, his history lecture to Tucker Carlson last week was a master class in cancel culture. He "proved" that Ukraine has no right to exist because it had always been part of Mother Russia.
Date posted: 2024-02-17
China's population has declined for the second year in a row, despite desperate government incentives to persuade women to have children. In 2023, the number of people fell by 2.08 million to 1.410 billion. The number of births fell by 500,000.
Date posted: 2024-01-27
Fireworks erupted last week after Pope Francis demanded a global ban on the practice of surrogacy. He described it as "deplorable" and "a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child". "A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract," he said.
Date posted: 2024-01-27
Donations of "spare" IVF human embryos to scientific research in the UK have nosedived over the past 15 years, according to The Guardian. The latest available figures show that 17,925 embryos were donated in 2004, and only 675 in 2019.
Date posted: 2024-01-02
It wasn't just the violence. It was also the timing. Hamas's October 7 slaughter of Israelis on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War sent a message to Israel. In October 1973 Egyptian and Syrian armies invaded. It was a close-run thing. Israel was caught napping; in the early days of the war, success was far from certain.
Date posted: 2023-12-16
Such is the stigma surrounding suicide that advocates of "voluntary assisted dying" insist vehemently that it is by no means suicide.
Date posted: 2023-12-16
Let's tackle this thorny issue in three stages: What is conversion therapy? Does it really make people suicidal? And what accounts for the vehemence of academic activists?
Date posted: 2023-11-30
Don't imagine that euthanasia's slippery slope is like a long water slide at a theme park in which you hurdle ever downward, ever faster, until you are thrown into a pool. It's more like moving from Duluth to Montreal through the St Lawrence Seaway - you slowly glide along, enter a lock, descend, glide, enter a lock, descend, glide and so on through 15 locks to the Atlantic.
Date posted: 2023-10-12
Gay conversion therapy is an international issue. But only eight European countries have banned it completely - Malta, Greece, Spain, France, Germany, Albania, Cyprus and Iceland. (Portugal has passed legislation, but the bill has not become law.) Strangely, Sweden is a hold-out.
Date posted: 2023-10-07
The transgender movement is a conundrum. Full commitment requires voluntary mutilation and sterility. The mental and physical pain, especially for young people, is appalling.
Date posted: 2023-09-15
The unregulated market in sperm donation is growing rapidly. People are increasingly bypassing regular sperm banks and fertility clinics and sourcing sperm on the internet.
Date posted: 2023-08-12
It is becoming harder and harder to assess claims that transgender medicine is based upon rock-solid evidence. Much of the time, the debate is carried on in columns of newspapers, not medical journals.
Date posted: 2023-07-28
According to a recent study in the journal Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, women using birth control pills may have as much as 130% increased risk for depression, particularly in the first two years of oral contraceptive use.
Date posted: 2023-07-01
The benefits for a child born after mitochondrial donation - better known as a three-parent baby - are easily demonstrated: no potentially lethal mitochondrial disease. The benefits for its parents are evident in the delight and relief on their faces as they cuddle their newborn. The benefits for the IVF clinic are also clear: unquestioning praise in the media and loosened purse strings for government funding. But there are costs to this controversial IVF procedure - and these are being ignored by gullible journalists and swept under the carpet by government regulators.
Date posted: 2023-06-17
In addition to smoking, type 2 diabetes, obesity, opioids, and alcoholism, the US Surgeon-General, Dr Vivek Murthy, has identified another epidemic of lifestyle disease which is "an urgent public health concern" - loneliness.
Date posted: 2023-05-21
Large numbers of people are affected by infertility in their lifetime, according to a new report published the World Health Organization. Around 17.5% of the adult population - roughly 1 in 6 worldwide - experience infertility.
Date posted: 2023-05-02
Following Belgium, the Netherlands is set to legalise euthanasia for children. Until now, euthanasia was only available for people over 16, children between 12 and 16 who had the permission of their parents, and children under 12 months.
Date posted: 2023-04-29
Canadian investors in a gigantic internet porn site claim that their watchwords are trust, compliance, and safety.
Date posted: 2023-04-22
According to a market survey by Allied Market Research, IVF is booming in the Asia-Pacific region. The market size was about $9.3 billion in 2021 but is expected to reach $42 billion by 2031.
Date posted: 2023-04-11
Scientists believe that CRISPR gene editing technologies will transform medicine. But how many people have been treated so far?
Date posted: 2023-04-11
Could there be a better example of the slippery slope at work?
Date posted: 2023-04-05
Experts are urging caution in the use of life-changing medical treatment for children and adolescents.
Date posted: 2023-03-21
An attack on two schools in Sydney for teaching Christian morality has some broader lessons.
Date posted: 2023-02-15
Japan's Prime Minister has warned that his country will fall over an economic and social cliff unless it manages to reverse its population decline. "Our country is on the brink of being unable to maintain the functions of society," said Fumio Kishida.
Date posted: 2023-01-25
The number of American transgender murders is minuscule.
Date posted: 2022-12-06
The Economist's libertarian campaign might seem quixotic, but it is as sure of victory as Lenin was in Zuerich.
Date posted: 2022-11-06
Covenant Eyes and Accountability2You have been removed from the Google Play Store.
Date posted: 2022-10-28
America's sex reassignment surgery market size was US$1.9 billion in 2021, according to market analyst Grand View Research. It is expected to grow at a rate of about 11% annually, reaching about $6 billion in 2030.
Date posted: 2022-10-10
And we can expect that safeguards will decrease as demand for more equal access increases.
Date posted: 2022-10-10
On June 24 the US Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and declared that there was no right to abortion in the American Constitution. Ever since, the world's leading scientific and medical journals have been campaigning not just against the ruling, but against the Supreme Court itself.
Date posted: 2022-09-25
Enoch Burke sticks to his guns, but shouldn't he be a bit more conciliatory?
Date posted: 2022-09-13
When teenagers idolise a porn star, something is amiss.
Date posted: 2022-09-11
A study of more than 8 million children in Nordic countries suggests that children who begin life as frozen embryos (FET) may have a higher risk of cancer than children born through other means.
Date posted: 2022-09-09
Queering the Maid of Orleans shows an impoverished imagination. A new play about Joan of Arc, I, Joan, opens in London next week. After all the plays, poetry, novels, and biographies published since she was burned at the stake in 1431, it's difficult to imagine that anything fresh can be said about the Maid of Orleans.
Date posted: 2022-08-20
This is a horror story from India about the intersection of poverty, sexism, exploitation, gender norms, and medical ethics. Investigative reporting in BehanBox, a feminist website based in India, describes the appalling conditions in which women work as cane-cutters in the state of Maharashtra.
Date posted: 2022-08-20
Israeli scientists have created the world's first "synthetic embryos". They used mouse stem cells to create embryos, nurtured them in an artificial womb, and grew them for 8 1/2 days - roughly the equivalent of three weeks of a human pregnancy.
Date posted: 2022-08-20
The world-famous Tavistock clinic has been forced to close. Transgender medicine in the UK is in disarray, following similar turmoil in Sweden, Finland and France.
Date posted: 2022-08-19
Should a murderer escape his day in court by asking for euthanasia?
Date posted: 2022-08-02
President Biden has strongly backed this option, but is it really safe?
Date posted: 2022-08-02
Let's not distort discourse with loose words and sloppy thinking.
Date posted: 2022-08-02
It's a funny world in which an 18-year-old is forced to decide whether his 11 brothers and sisters should live or die after 16 years of suspended animation in a tank of liquid nitrogen. The couple's son comes of age in about 2028.
Date posted: 2022-07-25
The World Health Organization has refused to panic over the rapid and unprecedented spread of monkeypox across the globe.
Date posted: 2022-07-25
The Australian state of New South Wales legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide last week. Members of the Upper House supported the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2022 by a margin of 23 to 15.
Date posted: 2022-06-05
This is a moment to demand accountability from the activists, doctors and politicians who 'own' this legislation.
Date posted: 2022-05-21
Mrs Mary Whitehouse was once the most ridiculed and hated woman in Britain. From the 1960s to the 1990s she campaigned against pornography in the media. She was ridiculed as a Christian prude, but now she is being vindicated.
Date posted: 2022-04-11
A 0.02% chance of reinfection is too much for the agents of an assisted dying association.
Date posted: 2021-12-13
Threats of prosecution for murder are a powerful way to dissuade doctors from killing relatives.
Date posted: 2021-12-13
The Islamic Republic of Iran has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Now its leaders have been spooked by the coming demographic winter
Date posted: 2021-12-11
Research shows that the experience of losing a parent through suicide is a risk factor for children. How about VAD?
Date posted: 2021-12-04
A study of what doctors and nurses think raises troubling questions.
Date posted: 2021-12-01
Liberalising abortion laws will not save lives.
Date posted: 2021-11-03
But not everything in the report adds up. It’s absolutely necessary to get the facts right. The victims of clerical sexual abuse deserve justice, but justice must always be based on truth.
Date posted: 2021-10-09
Philosophy lecturer Peter Boghossian has thrown in the towel after battling insanity and harassment.
Date posted: 2021-09-19
Conscientious objection to abortion and euthanasia has emerged as an election issue in Canada's 2021 federal election - and politicians are refusing to defend it.
Date posted: 2021-09-19
A terrorist who now identifies as a woman wants a mitigated sentence for his gender dysphoria.
Date posted: 2021-09-04
If informed consent is a pillar of bioethics, puberty blockers fail the test.
Date posted: 2021-09-04
Even in the Netherlands, people are wary of making painless methods of suicide freely available. They understand that vulnerable people could die - or even be targeted. Even in the home of legal euthanasia some actions are beyond the pale.
Date posted: 2021-08-18
An 'advance directive implant' would end your life at a preset time.
Date posted: 2021-08-02
Are there lessons here for the transgender movement?
Date posted: 2021-07-13
Recent studies have exposed the flimsiness of much of the evidence.
Date posted: 2021-05-29
In the past coercive and abusive programs to "cure" people of homosexual urges did exist. But nearly all of these disappeared long ago. What's the point of banning them today?
Date posted: 2021-05-29
Planned Parenthood has a founder problem. Margaret Sanger was a racist and a eugenicist. This is by no means news - critics of Planned Parenthood have been needling the organisation over her noxious ideas for decades. Finally, under the pressure of the anti-racist movement, Planned Parenthood has cracked.
Date posted: 2021-05-29
The latest report claims that the evidence for transgender medicine is 'very low' quality.
Date posted: 2021-04-26
Another step in "an explosion of new techniques and ideas for studying early development" of human embryos came last week from Israel. Researchers there have successfully grown mouse embryos for 12 days, which is about half the animal's natural gestation period. Scientists acknowledge the ethical problems -- and then ignore them.
Date posted: 2021-04-26
Four lab groups have almost simultaneously published research showing that it is possible to create structures which are nearly identical to human embryos.
Date posted: 2021-04-26
Its scope is ever-widening and the safeguards are failing.
Date posted: 2021-02-19
Ruth Davidson says that both demystify the business of human life.
Date posted: 2021-02-19
A contraceptive innovation, the Missed Period Pill, is a recipe for psychological anguish.
Date posted: 2020-12-28
Spain's coalition government is attempting to legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide. Its right-to-die bill includes an "express euthanasia" service, with doctors visiting chronically ill patients at home, as well as in hospitals and clinics.
Date posted: 2020-10-31
French doctors and intellectuals condemn the "relational deaths# of the elderly.
Date posted: 2020-10-31
In a new document, the Vatican denounces it as a crime, but insists on understanding and compassion.
Date posted: 2020-10-17
'Every time a line was drawn, it was also pushed back.
Date posted: 2020-09-26
Time for a reckoning with Margaret Sanger's record of supporting eugenics.
Date posted: 2020-08-21
Hailed as confirmation of the need for gender-affirming surgery, a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry was mistaken.
Date posted: 2020-08-21
Physicians and other healthcare professionals in the Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium who are willing to do late abortions would also support the legalisation of infanticide, according to a survey published in the journal Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica.
Date posted: 2020-08-21
A German researcher has uncovered more evidence of oppression of the Muslim minority. And a searing report from an American think tank has accused China of genocidal policies towards Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region.
Date posted: 2020-07-13
Many nursing home residents with breathing difficulties were given morphine instead of oxygen. Disturbing figures are coming from Sweden about the number of Covid-19 deaths amongst the elderly.
Date posted: 2020-07-05
Over the past few years, the number of transitions has increased nearly four times.
Date posted: 2020-07-05
Sperm and egg donation ought to be controversial, not just another job.
Date posted: 2020-06-22
The hot spot of international surrogacy is Ukraine. Commercial surrogacy is legal there; the medical facilities are good; the cost is relatively low; and poor young women are plentiful.
Date posted: 2020-06-20
Reprogramming a patient's own skin cells to replace cells in the brain that are progressively lost during Parkinson's disease has been shown to be technically feasible, reports a team of investigators from McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in the most recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Date posted: 2020-06-15
Hundreds of babies are separated from their commissioning parents because of Covid-19.
Date posted: 2020-05-23
Both countries and companies have taken advantage of the misery of the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, the loneliness and the misery of millions to burnish their image.
Date posted: 2020-05-23
The journal Bioethics has just released a special issue on ectogenesis, or gestating babies in artificial wombs. Although it is only an idea at the moment, scientists are making progress and it could be ready for human use in the foreseeable future.
Date posted: 2020-05-23
Governments the world over have turned their countries upside down with social distancing, forced unemployment and massive welfare spending, -- all to save the most vulnerable and oldest people in the population pyramid.
Date posted: 2020-05-17
Some Canadian doctors believe that it is, despite the pandemic.
Date posted: 2020-04-15
A peak doctors' group has given the government bad advice.
Date posted: 2020-03-20
Two biologists have denounced "sex denialism" and argue that the existence of only two sexes, male and female, is a scientific fact and that transgender ideology is "an eccentric academic theory".
Date posted: 2020-03-07
What should really terrify parents is the mutilation of their child's healthy body.
Date posted: 2020-03-06
The prospect of "designer babies" is both a dream and a nightmare. For a growing number of companies, it is not just a dream, but the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Date posted: 2019-12-07
Critics of transgender treatment for children have been making heavy weather of persuading people that it could be medically dangerous. Will the threat of lawsuits rein in gender dysphoria doctors?
Date posted: 2019-11-17
Why hasn't the #MeToo movement protested the close connection between the pornography industry and IVF clinics? Most clinics provide pornography so that men can quickly provide a sperm sample. It is an essential, if grubby, part of the clinic's services.
Date posted: 2019-11-17
A leading professor describes experimental sex-corrective treatment as one of the biggest scandals in medical history.
Date posted: 2019-11-17
Ectogenesis, or artificially gestating babies, is an idea which has a perennial appeal, for good reasons and bad.
Date posted: 2019-11-17
LGBTQ mental health hasn't improved since the US Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage.
Date posted: 2019-10-22
The National Council on Disability (NCD) has released a scathing analysis of the effect of assisted suicide laws in the United States on people with disabilities. It finds that safeguards are ineffective and that there is little oversight of abuses and mistakes.
Date posted: 2019-10-22
Today's Global Climate Strike represents a turn towards a dark politics.
Date posted: 2019-10-08
In today's sex-soaked media, it was gratifying to see a leading champion of unrestricted sexual freedom, the New York Times, going bonkers about the wickedness of pornography.
Date posted: 2019-10-08
The man who was probably Indiana's most experienced abortionist, Ulrich Klopfer, was hardly an attractive advertisement for his profession when he was alive. But after his death on September 3, he has become the Chernobyl of reputation management.
Date posted: 2019-10-08
It's about time. A national inquiry into the safety and ethics of transgender medicine in Australia will be conducted by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians with the backing of Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt.
Date posted: 2019-08-22
You might think that watching cute kittie videos on YouTube is as harmless as it gets. You'd be wrong. Online video is destroying the Amazon jungle, melting glaciers in Greenland and kindling wildfires in California.
Date posted: 2019-08-12
In a stunning example of evading ethical controversy by exporting it, Spanish and American researchers have created monkey-human chimeras in China. The hybrid embryos will be destroyed after they develop a central nervous system and will not be brought to term.
Date posted: 2019-08-06
You might think that watching cute kittie videos on YouTube is as harmless as it gets. You'd be wrong. Online video is destroying the Amazon jungle, melting glaciers in Greenland and kindling wildfires in California.
Date posted: 2019-07-30
Last week New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard won gold medals at Apia's Faleata Sports Complex. She is now the Oceania senior champion, the Commonwealth senior champion, and the Pacific Games senior champion. She is looking forward to a spot in her nation's 2020 Olympic team.
Date posted: 2019-07-30
Why does this preposterous movement seem so plausible and righteous?
Date posted: 2019-07-15
The Australian state wants to change birth certificates to reflect transgender realities.
Date posted: 2019-06-29
Australian intended parents are spending A$20,000 to select the sex and eye colour of yet-to-be-born babies via with IVF at American fertility clinics. Blue is the favourite eye colour.
Date posted: 2019-06-14
Doctors must refer patients for 'medical assistance in dying'.
Date posted: 2019-05-25
Israel Folau, one of Australia's best-ever rugby union players, has been found guilty of a "high-level breach" of the Professional Players' Code of Conduct. His crime? Posting comments critical of the homosexual lifestyle on social media.
Date posted: 2019-05-25
Women over 40 with little hope of conceiving a baby are being exploited by greedy IVF clinics, the chair of the UK's fertility watchdog has warned.
Date posted: 2019-05-25
An American critical care expert says that more and more doctors are considering the abolition of the "dead donor rule" now that euthanasia is legal in Canada.
Date posted: 2019-05-25
The number of deaths by suicide recorded in that month was greater than the number in any month in the five-year period examined by the researchers.
Date posted: 2019-05-25
A worrying sign for supporters.
Date posted: 2019-05-25
The concept of brain death, while legally adopted in the U.S. and in large parts of the world, has remained an area of ongoing discussion. It often centers on how someone can be dead when the heart is beating and the body is warm, even if this function is entirely reached through artificial support.
Date posted: 2019-05-11
According to the latest figures, about 3,000 Canadians were euthanised in 2018. The Fourth Interim Report on Medical Assistance in Dying says that there were at least 2,614 "medically assisted deaths" in Canada between January 1 and October 31. At the current rate, when all the figures are in, deaths in November and December will probably push last year's total above 3,000.
Date posted: 2019-05-11
Safety is important, but ethics are even more important.
Date posted: 2019-03-26
In an extraordinary coincidence last year, the freezing tanks at two major American IVF centres malfunctioned, destroying the embryos and eggs belonging hundreds of clients.
Date posted: 2019-03-11
The young Dutch woman was not terminally ill. Instead, she requested euthanasia at an end-of-life clinic because she had a borderline personality disorder and other mental health issues.
Date posted: 2019-03-11
During Australia's debate over same-sex marriage during the 2017 postal plebiscite, politicians gave bland reassurances that nothing would change, that life would go on, that no one could ever be forced to get same-sex-married. What difference could striking out the words "man and woman" and substituting "two people" make?
Date posted: 2019-03-11
The transgender issue is complex and controversial.
Date posted: 2019-03-11
While genome modification for complex traits like IQ may be the stuff of science fiction, not science fact, at least with current technology, another path to children with higher IQs is not.
Date posted: 2019-03-05
It's an updated version of the Flat Earth theory, complains one scientist.
Date posted: 2018-12-26
The UN's own benchmark for stopping the HIV/AIDS epidemic is only 13 months away. It won't meet it. But what if its strategy is wrong? Albert Einstein reportedly said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results". But that is exactly what UNAIDS has been doing. It has placed all of its faith in technological solutions like distributing 20 billion condoms a year in low- and middle-income countries and has neglected the principal driver of the epidemic, behaviour.
Date posted: 2018-12-26
Quebec's euthanasia law came into effect three years ago, in December 2015. Since then, 1,664 Quebecois have been euthanised, according to a report tabled in the Quebec parliament.
Date posted: 2018-12-09
A class action lawsuit has been launched against an Australian cosmetic surgery company specialising in breast augmentations. According to lawyers for the women, The Cosmetic Institute (TCI) performed more than 5,000 cosmetic procedures each year, most of them breast augmentations. A lawyer with Turner Freeman, the firm representing them, claims that as many as 1,000 women may have had botched surgery.
Date posted: 2018-12-09
Is egg freezing for social reasons cost-effective? An Israeli IVF specialist argues in Reproductive Biomedicine Online that while egg freezing is here to stay, few patients and doctors are asking hard questions about its cost, especially in the face of demands that governments support large-scale "fertility preservation" programmes.
Date posted: 2018-11-20
A British couple has won a court battle with a National Health Service trust over the death of their new-born baby in 2012. They alleged that staff at Darlington Memorial Hospital turned off the child's life support without consultation with or consent of the parents. Only after their daughter Ivy had died were they able to see her.
Date posted: 2018-11-20
The evidence that teenagers with gender dysphoria are suffering from mental illness is overwhelming. Yet instead of psychiatric help, the report recommends acceptance by parents, schools, doctors, universities and government agencies. It encourages the children's peers to respect chosen pronouns and names.
Date posted: 2018-11-20
A large association of American doctors has adopted a position of "engaged neutrality".
Date posted: 2018-10-28
Euthanasia, or "medical aid in dying", was authorised by Canada's Supreme Court in June 2016. It was a controversial decision and the controversy is far from over. Three issues were left hanging: euthanasia for "mature minors", euthanasia for people with mental illness, and advance directives for euthanasia.
Date posted: 2018-10-03
As the cost of genome sequencing decreases, doctors are debating whether all newborns should be sequenced, facilitating a lifetime of personalized medical care.
Date posted: 2018-10-03
Is this child abuse?
Date posted: 2018-09-22
Three news items this week illustrate the patchwork of capital punishment legislation in the United States.
Date posted: 2018-08-30
The UK's equality watchdog has demanded that the country's National Health Service offer scarce fertility services to transitioning transgender people.
Date posted: 2018-08-30
Doctors who object should be exiled from the profession
Date posted: 2018-08-14
The popular supposition is that cloning will produce an exact physical duplicate of the person cloned.
Date posted: 2018-07-29
People are being sucked into IVF without a full recognition of exactly how low the success rate is.
Date posted: 2018-07-29
The UK's leading bioethics institute has given a green light to intergenerational modification of the human genome.
Date posted: 2018-07-29
2300 American online sex offenders were arrested in three months. The media ignored it. Why?
Date posted: 2018-07-09
First case of its kind in Switzerland. The founder of Switzerland's best-known assisted suicide group, Dignitas, 85-year-old Ludwig Minelli, has been charged with profiting from assisted suicide. Minelli has firmly denied the charges, denouncing them as "unfounded and incomprehensible".
Date posted: 2018-06-03
Groundless pessimism about the future can be lethal. Climate change can kill.
Date posted: 2018-06-03
The death of a 104-year-old Australian scientist in a suicide clinic in Switzerland is a tragedy, not a triumph of self-affirmation.
Date posted: 2018-05-19
A reconstructive surgery team at Johns Hopkins University has successfully performed the world's first total penis and scrotum transplant. The patient was a young unnamed military veteran maimed by an IED in Afghanistan. He lost both legs above the knee as well as his genitals.
Date posted: 2018-05-05
Only about 15% of euthanasia cases in the semi-autonomous region of Flanders, in Belgium, are being reported, according to the latest research by physicians.
Date posted: 2018-05-05
It becomes the seventh US jurisdiction to do so.
Date posted: 2018-04-21
Observant students tend to be more conscientious and cooperative.
Date posted: 2018-04-21
A survey of end-of-life decisions for cancer patients involving Flemish physicians has found that in 10.4% of the cases, there was euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide and life shortening without explicit patient request in 1.8%.
Date posted: 2018-04-14
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has published a briefing note on whole genome sequencing of babies. Whole genome sequencing is starting to be used in the UK's National Health Service in the care of seriously ill babies, and will also become available through commercial companies.
Date posted: 2018-04-14
The idea of a slippery slope for euthanasia is mocked by supporters.
Date posted: 2018-03-28
Is Stephen King looking for a new plot for a novel? How about the activities of a shadowy network dedicated to helping people commit suicide? It operates outside the law with the connivance of authorities; its reach is international; its spokesmen are well-known, but are distant from the increasing number of deaths....
Date posted: 2018-03-28
Even though the legalisation of euthanasia has been gathering momentum around the world, the World Medical Association has refused to support it.
Date posted: 2018-03-09
A former member accuses it of breaking the law, muzzling dissent, and packing it with euthanasia practitioners.
Date posted: 2018-02-24
A natal male with all his equipment breastfed his partner's baby, experts report.
Date posted: 2018-02-24
Will they be hounded out of their profession? For years bioethicists of a utilitarian cast have argued that conscientious objection has no place in medicine. Now Canadian courts are beginning to put their stamp of approval on the extinction of doctors' right to refuse to kill their patients.
Date posted: 2018-02-12
A medical ethicist has resigned from a Dutch regional assessment committee for euthanasia over a law which allows non-consenting demented patients to be euthanised.
Date posted: 2018-01-25
The British Fertility Society has recommended that the time limit on freezing eggs for social reasons be changed from 10 years to 55 years, thus potentially allowing women to have children when they are in their 80s.
Date posted: 2017-12-21
A strongly pro-life Congressman from Arizona, 60-year-old Trent Franks, has resigned after being accused of pressuring a staff member to act as a surrogate mother for him and his wife.
Date posted: 2017-12-21
Australian politicians predict more love and more commitment. Let's measure it.
Date posted: 2017-12-21
Over 600,000 Rohingya refugees crossed the border from Myanmar to Bangladesh since the end of August -- joining the 200,000 who were already there.
Date posted: 2017-12-18
Is the value of human life slowly being eroded?
Date posted: 2017-12-10
The development of CRISPR gene editing technology has quickly led to calls for modifying the human germline.
Date posted: 2017-11-20
There's a clear generation gap between older and younger homosexuals.
Date posted: 2017-11-19
One of the principal motivations behind current efforts to legalise assisted suicide in Victoria and New South Wales (and most jurisdictions) is patient autonomy. However, research suggests "gendered risks" may thwart women's autonomy in end-of-life decisions, making them uniquely vulnerable to assisted suicide laws.
Date posted: 2017-11-07
Another chapter in The Reproductive Revolution, this time (as so many other times) from California via a report by Jane Ridley in the New York Post. Jessica Allen, 31, already had two sons with her partner and decided to give the gift of life to another couple as a surrogate mother.
Date posted: 2017-11-07
Although experimentation on human embryos is tightly controlled in the United States. American scientists may have found a way around this restriction. According to the MIT Technology Review, some scientists are creating embryo-like structures from stem cells.
Date posted: 2017-10-22
A trial of four doctors and their accomplices in Costa Rica, one of the main countries for international medical tourism, is opening up a window on global organ trafficking.
Date posted: 2017-10-15
No, sorry, not always.
Date posted: 2017-10-15
In an informal gathering in Colombia last month, he insisted that his critics are wrong.
Date posted: 2017-10-15
In Oregon, 48.9% of patients who ended their lives under the state's assisted suicide act said that fear of being a burden was one of their reasons. We should be very worried by this, argues Charles Foster, a British medical ethicist, in the blog Practical Ethics.
Date posted: 2017-09-17
Independent thinking is being penalised at many universiti
Date posted: 2017-09-02
Studies from Denmark and Sweden show that there is greater risk of suicide.
Date posted: 2017-09-02
It's an increasingly common practice in the Netherlands, it seems
Date posted: 2017-09-02
A poster in Melbourne against same-sex marriage may be offensive and provocative, but its statistics are correct.
Date posted: 2017-09-02
Gene-editing with CRISPR has been in the headlines over the past month and touted as a way of eliminating genetic diseases.
Date posted: 2017-09-01
A former state president of the Australian Medical Association is among a group of doctors urging the AMA to retract its "fatally flawed" position statement on marriage equality.
Date posted: 2017-08-14
More statistics about euthanasia from the Netherlands, based on the latest figures from 2015. Nearly one death in 20 (4.5%) is now due to euthanasia.
Date posted: 2017-08-14
Efforts to ban commercial surrogacy in India are hitting one speed bump after another. At the moment, despite lobbying from IVF clinics, the government has banned the practice for overseas clients. However, there is still a thriving business in local surrogacy.
Date posted: 2017-08-14
American and Korean scientists have published in Nature the details of how they successfully edited a single gene in human embryos. A team of American, Chinese and Korean scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University used gene-editing CRISPR/Cas9 technology to eliminate a gene, MYBPC3, linked to a heart disorder.
Date posted: 2017-08-14
In the first systematic review of trends in sperm count, researchers this week reported in the journal Human Reproduction Update a significant decline in sperm concentration and total sperm count among men from Western countries.
Date posted: 2017-08-03
The case of dying English baby Charlie Gard shows how much public opinion about life and death issues is swayed by emotion rather than thoughtful deliberation. In an op-ed this week the NY Times hits rock bottom.
Date posted: 2017-07-16
For years now, the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program after 9/11 has been under fire for being torture. The Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) says that it should also be framed as illegal and unethical human experimentation.
Date posted: 2017-07-07
Physicians should be cautious about embracing experimental therapies in general, but especially those intended for children, and should particularly avoid any experimental therapy that has virtually no scientific evidence of effectiveness or safety. Regardless of the good intentions of the physicians and parents, to expose young people to such treatments is to endanger them.
Date posted: 2017-07-07
A British study shows that the world is far from prepared.
Date posted: 2017-06-23
Safeguards for the mentally ill and the demented are slipping away.
Date posted: 2017-06-23
In vitro gametogenesis (IVG)is one of the nightmares of conservative bioethicists.
Date posted: 2017-06-02
The world's most influential news magazine is campaigning for commercial surrogacy. Why not cannibalism?
Date posted: 2017-06-02
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has launched an online pledge for health professionals across the United States to reject torture as an absolute wrong which can never be sanctioned.
Date posted: 2017-05-23
A recent study in the journal Bioethics finds that "moral enhancement technologies" are neither feasible nor wise, based on an assessment of existing research into these technologies.
Date posted: 2017-05-23
The fertility industry could have a strong competitor after a cheap, simple, time-tested fertility remedy has been proved to be even more effective than IVF.
Date posted: 2017-05-23
The world's most influential news magazine has given commercial surrogacy full-throated support.
Date posted: 2017-05-23
Surrogacy is included in a payout to a Canadian woman injured in a horrific car accident.
Date posted: 2017-05-23
Britain's most famous gay dads are at the centre of a controversy over their surrogate mother business. Tony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow were the first same-sex couple in Europe to have their names on the birth certificates of their children. Now they have four sons and a daughter created with the help of a variety of egg donors and surrogates.
Date posted: 2017-05-22
The American state of Arkansas executed four prisoners in April. They were given a lethal injection with a three-drug cocktail, a procedure which requires some medical skills. Should doctors take part in such executions?
Date posted: 2017-05-09
Autonomy has become a slogan justifying almost everything. And like most slogans, it is almost meaningless.
Date posted: 2017-05-08
The possibility of creating synthetic gametes (eggs from male stem cells, sperm from female stem cells) raises some interesting ethical issues. LGBT couples currently depend upon a third party to contribute opposite-sex gametes. This means that their children will never be fully genetically related and that their relationship depends on outside intervention
Date posted: 2017-05-07
Down syndrome is the leading cause of intellectual disability in the United States. But how many Americans have Down syndrome? There is no clear answer to that question, as the US does not record this information systematical
Date posted: 2017-05-07
Researchers have moved a step closer to ectogenesis - brewing babies in an artificial womb. A team at the Center for Fetal Research in Philadelphia have developed a womb-like environment in which premature lambs have already lived at least four weeks before being delivered.
Date posted: 2017-05-07
One of the last substantial barriers to increasing the number of euthanasia cases for non-terminally-ill psychiatric patients in Belgium seems to have crumbled.
Date posted: 2017-05-07
Swedish midwife Ellinor Grimmark has decided to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights over Sweden's hard line on conscientious objection.
Date posted: 2017-05-05
Several Belgian physicians argue in a recent research letter in JAMA that encouraging the practice of organ donation after euthanasia will help reduce the waitlists for organ donation.
Date posted: 2017-05-04
Although Dutch government proposals for euthanasia for "completed life" - that is, for elderly people who want to step off the treadmill gracefully - have received a lot of publicity, they have not been legislated.
Date posted: 2017-04-19
The American state of Arkansas has not executed anyone for more than 10 years. And now, because it cannot source a crucial ingredient in a lethal cocktail of drugs after April 30, 7 inmates are scheduled to die in 11 days. Another one was granted a stay of execution on Thursday.
Date posted: 2017-04-19
Sperm is becoming a commercialised commodity. In the UK a hospital run by the National Health Service (NHS) in London is planning to meet its budget by selling it. Although the hospital is non-for-profit, it is allowed to sell sperm.
Date posted: 2017-04-19
The deaths of possibly 100 Syrian civilians, including children, after a gas attack, is just a ghastlier incident in an unending series of ghastly deaths which seem designed to destroy the rebel health system.
Date posted: 2017-04-16
The government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has released a draft of a bill regulating the controversial surrogacy industry.
Date posted: 2017-04-16
Another dispatch from the Wild West of assisted reproduction. "Husband Gave Birth To His First Child After Wife Was Unable To Fall Pregnant" was the irresistible headline in the Huffington Post UK.
Date posted: 2017-04-01
Both in the US and UK, growing human embryos more than 14 days in a laboratory is banned. Recent developments suggest that it may be possible to grow them for longer and a number of scientists are lobbying to extend the limit. They contend that the limit is out-of-date and too restrictive.
Date posted: 2017-04-01
Three elderly women in Florida have been blinded by an unproven treatment, as a reminder of how dangerous stem cell therapies can be.
Date posted: 2017-04-01
The world market for IVF and IVF products will grow from US$8.4 billion this year to $12.5 billion on 2022, according to a report from a market research company.
Date posted: 2017-03-21
t is estimated that half of the world's estimated 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing. Under pressure from dominant languages to assimilate, linguistic communities shrink, wither and disappear. Every fortnight, the last fluent speaker of a language dies, according to some experts.
Date posted: 2017-03-21
An international campaign seeks to make animals honorary humans. The fact is that people who think that animals should be treated with all the respect and tenderness due to human beings will end up treating human beings like animals.
Date posted: 2017-03-18
The love that dared not speak its name in 1894 has become the love that cannot stop gabbling on in 2017. How did this come about? Is there a thread connecting Oscar Wilde, the Stonewall Riots, same-sex marriage, Caitlin Jenner and North Caroline bathrooms? What does this mean for democracy and the family?
Date posted: 2017-03-17
It always pays to take a closer look at the figures in the headlines
Date posted: 2017-03-09
Because they have opened a door to legalising eugenics
Date posted: 2017-03-09
A completely different way of viewing transgender issues comes from the Oxford Human Rights Hub. Geoffrey Yeung, a Hong Kong activist studying at Oxford, argued last year that restrictions on transgender people are banned by the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT).
Date posted: 2017-02-23
Sex reassignment surgery requires the intervention of doctors. But what kind of treatment is it? Is it a therapy for a disease which should be offered only after psychiatric authorization? Or is it a biomedical enhancement which anyone can freely choose.
Date posted: 2017-02-23
Hollywood's A-List has blamed Donald Trump for whipping up hysteria about immigrants. They should take a good look in the mirror. For decades Hollywood has tutored Americans in xenophobia.
Date posted: 2017-02-21
Relatives had to hold her down so that the doctor could give the lethal injection.
Date posted: 2017-02-21
The 1957 Wolfenden report changed the UK for ever. These flimsy arguments never would and never could stem the flourishing of a homosexual culture in Britain. In fact, 60 years later Britons live in a country where same-sex marriage is legal and criticism of homosexuality is taboo.
Date posted: 2017-02-15
Euthanasia only became legal in June and already about 800 people have received a lethal injection at the hands of a doctor.
Date posted: 2017-02-15
The number of autistic kids is skyrocketing. The number of transgender kids is skyrocketing. Is there a link?
Date posted: 2017-02-10
Ellinor Grimmark has been refused employment at several hospitals in the Jonkoping region because she has declared that abortion is against her conscience and her religious convictions.
Date posted: 2017-02-10
On January 27, Germany's Bundestag commemorated the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp. This year the focus was placed on the 300,000 disabled victims of the notorious Aktion T-4 euthanasia program.
Date posted: 2017-02-10
The US state of Colorado has legalized assisted suicide, but its large Catholic hospital system is refusing to cooperate, according to STAT.
Date posted: 2017-02-03
The new CRISPR gene-editing technology is an incredible tool, but it could be used for ethically-troubling procedures like human eugenics, modification of human germline cells, genetically-modified crops, gene drives to wipe out species and on and on and on. How can its uses be restricted?
Date posted: 2017-02-02
Scientists are close to finding out how to create eggs and sperm in a Petri dish.
Date posted: 2017-01-24
Spain is leading the world in deceased organ donation. An article in the American Journal of Transplantation explains how this happened.
Date posted: 2017-01-24
The dreary design of the website and Facebook page of Find Surrogate Mother (aka surrogacy inc) makes depressing reading. The business describes itself as "a full service Surrogacy Agency in Manila, Philippines, helping to match Surrogate Mothers, Intended Parents, Egg Donors, Sperm Donors [which] provide[s] services for Heterosexual Couple, Gay Couple, Lesbian Couple, Single Woman, Single Man".
Date posted: 2017-01-24
The imminent arrival of eggs and sperm grown from skin cells makes legislative change imperative, three Ivy League professors argue in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Date posted: 2017-01-24
Well, that didn't take long. Euthanasia became legal in Canada in June and by December Quebec bioethicists had already published an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics calling for organ donation after euthanasia. In fact, they were reflecting the positive opinions of the both the Quebec government and Transplant Quebec.
Date posted: 2017-01-24
Philip Nitschke is one of the world’s most famous Australians, although he has recently moved to the Netherlands. He helps people to kill themselves, mostly by directing them to lethal drugs or supplying them with bottled gas.
Date posted: 2017-01-17
The fundamental question in confronting euthanasia is whether life is worth living.
Date posted: 2017-01-17
Five years ago, a paper published in the BMJ came to the startling conclusion that IVF was more dangerous than abortion in the UK.
Date posted: 2017-01-17
Research showing that structural stigma reduces life expectancy is false.
Date posted: 2017-01-17
As clinics offering cheap surrogacy overseas shut their doors to foreigners, pressure is mounting in Australia to permit commercial surrogacy.
Date posted: 2017-01-17
A 14-year-old British girl dying of cancer recently won a court battle to be cryogenically frozen.
Date posted: 2017-01-01
It's certainly less bother than a 12-step program in Alcoholics Anonymous
Date posted: 2016-12-30
This brilliant short documentary explains why euthanasia abandons patients.
Date posted: 2016-12-30
A 14-year-old British girl dying of cancer recently won a court battle to be cryogenically frozen.
Date posted: 2016-12-29
The data is sketchy, but drones authorized by President Obama have killed about 100 civilians and about 2,500 enemy combatants. The drones bring death from the skies. Australian euthanasia entrepreneur Dr Philip Nitschke, has a similar idea: delivering suicide drugs by drone to nursing homes.
Date posted: 2016-11-29
After surveying its members the Australian Medical Association has reaffirmed its opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2016-11-29
Dutch anatomists have published an amazing 3D atlas of the human embryo.
Date posted: 2016-11-29
California's new End of Life Option Act, which permits assisted suicide, has some disturbing consequences According to recently passed regulations terminally ill patients in mental hospitals have a right to request assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2016-11-27
A 14-year-old British girl who was dying of cancer won a court battle last month to be cryogenically frozen in the hope of being revived in 200 years' time.
Date posted: 2016-11-27
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has delivered a blistering attack on the advertising practices of IVF clinics.
Date posted: 2016-11-27
The latest government statistics for assisted suicides in Switzerland reveal a 26% increase over the previous year. Most of those who died by assisted suicide were said to be terminally ill.
Date posted: 2016-10-30
Without sugar-coating the past, a bare half a century ago divorce was rare, churches were full, most movies were family-friendly, modesty was praiseworthy. Today, octogenarian mums and dads of that era mutter as they look around at their grandchildren: "whatever happened to the world I remember?"
Date posted: 2016-10-30
China's recently introduced universal two-child policy is predicted to have a relatively small effect on population growth, with a likely peak of 1.45 billion in 2029, compared to 1.4 billion in 2023 if the one-child policy had continued, according to academics writing in The Lancet.
Date posted: 2016-10-30
Norwegian health officials have ruled that not only is foetal reduction legal for residents, but that women from foreign countries can seek it as well. The controversial procedure involves aborting one or more healthy babies in a multiple pregnancy
Date posted: 2016-10-30
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has told the BBC that his new policy of chemical castration could "wipe out" paedophilia in his country. He said that "our constitution respects human rights, but when it comes to sexual crimes there is no compromise. We are strong and we will be very firm. We will hand out the maximum penalty for sexual crimes."
Date posted: 2016-10-30
It's hard to understand why Dutch politicians are so proud of "completed life" euthanasia. Isn't that the proper role of governments: to foster a society in which people feel glad to be alive?
Date posted: 2016-10-30
Ethical reasoning which relies on empirical studies will often be flawed.
Date posted: 2016-10-15
When a conservative Christian journalist writes a story about a highly-praised AIDS drug headlined "Killing Grandma for Gay sex" and an AIDS activist describes it as a "profit-driven sex toy for rich Westerners", you know that you've uncovered an ethical controversy.
Date posted: 2016-10-15
Why are gay marriage supporters afraid to debate?
Date posted: 2016-09-27
Much of the jousting over same-sex marriage, same-sex parenting and transgender issues takes place in a fact-free arena. Fortunately, there has been a pushback from academics dismayed by the lack of academic rigour. The consensus is flawed by small-scale studies, badly framed questions and poorly understood data.
Date posted: 2016-09-21
Australia's Safe Schools program is so bizarre and fact-free that you can describe it as a cult, says an academic.
Date posted: 2016-09-21
A terminally ill youngster been euthanised in Belgium - the first since Parliament lifted all age restrictions in 2014. The head of the Federal Control and Evaluation Committee on Euthanasia, Dr Wim Distelmans, confirmed that the case had been reported by a local doctor last week.
Date posted: 2016-09-21
On yet another front, Obamacare has been challenged on ethical grounds, this time for allegedly forcing doctors to perform gender transition procedures on children.
Date posted: 2016-09-21
On yet another front, Obamacare has been challenged on ethical grounds, this time for allegedly forcing doctors to perform gender transition procedures on children.
Date posted: 2016-09-21
Abortions for cleft palate, an easily-fixed facial deformity, have been rising in the United Kingdom, according to the latest official figures. In 2015, 11 were carried out. The comparable figure in 2012 was 4.
Date posted: 2016-09-21
With as many as one in 25 children being born through IVF in some countries, you would think that doctors understand the health risks perfectly. Not so.
Date posted: 2016-09-11
Evolution is caused by the differential reproduction of individuals with certain features. So surely IVF, which enables people to reproduce who are unable to do so naturally, must be having an effect upon human evolution.
Date posted: 2016-09-11
Should babies with Trisomy 13 and Trisomy 18 be given life-sustaining treatment? Both conditions are associated with severe physical and intellectual disabilities and most die children in their first year. So until recently, few of them were treated. Doctors regarded the conditions as "lethal congenital anomalies".
Date posted: 2016-09-11
Government regulators have closed some services of a leading abortion provider in the United Kingdom, citing vague concerns about "corporate and clinical governance arrangements and patient safety protocols in specific areas".
Date posted: 2016-09-11
The Indian government plans to impose a complete ban on commercial surrogacy and to permit it only for legally married Indian couples. Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016 would ban unmarried couples, single parents, live-in partners and homosexuals from engaging surrogate mothers. Nothing but altruistic surrogacy would be permitted.
Date posted: 2016-09-11
A landmark report from the US questions cliched views of homosexuality and transgenderism
Date posted: 2016-08-28
It's only anecdotal evidence, but a BBC story from the Indian city of Chennai shows that surrogate mothers feel emotionally traumatized by the wrench of surrendering a child whom they have carried for nine months. The money they earn does not compensate them for this pain. There are a dozen or more clinics in Chennai which broker surrogate babies, employing about 150 surrogate mothers.
Date posted: 2016-08-28
"Growing old isn't so bad when you consider the alternative," used to be a joke. But for supporters of legalised euthanasia, the alternative looks better than growing old. Some recent research shows that there is some confusion about the aims of the movement.
Date posted: 2016-08-19
Step by step, our lives are being absorbed by technology.
Date posted: 2016-07-25
"What we're trying to do is get the government, the party state in Beijing, to stop killing their own people for their organs," David Kilgour, a human-rights activist and former Canadian MP, told the Toronto Globe and Mail. "An industrial-scale crime against humanity is going on in China."
Date posted: 2016-07-17
When a proposal to adopt a neutral stance failed by a huge margin, 63% to 37%, on June 21, it was only reported by a few Christian and pro-life blogs.
Date posted: 2016-07-11
Another Chinese scientist is stretching medical ethics to the breaking point. According to the New York Times, Dr. Ren Xiaoping of Harbin Medical University, is planning to do a body transplant. Several patients have already volunteered for the daring experiment, which involves attaching the head of a live person to the body of a cadaver.
Date posted: 2016-06-26
Another Chinese scientist is stretching medical ethics to the breaking point. According to the New York Times, Dr. Ren Xiaoping of Harbin Medical University, is planning to do a body transplant. Several patients have already volunteered for the daring experiment, which involves attaching the head of a live person to the body of a cadaver
Date posted: 2016-06-26
If we welcome transgender women, are transgender mothers a big deal? Although surgeons are still mastering the technique of transplanting wombs, patients are already asking when this will become possible.
Date posted: 2016-06-26
Along with unbearable physical pain, mental suffering, and dementia, a new reason for seeking euthanasia in Belgium has emerged in the media: paedophilia.
Date posted: 2016-06-25
The doctors are so enthusiastic about the procedure that they have proposed legal changes which will speed up the procedure and maximize the number of donations.
Date posted: 2016-06-25
A Ukrainian clinic uses feminist rhetoric to sell its services.
Date posted: 2016-06-07
Chemical castration will be a sentencing option for judge in Indonesia. President Joko Widodo has signed a decree authorizing this penalty for convicted child sex offenders. Those who have been released on parole must wear electronic monitoring devices.
Date posted: 2016-06-07
In a landmark decision, the High Court in the UK has ruled that it is discriminatory to prevent single men or women from becoming the parents of babies born to surrogate mothers. The government will probably have to update its legislation to make it compatible with the ruling.
Date posted: 2016-06-07
According to an exclusive report in the New York Times, 150 scientists, lawyers and entrepreneurs gathered behind closed doors at Harvard earlier this month to discuss creating a synthetic human genome.
Date posted: 2016-06-06
As a sign of growing interest in transhumanism, the Washington Post recently featured a symposium with several distinguished writers. It may indicate a growing interest in its aspirations, in an election year when a transhumanist, Zoltan Istvan, is seriously running for President.
Date posted: 2016-06-06
The editor-in-chief of one of the world's leading reproductive medicine journals has attacked the rising use of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) for the treatment of infertility, following publication of the latest world report on assisted reproductive technologies (ART).
Date posted: 2016-06-05
That bioethicists regard the lives of animals as more important than infants or disabled humans is a common complaint amongst their critics. The death of a silverback gorilla in the Cincinnati Zoo serves as a test of this hypothesis.
Date posted: 2016-06-05
Although polygamy is permitted under sharia law, most Muslim men do not have two, three or four wives. In fact, according to "The Salafi Feminist", a Canadian blogger, average Muslims view second wives "as little more than secret mistresses, home-wreckers, and simply selfish".
Date posted: 2016-05-30
It's not weakness to regard dropping atom bombs on two Japanese cities as immoral.
Date posted: 2016-05-15
The issue of harvesting organs from political prisoners in China to supply the country's more than 160 transplant centres is not just controversial, but explosive.
Date posted: 2016-05-15
The number of euthanasia cases in the Netherlands continues to rise steadily. According to the latest statistics released by the government, in 2015 there were 147,010 deaths in the country. Of these 5,516 were reported to be euthanasia or assisted suicide (only 208 cases). This is rise of 4% over the figures for 2014.
Date posted: 2016-05-15
A government report has backed calls for an international treaty on surrogacy and for uniform legislation within Australia banning commercial surrogacy.
Date posted: 2016-05-15
The Dutch Health Minister, Edith Schippers, has earmarked almost 400,000 Euros for a study of whether to expand eligibility for euthanasia to children between 1 and 12. At the moment, children under 1 may be killed with the consent of their parents following criteria set out in the Groningen Protocols. Children older than 12 are already eligible.
Date posted: 2016-05-15
As southern Canada prepares to roll out euthanasia after last year's Supreme Court decision, the Dene, an aboriginal group of First Nation people, are awaiting it with fear.
Date posted: 2016-05-13
Guaranteeing the anonymity of sperm and egg donors is a controversial topic. On the one hand children may want to connect with their biological parents; on the other, the parents may have agreed to donate only because the transaction was anonymous.
Date posted: 2016-05-05
An Australian case of sexual exploitation of infants has raised questions about international surrogacy. An unnamed 49-year-old man in rural Victoria has pleaded guilty to abusing not only two young nieces, but twins whom he fathered with the help of a donated egg from a woman in Ukraine at an IVF clinic in Asia.
Date posted: 2016-05-05
The British press is a fathomless mine of lurid but thought-provoking, strange-but-true explorations of the dark side of the human condition. Last week's revelation was published in a magazine called The New Day -- a passionate incestuous romance between a 51-year-old British woman and her 32-year-old American son.
Date posted: 2016-04-21
A year after the first genetically-engineered human embryos were created in China, a different Chinese team has repeated the experiment, with much the same results: failure.
Date posted: 2016-04-21
The researchers believe that over the past 20 years, there are 4,472 "missing" girls in Canada as a result of a preference for males amongst Indian immigrants. This happens mostly when both parents were born in India.
Date posted: 2016-04-21
The British press is a fathomless mine of lurid but thought-provoking, strange-but-true explorations of the dark side of the human condition.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
How do you run an ethical randomised trial to stop paedophilia? This is the question that hovers over research into drugs which are intended to stop unwanted sexual impulses.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
Italy's Constitutional Court has reaffirmed the legitimacy of a ban on human embryo research. In a decision late last month the Court declared that Article 13 of Law 40, a 2004 law on assisted reproduction, was constitutional.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
The Dominican Republic is the latest victim of LGBT bullying by the US government.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
Urinals as a political flashpoint? The last time urinals created so much controversy in the United States was in 1917 when the Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal to a New York art show. And in truth, there is something surrealistic about the debate surrounding North Carolina's new law on who can enter public bathrooms.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
It's not just bio-conservatives who are troubled and puzzled by the growth of surrogate motherhood. Writing in the Huffington Post, Keston Ott-Dahl, the lesbian co-mother of a Down syndrome daughter, confesses that there is conflict in the LGBT community as well.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
A former member of a euthanasia review board in the Netherlands has written a stinging attack on the policy he once formed part of.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
A US$5.7 million study of the long-term outcomes of medical treatment for transgender youth begins recruiting in May. But knotty ethical questions remain unanswered.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
Dr Fonck, a renal physician who was a minister in the government of Elio di Rupo, queried Health Minister Maggie De Block about why the full text of the country's euthanasia law has never been published.
Date posted: 2016-04-14
Several Dutch and Belgian doctors have proposed legal reforms to increase the popularity of combining euthanasia and organ donation in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Date posted: 2016-04-12
The UK's National Health Service is to encourage pregnant women whose children have a fatal birth defect to bring them to term so that their organs can be harvested.
Date posted: 2016-03-20
With a range of inconsistent statutes amongst member states, surrogacy is becoming a political football in Europe. Accusations of conflict of interest are being raised in the lead-up to a debate next week in a committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
Date posted: 2016-03-20
The head of Portugal's national nurses' association has blown the whistle on covert euthanasia in public hospitals. Ana Rita Cavaco told a radio program that she personally had heard doctors discussing the topic.
Date posted: 2016-03-18
Harvard University is the richest, most famous and oldest university in the US - and it won the Harvard-Yale game last year 38-19. But one distinction which it would rather forget is that it was the "brain trust" of American eugenics.
Date posted: 2016-03-17
The evidence is piling up. According to a report in The Economist, there are possibly 700 to 800 million individual porn pages, 60 percent of them in the US. A portal for pornography, PornHub, claims that it had nearly 80 billion video viewings in 2014 and more than 18 billion visits. It's obvious that we live in a pornography-saturated culture.
Date posted: 2016-03-03
Beginning today, the Dutch right-to-die association NVVE is celebrating Euthanasia Week with a selection of documentary films and youth outreach.
Date posted: 2016-02-28
Another euthanasia scandal in Belgium. Two sisters have complained on a television program, Terzake, about the euthanasia of their sister. Tine Nys was 38 at the time and had broken up with her live-in boyfriend. On Christmas Eve 2009 she announced that she was going to be euthanased.
Date posted: 2016-02-28
Another euthanasia scandal in Belgium. Two sisters have complained on a television program, Terzake, about the euthanasia of their sister in April 2010.
Date posted: 2016-02-28
Activists are trying to spook governments into allowing abortion. Don't do it, says a woman with the condition.
Date posted: 2016-02-06
Few of the essentials have changed since the first recorded case in 1884.
Date posted: 2016-02-05
The dark history of government-sponsored eugenics before World War II has largely been forgotten, although it is well documented.
Date posted: 2016-02-05
At least one person and perhaps three have been euthanased in Quebec since the Canadian province's legislation went into effect in December.
Date posted: 2016-02-05
US government statistics show that more than half a million girls and women are at risk of female genital mutilation or its consequences in the United States. This figure has tripled over the last 25 years as a result of increased migration from countries where FGM is common.
Date posted: 2016-02-05
The latest issue of JAMA showcases the views of leading American doctors and lawyers on physician-assisted suicide (PAS). The theme is captured by the headline above one of the articles: "Physician-Assisted Dying: Turning Point?"
Date posted: 2016-02-05
A British report on the irrelevance of "naturalness" could have far-reaching consequences.
Date posted: 2016-02-05
Scientists in the UK could begin genetically engineering human embryos as early as March, if the fertility regulator approves plans by researchers at the new Francis Crick Institute in London.
Date posted: 2016-01-31
Although, with more than a billion members, the Catholic Church has immense influence on bioethical practice, its positions are rejected by many bioethical theorists. None is more disputed, even ridiculed, than its condemnation of contraception. However, this stand does have thoughtful defenders.
Date posted: 2016-01-31
Waffles, beer, chocolate and euthanasia: Belgium is famous for all of them. Will do-it-yourself eugenics be added to the list?
Date posted: 2016-01-30
Persistent rumours about organ trafficking by the Islamic State have some basis in fact.
Date posted: 2016-01-18
The Netherlands health ministry has revised its guidelines to allow severely demented patients to be euthanized. However, an advance directive which was made when the patient was lucid is required.
Date posted: 2016-01-18
A stark reminder of the hazards of IVF and surrogacy.
Date posted: 2016-01-18
Last February Canada's Supreme Court declared that denying patients access to assisted suicide and euthanasia is a violation of their human rights. The federal, provincial and territory governments were given a year - until February 6, 2016 - to enact legislation consistent with its decision.
Date posted: 2016-01-13
Human interest stories are like earthquakes. Readers love earthquakes, but they get bored with the small ones that flatten a single city. Editors need devastated provinces and tsunamis up to wind up their interest. So the lives of transgender people are the gift that keeps on giving for tabloids. Readers are always interested and the stories keep getting weirder and weirder.
Date posted: 2016-01-10
"All Of Us" is an education pack about homosexuality and transexuality for teachers of Australian children in Years 7 and 8. Launched last month, it is supposed to help students be aware of bullying and discrimination and to affirm the identities of their LGBT classmates.
Date posted: 2015-12-27
Cloning has been off the radar for several years. But, according to a report from Agence France-Presse, it's back on the boil in China.
Date posted: 2015-12-26
Gene-editing with the four-year-old CRISPR technique is already so promising that a meeting of American, British and Chinese scientists was held in Washington this week to discuss how it should be regulated.
Date posted: 2015-12-26
China's decision to abolish the one-child policy made many couples happy - and many IVF clinics. Business is booming, as many couples are eager to ensure that they have a boy. Chinese women marry at around 28, so many will have trouble conceiving a second child if they wait until they are 35 or so.
Date posted: 2015-12-26
Do parents really know what their children will be taught about the LGBT universe?
Date posted: 2015-12-22
The leading Dutch right-to-die society is seeking talks with the Dutch medical association (KNMG) for approval of a "peaceful pill" which will allow its members to kill themselves without the help of a doctor.
Date posted: 2015-12-04
The international market for surrogacy is proving to be very resilient in the face of legal and social disruption. Now that India, Nepal and Thailand have banned international clients from using local surrogates, clinics and brokers are shifting their business to Cambodia.
Date posted: 2015-11-18
Silicon Valley start-up 23andMe, as well as internet giants Google, Facebook and Apple, are competing to create databases which can be made available to medical researchers.
Date posted: 2015-11-18
Supporters of euthanasia promised Belgians emancipation from medical paternalism and "therapeutic obstinacy". But after reading Wim Distelmans' explanation of their law, it's apparent that Doctor still knows best. The only thing that has changed is that Doctor is carrying a syringe filled with a lethal drug.
Date posted: 2015-11-18
What ever happened to the stem cell wars?
Date posted: 2015-11-18
The world's foremost promoter of assisted suicide and euthanasia, Australia's Dr Philip Nitschke, has agreed to cease his advocacy in exchange for retaining his medical registration.
Date posted: 2015-11-17
You know that we have come to the end of an era when a bra-burning torchbearer for the sexual revolution is being vilified as a misogynist.
Date posted: 2015-11-15
Too often it is glibly asserted that troubled youths can deal with their psychological conflicts by transitioning to a different gender. They are either deceiving themselves or being deceived. The facts are there for anyone, especially those considering sexual reassignment surgery, to see: for many people life as a transgender is full of psychological pain.
Date posted: 2015-11-05
There are women who want a child but no intimacy and no love.
Date posted: 2015-10-18
Ten percent of Americans now have access to assisted suicide after Jerry Brown, governor of California, approved Assembly Bill 15.
Date posted: 2015-10-18
A steady trickle of women seeking IVF in Britain are single women who have never had sexual intercourse.
Date posted: 2015-10-16
Will California's new assisted suicide law actually result in fewer people committing suicide as its supporters have promised?
Date posted: 2015-10-16
Ten percent of Americans now have access to assisted suicide after Jerry Brown, governor of California, approved Assembly Bill 15 on October 5.
Date posted: 2015-10-16
Process raises serious concerns, especially if changes can be inherited.
Date posted: 2015-10-16
Olga Gutierrez Machorro, a councillor in the local government of Tecamachalco, not far from Mexico City, has suggested that homeless beggars should be put down with a lethal injection to keep them off the streets.
Date posted: 2015-10-16
Another dispatch from the Wild West of assisted reproductive technology. The third place contestant in the UK's first Miss Transgender beauty competition wants to be the first Briton to be both father and mother of a child.
Date posted: 2015-10-16
With the advent of new genomic sequencing technologies, researchers around the world are working to identify genetic variants that help explain differences in intelligence. Can such findings be used to improve education for all, as some scientists believe?
Date posted: 2015-10-15
Notwithstanding a wide range of approaches, the ultimate goal of all transhumanists is the indefinite extension of life. But according to Steve Fuller, a leading transhumanist theorist, it is an uphill battle to convince the public that this is possible or even desirable.
Date posted: 2015-10-15
Australian research from the 1990s has emerged as key evidence in the debate about same-sex parenting. The constant refrain from supporters has been that there is no difference in outcomes for children in traditional marriages or same-sex couples. This is simply not true.
Date posted: 2015-10-15
Once again Planned Parenthood entered the US political debate. On Friday, the House of Representatives passed the Defund Planned Parenthood Act by a vote of 241-187 which imposes a one-year moratorium on federal funding in order to make a thorough investigation of its practices.
Date posted: 2015-10-14
In April Chinese scientists revealed that they had used Crispr, the new genetic engineering tool, to edit the genomes of surplus embryos from IVF clinics. Although none of the embryos were viable, the news sent a tsunami of excitement through the stem cell research community.
Date posted: 2015-10-13
Nearly two-thirds of all psychology research should be distrusted because it cannot be replicated, according to a troubling paper in Science
Date posted: 2015-09-22
The Council, whose co-chair is Robert P. George, of Princeton University, has just published its extended moral and medical arguments against human cloning in the journal The New Atlantis. It argues that "If research cloning is not stopped now, we face the prospect of the mass farming of human embryos and fetuses, and the transformation of the noble enterprise of biomedical research into a grotesque system of exploitation and death."
Date posted: 2015-09-21
"Maggie's Story" is the fourth in a series of videos about "eggsploitation", the dark side of egg donation. Maggie was a 19-year-old altruistic donor who donated eggs 10 times, even though the recommended limit is six.
Date posted: 2015-09-05
Doctors in the Netherlands are permitted to give infants under 1 year a lethal injection if it has a low life expectancy and is suffering.
Date posted: 2015-09-05
It is easier to sell a drug than to heal broken relationships and dysfunctional personalities. Like so many other technologies, Addyi is being used as a chemical fix for a human problem.
Date posted: 2015-09-05
Nearly 20 years after approving Viagra, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug for enhancing female libido. Approval was announced on Tuesday and on Thursday Sprout Pharmaceuticals, the small company which had ushered it through the regulatory process, was sold for US$1 billion in cash to Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, the largest public company in Canada.
Date posted: 2015-09-05
Much to its chagrin, Planned Parenthood is still in the headlines of American newspapers over allegations that it is profiting from the sale of foetal tissue.
Date posted: 2015-09-05
There is good news and bad news about euthanasia from the Netherlands and Belgium in JAMA Internal Medicine this week. But which is which depends on which side of the fence you sit.
Date posted: 2015-08-20
"Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the 'slippery slope': once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die. There is no evidence for this claim." So wrote Professor Peter Singer in an article in 2009.
Date posted: 2015-08-20
A country where more and more people are asking to be killed.
Date posted: 2015-07-31
With same-sex marriage and the transformation of Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn Jenner in the world headlines, it's time to ask what LGBT bioethics would look like. Timothy Murphy, of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, foreshadows some of the major themes in the journal Bioethics.
Date posted: 2015-07-14
What lies beyond the bizarre expansion of children's rights to euthanasia and sex change surgery? The death toll in Syria continues to rise. According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights about 231,000 people have died since war broke out in 2011. Of these, 69,500 were civilians, including 11,500 children and 7,500 women. It must be one of the first wars in which children are suffering more than adults.
Date posted: 2015-07-14
Writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Rafael Cohen-Almagor, an Israeli professor of politics at the University of Hull, says that Belgians should be alarmed by the deliberate shortening of lives of some patients without their explicit voluntary request.
Date posted: 2015-07-12
Ireland has written a social suicide note and we grieve for her. More than half the Irish have voted for homosexual marriage, seduced by celebrities to violate something they once held sacred: the life between mother, father and child. From today, the Irish Constitution assumes a mother does not matter to a baby, and a father is irrelevant to his son. That is madness.
Date posted: 2015-06-14
Do we really need ever-more accurate tests to detect Down syndrome in unborn children?
Date posted: 2015-06-14
Italian celebrity surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who created artificial windpipes with cadaver-derived scaffolding and stem cells, has been found guilty of scientific misconduct by an investigator from Sweden's Karolinska Institute.
Date posted: 2015-06-14
So many politicians have evolved so quickly on same-sex marriage that it has become one of the greatest-ever experiments in Darwinian selection.
Date posted: 2015-06-14
Nepal's devastating earthquakes in recent weeks have brought to light its little-known surrogacy industry.
Date posted: 2015-06-04
Somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are drifting in the Andaman Sea while neighbouring countries take turns to deny them entry.
Date posted: 2015-06-04
Many people with a religious outlook on life feel threatened by the advance of same-sex marriage.
Date posted: 2015-06-04
What else will change if same-sex marriage is legalized? This is the question which voters in the United States and Ireland should be asking themselves.
Date posted: 2015-05-31
A recent Vice documentary for HBO, Outsourcing Embryos, explored the well-trodden path to shady surrogacy practices in India.
Date posted: 2015-05-31
The institution of man-woman marriage is not an insult; it is an ensign, beckoning to anyone - regardless of sexual orientation - that the union of a man and a woman is uniquely significant because it is endowed with procreative power and complementary capacity.
Date posted: 2015-04-28
The idea that criminal behaviour is in our genes may be making a come-back.
Date posted: 2015-04-28
Guantanamo Bay is not the only place where American health workers' ethics clash with the need for security. This is also the case in American jails, according to a two-year study of New York's Rikers Island jail complex published in Harvard's Health and Human Rights Journal.
Date posted: 2015-04-22
There is no evidence that a Caesarean section rate of more than 10% saves the lives of mothers or babies, says the World Health Organization. In a new statement it recommends that C-sections be performed based only on the needs of the patient, rather than focusing on target rates.
Date posted: 2015-04-22
Is fighting for traditional marriage and against same-sex marriage worthwhile? Ryan T. Anderson, a 33-year-old fellow at the Heritage Foundation, thinks so and is crisscrossing the US to persuade people that they are not irrational or homophobic if they think that marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman.
Date posted: 2015-04-22
People with Down syndrome, on an equal basis with other people, must be able to enjoy full and equal rights, both as children and adults with 'opportunities' and 'choices'. What's odd about this complaint is that the biggest discrimination is hardly mentioned - the right to participate in life, period.
Date posted: 2015-04-07
Allowing physician-assisted suicide would be a grave mistake for four reasons.
Date posted: 2015-04-07
The New York Times is edging to a cautious endorsement of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2015-04-07
Dr Wim Distelmans explains their misery.
Date posted: 2015-04-07
Gay icons war over "synthetic children".
Date posted: 2015-04-07
If there is one request by patients which is spurned by all doctors, without any fear of being labelled paternalistic, it is muscle-bound young men asking for performance-enhancing steroids. Extensive research confirms that anabolic steroids damage the liver and the heart, among other problems. So, if widespread steroid use is discouraged for men, why haven't the neurological effects on women of the steroid-based contraceptive pill been studied just as thoroughly?
Date posted: 2015-04-07
Is there a silver lining to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa which has claimed nearly 10,000 lives over the past year?
Date posted: 2015-04-07
Fourteen European nations have signed the first international treaty on organ trafficking.
Date posted: 2015-04-05
Exit, the assisted suicide group for German-speakers in Switzerland, recorded a 27% increase in deaths last year, rising from 459 in 2013 to 583. Membership grew by 20% to 86,000.
Date posted: 2015-04-05
March 29 marked the first anniversary of the legal same-sex marriage in England and Wales. Look around, say the twitterati - no plagues of locusts and frogs have blighted the land; no fire and brimstone have rained down upon Westminster; no earthquake has swallowed up Sir Elton. All is well.
Date posted: 2015-04-05
Australian euthanasia activist Philip Nitschke is sailing against the wind in his campaign to regain registration as a medical doctor.
Date posted: 2015-04-05
America's leading assisted suicide lobby group, Compassion & Choices, has scored another public relations coup with the release of a third Brittany Maynard video
Date posted: 2015-04-05
Gender confusion and reproductive technology are muddling the English language. We need to take action.
Date posted: 2015-03-22
Why don't we know more about the neurological effects of the contraceptive Pill?
Date posted: 2015-03-22
The notion that religious convictions have no place in medicine or bioethics is widespread and growing.
Date posted: 2015-03-22
The Irish Fertility Society has called upon the Oireachtas to scupper new assisted reproduction regulations.
Date posted: 2015-03-22
More than 1.5% of the babies born in the United States in 2013 began life in a Petri dish.
Date posted: 2015-03-22
The 37th Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras last Saturday was one of the best-publicised events in Sydney's social calendar. About 10,000 people participated, with 150 floats chugging through the gay district. An estimated 200,000 watched the spectacle, which one disillusioned gay journalist described as "a sweaty orgy of glitter-coated body parts".
Date posted: 2015-03-22
One of the world's leading stem cell scientists has entered a partnership with the disgraced Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk to pursue cloning research in China, Science reports.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
Despite the advance of same-sex marriage in the US, it may be some time before the law is scrubbed clean of the presumption that a male/female relationship constitutes a family.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
Two New Zealand academics have proposed that surrogacy become a profession like nursing or teaching which is fully integrated into the health system.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
The assisted suicide of American woman Brittany Maynard on November 1 may have tipped Colombia into legalising euthanasia.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
A group of right-to-die activists is searching for a new word for suicide by conducting an internet poll. They've got their work cut out for them.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
Conscientious objection to "physician-assisted dying" is shaping up as a major issue among doctors in Canada after last week's Supreme Court ruling which legalised it.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
After "three-parent embryos" were legalised in Britain last week, some American bioethicists immediately took to the media to promote the technique.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
A group of right-to-die activists is searching for a new word for suicide by conducting an internet survey.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
Independent investigators commissioned by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have concluded last year's war in Gaza involved "several serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law" by the Israeli Army, including attacks on healthcare workers and facilities.
Date posted: 2015-03-01
A US study finds that opposite-sex parents are better than same-sex parents. Wait for the fireworks.
Date posted: 2015-02-23
Despite similar views about the overall place of science in America, the general public and scientists often see science-related issues through a different lens, according to a new pair of surveys by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Date posted: 2015-02-23
After years of debate, the British House of Commons approved the creation of embryos with genetic material from two women and one man by a vote of 382 to 128. The House of Lords will probably pass the bill, which amends the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, later this year.
Date posted: 2015-02-23
In a landmark decision the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Friday that prohibiting assisted suicide is unconstitutional and a violation of the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canada is now the first country outside Europe to legalize assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2015-02-23
Sex-selective abortion is almost universally reviled - by opponents of abortion because it kills an unborn child and by feminists because it entrenches discriminatory attitudes towards women. However, it has its defenders, even in the Western world.
Date posted: 2015-02-06
For the first time ever, an Egyptian doctor has been convicted of performing female genital mutilation.
Date posted: 2015-02-06
The days of anonymous sperm donation are over in Germany.
Date posted: 2015-02-06
Torture is an issue on which the public might expect bioethicists to be moral absolutists.
Date posted: 2015-02-06
70 years ago today, the most notorious Nazi death camp was liberated by the Red Army.
Date posted: 2015-02-06
The French parliament opened a long-awaited debate on euthanasia this week.
Date posted: 2015-02-06
Why do philosophers who defend abortion also defend torture?
Date posted: 2015-02-05
Awful as the Paris massacre is, does it really mean that we ought to blaspheme more?
Date posted: 2015-02-05
A Dutch end-of-life clinic has been reprimanded for the third time in a year for moving the goal posts for euthanasia.
Date posted: 2015-02-05
Novel techniques of editing the genome have inspired some British scientists to call for a public debate on designer babies.
Date posted: 2015-02-05
While virginity tests for unmarried women have been universally regarded as unethical in Western countries, the practice is spreading in immigrant communities.
Date posted: 2015-02-05
Artificial insemination has become part of international diplomacy
Date posted: 2015-02-05
The phrase "not completely brain dead", like "not completely pregnant", has a Monty Python-esque ring to it. But it is the way the Daily Mail described an alarming organ transplant incident in the German city of Bremen.
Date posted: 2015-02-05
When a 17-year-old rejects chemotherapy - with her mother's support - the state should step in.
Date posted: 2015-02-05
When a 17-year-old rejects chemotherapy - with her mother's support - the state should step in.
Date posted: 2015-02-05
A tragic murder in the Australian state of Queensland has provoked a controversial solution by a former Federal government minister: no contraception, no dole.
Date posted: 2015-02-05
Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke remains deregistered after a ruling that his activities would undermine public confidence in the medical profession and posed a serious risk to public safety. Nitschke says that he will appeal the decision by the Northern Territory Health Professional Review Tribunal.
Date posted: 2015-02-05
The idea of using patients as organ donors if they request assisted suicide or euthanasia seems to be catching on. This is reasonably common in Belgium and in the Netherlands an official protocol is being drawn up to regulate such cases.
Date posted: 2015-01-11
Yet another stem cell dream has been shattered for ever. At a news conference yesterday, officials at Japan's prestigious RIKEN Institute announced that attempts to replicate STAP cells, or stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency cells, are over.
Date posted: 2015-01-11
"Both bioethics and medical ethics together have, in many ways, failed as fields," laments the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Oxford's Julian Savulescu. His diagnosis is that an illogical moralism dominates nearly all bioethical issues and that debates are conducted in philosophical darkness.
Date posted: 2015-01-11
Arthur Caplan's canter through the history of bioethics in a special 40th anniversary issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics is decidedly upbeat.
Date posted: 2015-01-11
I just stumbled across a documentary about the 300,000 women and 22,000 men forcibly or deceitfully sterilised by population control officials in the government of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s.
Date posted: 2015-01-11
Transgender studies is a field which comes up with many surprises. An article in this month's issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology says that since most transgender men desire to have children, more attention should be paid to those who actually bear their own.
Date posted: 2015-01-11
You've heard of hook-up sites like match.com for people who just want sex, but not marriage and kids. But you may not have heard of sites like Modamily.com, PollenTree.com and Familybydesign.com for people who just want kids, but not marriage and sex.
Date posted: 2015-01-11
Two psychologists contracted by the CIA to create enhanced interrogation techniques for al-Qaeda detainees have come under fire for violating human rights and medical ethics
Date posted: 2015-01-11
Assisted suicide is an idea which keeps evolving in unpredictable ways. Who could have foreseen the development of groups of non-doctors which help hundreds of people to die in Switzerland? They are non-profits and charge only for membership and handling fees. But what if companies saw a commercial opportunity in the market for ending one's life?
Date posted: 2014-12-12
Why do people in the United States (and probably other Western countries, as well) over-estimate the proportion of gays and lesbians in the population?
Date posted: 2014-12-12
A deeply utilitarian mindset pervades US foreign policy.
Date posted: 2014-12-12
Udo Schuklenk, of Queen's University, in Canada, the co-editor of the journal Bioethics, and Gilbert Meilaender, of Valparaiso University, in Indiana, discuss the ethics of, in Schuklenk's words, "what would amount to postnatal abortion".
Date posted: 2014-12-11
Shades of Hwang Woo-suk
Date posted: 2014-12-11
More evidence that articles about genetic determinism are positively correlated with provocative headlines.
Date posted: 2014-12-11
Doctors in the Netherlands are developing a protocol which will increase the number of organs from people who request euthanasia.
Date posted: 2014-12-11
Assisted suicide is an idea which keeps evolving
Date posted: 2014-12-11
A gay couple in Britain made history recently when all three of their surrogate mothers presented them with babies within seven months of each other. Daryl Lee, 41, and Luke Harris, 50, had been in a civil partnership for years and had always dreamed of having a family.
Date posted: 2014-12-10
Do more women will die if they are forced to resort to underground abortion mills.
Date posted: 2014-12-10
The British Parliament will begin debating whether to legalise a controversial technique known to opponents as "3-parent embryos" or "3-parent babies" or, to its supporters as "mitochondrial transfer".
Date posted: 2014-12-10
Did Brittany Maynard die freely? This is the question that must be asked after the attractive 29-year-old woman with a brain tumour announced earlier in the week that she would probably postpone the assisted suicide she had scheduled for Saturday, November 1.
Date posted: 2014-12-10
In New York IVF clinics, older clients are 40; in India, they are 60 or even 70.
Date posted: 2014-11-19
Increasingly it seems that the touchstone of success for supporters of same-sex marriage is shifting from accommodation and acceptance to unconditional surrender. Disagreement and criticism will not be tolerated.
Date posted: 2014-11-19
Hundreds of foreign healthcare workers have been shuttling in and out of Ebola-affected countries in West Africa.
Date posted: 2014-10-26
A leading right-to-die campaigner in Britain has starved herself to death. Jean Davies, 86, passed away on October 1, five weeks after she stopped taking food and two weeks after she stopped taking water. She did not have a terminal illness.
Date posted: 2014-10-26
Since there always is a Next Big Thing, what is the Next Big Thing after the legalisation of same-sex marriage? Is it legalising sado-masochism? Is it recognising paedophilia as a genetic disability?
Date posted: 2014-10-26
Surrogacy will be one of our biggest human rights challenges. But same-sex parenting boosters will veto awards to those who fight it.
Date posted: 2014-10-26
Add paedophilia to the growing list of genetically-determined attractions, preferences and predispositions. In a New York Times op-ed, a law professor from Rutgers University contends that paedophilia is not a matter of choice.
Date posted: 2014-10-26
Euthanasia cases in the Netherlands increased 15% in 2013 compared to 2012, according to the latest official statistics.
Date posted: 2014-10-26
Schumm's study suggests that definitive proof of "no difference" thesis is still a long way off. If only the judges would listen.
Date posted: 2014-10-08
A man serving a life sentence for rape and murder has been allowed by a Belgian court to undergo euthanasia.
Date posted: 2014-09-24
Is UK's battle over "three-parent embryos", as it is called in the media, or mitochondrial transfer, as it is called in the journals, becoming more transparent?
Date posted: 2014-09-24
Commercialisation of IVF is crossing new frontiers in New York with "egg freezing parties" for career women who want to keep their options open. A company called EggBanxx will retrieve and store eggs - for about US$7,000 to $8000 per cycle.
Date posted: 2014-09-14
An Australian couple has copped a media bashing over their alleged abandonment of a Down syndrome twin born to a Thai surrogate mother. But with the enormous publicity given to the case, similar cases are beginning to emerge elsewhere.
Date posted: 2014-09-14
A Dutch euthanasia clinic is being investigated for helping an elderly woman to die because she did not want to live in a nursing home.
Date posted: 2014-09-14
Peace between Israel and Hamas must be founded on justice, not merely a cessation of hostilities.
Date posted: 2014-09-14
A new documentary presents a strong case for the Catholic stand on homosexuality
Date posted: 2014-09-14
What a great Roman historian can teach us about IVF and egg freezing.
Date posted: 2014-09-14
A British politician has blasted proposals for "three-parent embryos".
Date posted: 2014-09-14
This month's issue of LGBT Health contains a fascinating interview with two Boston fertility specialists who cater for gays and lesbians who want to become parents.
Date posted: 2014-09-14
A Belgian man is challenging his country's euthanasia law in the European Court of Human Rights.
Date posted: 2014-09-14
The new Thai military government is moving swiftly to crush the lucrative surrogacy industry.
Date posted: 2014-08-25
Australian law could be revised to allow more than two parents, if recommendations in a major report are accepted by the government. A "Report On Parentage And The Family Law Act", was released this week.
Date posted: 2014-08-25
Although it is technically illegal, there are many loopholes and the country now has an estimated 1,000 surrogate mother brokers. The Times interviews the CEO of Baby Plan Medical Technology Company who says that his business has four branches and a track record of 300 babies.
Date posted: 2014-08-25
On the Christian side, there's often more than a smidgen of repugnant smugness in rejection of the gay lifestyle. Summed up in the slogan "pray away the gay", Christian moral teaching is prescribed by some pastors and parents as if it were aspirin. Aspirin is no cure for wounded hearts.
Date posted: 2014-08-25
A few months ago British Prime Minister David Cameron congratulated all the gay couples who were about to tie the knot legally for the first time. "This weekend is an important moment for our country," he said. "It says we are a country that will continue to honour its proud traditions of respect, tolerance and equal worth." How did we get Here from There? How did a slightly prudish Britain become the Britain of same-sex marriage?
Date posted: 2014-08-25
The director of a hospital in Warsaw has been dismissed because he refused to refer a woman for an abortion. The case has become a cause celebre in Poland, leading to protests from the Catholic clergy and internet petitions.
Date posted: 2014-08-25
The web magazine Medium features a searing examination of the US clinical trials industry. The headline of the first part, written by bioethicist Carl Elliott, says it all: "The Best-Selling, Billion-Dollar Pills Tested on Homeless People: How the destitute and the mentally ill are being used as human lab rats".
Date posted: 2014-08-25
An Australian couple who commissioned a surrogate mother in rural Thailand abandoned a Down syndrome twin and left him with his impoverished mother, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Date posted: 2014-08-25
While research has told us that the prevalence of divorce in our society can account for the gender gap within higher education, a recent article in The Huffington Post sheds more light on what the exact causal relation might be. It may not just be the possibility of divorce, itself, that has such an impact on both female and male adolescents, but rather the lack of father involvement in the lives of male children.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
Euthanasia might be needed for poor people who cannot access palliative care, the new Lithuanian Health Minister has suggested. Rimante Salaseviciute was sworn earlier this month, but already she has made waves by backing an open discussion of the legalisation of euthanasia.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
A record number of Lords spoke, more than 130, in a debate which lasted 10 hours. However, this did not resolve the issue. After passing a second reading, the bill passes to a Parliamentary committee which will scrutinise it and propose amendments.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
Free fertility treatment should be banned for those making lifestyle reproductive choices, such as sterilisation reversal or single motherhood for fertile women. And fertility clinics should be subject to carbon capping schemes, in a bid to help curb climate change, argues a theologian in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
In a tell-all interview, one of Australia's most famous athletes admits that he is gay. Is he?
Date posted: 2014-07-27
Britain is in the grip of a moral panic about child sex abuse. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has just announced two public inquiries into "these disgusting crimes" whose scope is incredible. It seems that her government is planning to trawl through all of public life to ferret out hidden paedophiles.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
One of the world's leading medical journals has endorsed the legalisation of assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
Ragnarok is the day in Norse mythology when gods and men meet their doom. After three years of continuous winter, bloody battles and many natural disasters, the world will be flooded, and all but a few will die.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
The sorry saga of yet another flawed stem cell paper riddled with fraudulent data has come to an end. Nature has retracted a paper and a letter, both published in January, which claimed that physical perturbation of cells could create genetic effects. At the time the results were trumpeted on the front pages of newspapers around the world
Date posted: 2014-07-27
Surrogacy may be banned in France, but it must recognise children born to surrogate parents abroad, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
Smajdor makes two specific recommendations. First, that the rules for posthumous gamete donation be tightened. Second, that the discretionary authority of the UK's fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, be rescinded so that it cannot permit the export of gametes obtained without consent.
Date posted: 2014-07-27
Are demographic fears part of the reason for last month's results?
Date posted: 2014-07-01
A ministerial committee has approved a bill which would allow doctors to prescribe lethal medication to Israeli citizens with less than six months to live.
Date posted: 2014-07-01
Taking their cue from Belgium, Scottish groups have tentatively backed voluntary euthanasia for children with terminal illnesses
Date posted: 2014-07-01
The flood of unaccompanied children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala is partly America's own doing.
Date posted: 2014-07-01
This documentary from Family Watch International is a very helpful introduction to understanding male same-sex attraction. It argues that no one is "born gay" and that many people with unwanted same-sex attraction have been able to change.
Date posted: 2014-06-30
Two American bioethicists have questioned the haste with which the United Kingdom is seeking to legalise the creation of "three-parent babies".
Date posted: 2014-06-15
Quebec is on the verge of legalising euthanasia. Despite the crushing defeat of the Parti Quebecois in the recent election, the governing Liberal Party and the other three major parties have taken the unusual step of backing a quick vote on the bill in the new parliamentary term.
Date posted: 2014-06-14
Haruko Obokata reportedly has told co-authors on the paper on stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells that she was prepared to retract it.
Date posted: 2014-06-14
The number of cases of euthanasia in Belgium in 2013 rose by 26.8% over the previous year. Five people died of euthanasia every day.
Date posted: 2014-06-14
It is unethical for American physicians to participate in executions, according to a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Date posted: 2014-06-14
Are anti-procreation orders constitutional in the United States? A case in Ohio is working its way to the state Supreme Court.
Date posted: 2014-06-14
The world's most prestigious science journal, Nature, has thrown its weight behind the legalisation of "three-parent embryos".
Date posted: 2014-06-14
British children as young as nine are eligible to board the train for a sex reassignment surgery, according to the Mail on Sunday.
Date posted: 2014-06-14
Britain's leading fertility doctor, Lord Robert Winston, has warned that his recent research could open the door to "risky" eugenics programs.
Date posted: 2014-06-10
Under the new law, an adult who is terminally ill, of sound mind, and in constant and unbearable physical and psychological pain may request a lethal injection. Quebec now joins the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg as the fourth jurisdiction in which euthanasia is legal. Assisted suicide is legal in across the border in Washington state and Oregon, but not euthanasia
Date posted: 2014-06-06
A media storm is gathering over the discovery of hundreds of infants buried at a Catholic home for unmarried mothers.
Date posted: 2014-06-06
Calling for the integration of ethics into neuroscience, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues this week released the first of two volumes on the ethics of brain research.
Date posted: 2014-05-25
Increasingly surrogacy services offer rich pickings for con artists.
Date posted: 2014-05-25
The head of Belgium's euthanasia oversight commission, Dr Wim Distelmans, will lead a study tour of Auschwitz in October. Since Dr Distelmans is also Belgium's leading promoter of euthanasia and its leading practitioner, the tour has already generated some criticism.
Date posted: 2014-05-25
If Satanists planned a Black Mass at your university, would you ban it?
Date posted: 2014-05-24
Another informed consent scandal from the 1950s: researchers deliberately infected hospitalised children with malaria.
Date posted: 2014-05-11
More controversy over the therapeutic potential of stem cells.
Date posted: 2014-05-11
The Icarus-like rise of Japanese stem cell research Haruko Obokata has ended with a gigantic splash. Ms Obokata was found guilty of scientific misconduct by Japan's RIKEN Institute after an article and a letter published in Nature were found to be supported by manipulated data.
Date posted: 2014-05-11
A second official complaint has been filed against the chairman of the Belgium committee which regulates euthanasia for euthanasing a woman suffering from depression.
Date posted: 2014-05-11
A horror story from Utah shows the crumbling ethical foundations of the assisted reproduction industry.
Date posted: 2014-05-10
A junior bioethics scholar has vented her frustration about her job search in the bioethics.net blog. Dr Keisha Ray says that many philosophers do not even regards bioethics as a real discipline.
Date posted: 2014-05-09
Interest in using stem cells from cloned human embryos has revived after success by scientists in the United States and Korea.
Date posted: 2014-05-09
An investigation at the University of Utah is testing the presumption that IVF clinics are delivering babies who are the biological children of their clients. The story begins in 1992 with the birth of Annie Branum, the child of John and Pamela Branum. She was conceived with artificial insemination at a fertility clinic linked to the University of Utah.
Date posted: 2014-05-09
A botched execution in Oklahoma on Tuesday has revived the debate over the death penalty in the United States and raised hopes (or fears) that lethal injections have had their day. Convicted murderer Clayton Lockett thrashed on a gurney for 43 minutes before dying of a heart attack.
Date posted: 2014-05-09
Changes could be afoot in Swiss legislation after a doctor was acquitted this week of violating regulations for assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2014-05-03
Bunions might seem ethically uncomplicated, but the burgeoning field of aesthetic podiatry must eventually raise some questions about what constitutes medically necessary treatment.
Date posted: 2014-05-03
Three American bioethicists have criticised Belgium's new law permitting children with a terminal illness to choose euthanasia.
Date posted: 2014-05-03
The Iranian parliament is to consider banning vasectomies as a way of pushing up the country's below-replacement birth rate. On the table, too, is the possibility of restricting abortion and contraceptive services.
Date posted: 2014-05-03
A member of the Russian Duma (parliament) has called for commercial surrogacy to be banned. Russia is one of the few countries in the world where the practice is legal.
Date posted: 2014-05-03
Although euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, some Dutch pharmacists are refusing to supply the lethal drugs needed to carry it out.
Date posted: 2014-05-03
Involuntary euthanasia is acceptable medical treatment, according to a recent official statement by the Belgian Society of Intensive Care Medicine. Although voluntary euthanasia is legal is Belgium under some circumstances, involuntary euthanasia is basically illegal.
Date posted: 2014-05-01
Why did American officials refuse to prosecute Japanese doctors who had committed horrendous crimes in World War II?
Date posted: 2014-04-18
The Japanese woman at the centre of the latest stem cell scandal, Haruko Obokata, apologised tearfully for her "carelessness, ignorance and immaturity" at a press conference this week.
Date posted: 2014-04-18
An American businesswoman and an Ivy League scientist have teamed up to create a sophisticated service for reducing genetic diseases for lesbian couples and single women.
Date posted: 2014-04-18
Involuntary euthanasia is acceptable medical treatment, according to a recent official statement by the Belgian Society of Intensive Care Medicine. Although voluntary euthanasia is legal is Belgium under some circumstances, involuntary euthanasia is basically illegal. But the Society wants to be able to euthanase patients who do not appear to have long to live.
Date posted: 2014-04-18
Once again, a major advance in stem cell science has been tainted by allegations of fraud. A leading research centre in Japan, the RIKEN Institute, has apologised for "research misconduct" by a young scientist who had found an astonishing new method for producing pluripotent stem cells.
Date posted: 2014-04-18
Britain's first same-sex marriages will take place this coming weekend. In May Sir Elton John and his partner David Furnish plan to exchange vows, making them spouses as well as parents to their two sons, Zachary and Elijah. Jubilant campaigners say that fears of an impending social calamity are nonsense.
Date posted: 2014-04-17
Should whole-genome sequencing be used in public-health programs which screen newborns for rare conditions? That question is likely to stir debate in coming years in many of the 60+ countries that provide newborn screening, as whole-genome sequencing (WGS) becomes increasingly affordable and reliable.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
After a couple of years in hibernation, the notion of "therapeutic cloning" is once again in the headlines. The latest development comes from Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a Russian-educated researcher at Oregon Health and Science University.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
Donor conception is often shrouded in secrecy. At age 7, only about half of children know that they were conceived with donor eggs; the figure for donor sperm is only about one-quarter. Legislation forcing IVF clinics to give access to the identity of the donors is spreading.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
The world's leading science journal, Nature, may end up with egg on its face as complaints mount about a recent paper on a radical new method of creating pluripotent stem cells.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
Moves to legalise assisted suicide in Britain are a threat to the disabled during a time of economic hardship, says Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, a disabled peer.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
A US federal court recently declined to stop force-feeding of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to issue a preliminary injunction.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
An extensive survey of assisted suicide in Switzerland between 2003 and 2008 has found that the most vulnerable people are women, people who live alone or people who are divorced. People who ask for assisted suicide tend to be wealthier and better educated.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
The controversy over three-parent embryos could soon be old hat. Writing in one of the world's leading journals, one of Britain's best-known bioethicists has outlined a strategy for creating children with four or more genetic parents. He calls it "multiplex parenting".
Date posted: 2014-04-13
Too much is at stake to surrender in the fight against same-sex marriage.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
Barcoding embryos another version of the number tattooed on the forearm of the Polish shopkeeper. Embryos, children actually, are to be branded like cattle and assigned numbers instead of names. Loving parents give a gestating child a name, not a barcode. Despite all the promotional photos of glowing mums and gurgling babies, IVF is becoming a lot less like love and a lot more like manufacturing.
Date posted: 2014-04-13
After 11 years of participation in euthanasia, an official complaint has finally been lodged with the Belgian Medical Association against the leading practitioner in Belgium, Dr Wim Distelmans. In a three-page letter Tom Mortier and Dr Georges Casteur allege that Distelmans did not have the expertise to evaluate whether Mortier's mother, Godelieve De Troyer, was ready for voluntary euthanasia.
Date posted: 2014-03-01
All of contemporary bioethics springs from the Nuremberg Doctors Trial in 1947. Seven Nazi doctors and officials were hanged and nine received severe prison sentences for performing experiments on an estimated 25,000 prisoners in concentration camps without their consent. Only about 1,200 died but many were maimed and psychologically scarred.
Date posted: 2014-03-01
A bill permitting euthanasia for children has passed the lower house of the Belgian Parliament by a vote of 86 to 44, with 12 abstentions. The parties gave their members a free vote on the controversial issue.
Date posted: 2014-03-01
On February 25 and 26 the US Food and Drug Administration will discuss the possibility of legalising three-parent embryos - or, in scientific lingo, "oocyte modification in assisted reproduction for the prevention of transmission of mitochondrial disease or treatment of infertility".
Date posted: 2014-03-01
After the high tide of enthusiasm comes the ebb tide of scepticism. The new STAP cells discovered by a team of researchers from Japan and Boston are being questioned by stem cell scientists.
Date posted: 2014-03-01
Why is the UN criticising the Catholic Church? It can't control its own soldiers.
Date posted: 2014-02-25
With advances in stem cell technology constantly advancing, the dream of artificial (or synthetic) gametes comes ever closer. Last September Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, hosted a conference on "Artificial Gametes: Science and Ethics" (no papers available at the moment).
Date posted: 2014-02-25
Two recent controversies over "brain-dead" patients have obviously flustered some medical ethicists. Writing in a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, David C. Magnus, Benjamin S. Wilfond, and Art Caplan insist that the definition of death as brain death must be maintained.
Date posted: 2014-02-25
Iran has become the fertility capital of the Muslim Middle East, reports the magazine Foreign Policy.
Date posted: 2014-02-25
Hard questions need to be asked about the steep rise in IVF around the world, says the Evidence Based IVF Group.
Date posted: 2014-02-25
Assertions that euthanasia in Belgium is safe and voluntary have been undermined by a recently-published study in the Journal of Medical Ethics. A survey of end-of-life decisions made by Flemish doctors in 2007 has found that in nearly 80% of cases of terminal sedation, there was no explicit request from the patient. Terminal sedation, or relieving the distress of dying patients by heavily sedating them, accounts for nearly 10% of all deaths in Flanders.
Date posted: 2014-02-25
Texas woman Marlise Muñoz was disconnected from life support last Sunday. All cardiac function ceased within a few minutes. Her body was released to her family, ending a nation-wide debate over reproductive rights, brain death, and advance directives.
Date posted: 2014-02-25
This year marks the tenth anniversary of what may have been the most spectacular scientific fraud of the last 100 years: Hwang Woo-suk's claim that he had cloned human embryos. It made him a scientific celebrity everywhere, but especially in South Korea. The fraudulent data and ethical lapses, however, soon emerged and his career seemed over, his name a byword for scientific infamy.
Date posted: 2014-02-25
Immersing cells in acid creates pluripotent stem cells? Who could believe that? But it could be the future.
Date posted: 2014-02-23
It would be hard to find a national leader whose leftist credentials have been more brightly burnished than Rafael Correa, Ecuador's president since 2007. He allied himself with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, threatened to renege on the national debt, bashed American oil companies, gave Wikileaks leader Julian Assange asylum in Ecuador's embassy in London, expelled an American ambassador, and denounced the pro-privatization, free-market "Washington Consensus".
Date posted: 2014-01-14
Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, of the University of California Berkeley, has been honored by the American Anthropological Association with its first ever Anthropology in Public Policy Award for her trailblazing work on the dark practice of human organ trafficking.
Date posted: 2013-12-22
A genetic test for breast cancer shows that a patient is not at risk. But the results also reveal that there is an elevated risk of heart disease. What do the researchers owe the participant?
Date posted: 2013-12-22
Is Utah's ban on polygamy unconstitutional? Last week a Federal Court judge ruled that it is, after Kody Brown and his four wives, the stars of the reality TV series Sister Wives, challenged it.
Date posted: 2013-12-19
One of the recipients of this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine has used it as a platform for a blistering attack on the whole system of publishing research in science and medicine.
Date posted: 2013-12-19
There were tears of indignation outside of Australia's High Court yesterday, but it was the result that everyone expected: a law passed on December 3 authorising same-sex marriage in the Australian Capital Territory was unconstitutional. The marriages of the 30 or so gay and lesbian couples who had exchanged vows under the law have now been annulled.
Date posted: 2013-12-17
The outcome was expected, but observers overseas were astonished at the margin of victory. By a vote of 50 to 17 yesterday, the Belgian Senate approved euthanasia for children. When the bill finally passes - which now seems quite certain - there will be no age limit for choosing to die at the hands of Belgian doctor. The next step is a vote in the lower house, which will probably take place in May.
Date posted: 2013-12-17
A euthanasia clinic has been set up by Australia's leading euthanasia activist, Dr Philip Nitschke, in Adelaide. Police are keeping a close watch on activities there, but Dr Nitschke, who is used to working at the very edge of the law, is said to be doing nothing clearly illegal.
Date posted: 2013-12-15
The search for UK volunteers willing to ditch privacy and donate their genome and health data to science has begun with the launch of the Personal Genome Project UK. The organisers hope to find 100,000 donors.
Date posted: 2013-12-15
Saudi couples who are unable to have children are employing surrogate mothers in Asia and Europe even though surrogacy has been condemned by the country's Islamic Jurisprudence Council.
Date posted: 2013-12-15
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Helsinki, the benchmark for ethical medical research on subjects.
Date posted: 2013-12-15
Pope Francis's game plan is a stunning and inspiring document.
Date posted: 2013-12-11
Reporters for the journal Science have documented a thriving Chinese black market in articles and authorship in reputable scientific journals. "People are sparing no expense in order to get published," says the former vice-president of Peking University Third Hospital.
Date posted: 2013-12-11
There is still life in most famous bioethics article of all time, "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?" This was 2012 article in the February issue of Journal of Medical Ethics by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, two Italian bioethicists working in Australia.
Date posted: 2013-12-11
A bill to legalise euthanasia in Belgium for children and for patients with dementia passed its first legislative hurdle this week. A Senate committee voted 13-4 to approve a first draft.
Date posted: 2013-12-11
The hot water into which 23andme has landed is just one of many simmering controversies about genetic testing.
Date posted: 2013-12-11
The author of Brave New World warns us that drugs and recreational sex are dehumanising.
Date posted: 2013-12-03
Lebanon: a country where there are sick people with money, healthy Syrian refugees without money, skilled doctors, and no effective government regulation.
Date posted: 2013-12-03
Concern about the steady expansion of the boundaries of euthanasia in Belgium is growing.
Date posted: 2013-12-03
The monolithic concept of autonomy may be fissuring, judging from recent articles in the bioethics journals. In debates over key issues at the beginning and end of life, autonomy has been an important criterion, often the only one, for settling problems. But as academics bat the ball back and forth, it seems that it is beginning to fray.
Date posted: 2013-12-03
Some American politicians have discovered how to reconcile punishment and compassion: allow prisoners on death row to donate their organs.
Date posted: 2013-12-03
Despite complaints from experts, more and more IVF clinics are using intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).
Date posted: 2013-12-03
Escaping from relationships is one of the issues that four authors, all from Oxford, including Julian Savulescu, discuss in a lead article in the American Journal of Bioethics.
Date posted: 2013-12-03
Mandatory reporting over issues like death or injury due to defective manufactured goods or over suspected child abuse is common nowadays. How about doctor error? This is one of the leading causes of death in the US -- but doctors are very reluctant to blow the whistle on their colleagues.
Date posted: 2013-12-03
The respectability of marriage would be a disaster for gays and lesbians, argues a leading academic.
Date posted: 2013-11-25
Nearly 300,000 people who participated in clinical trials have been exposed to harm without any personal or social benefit, according to research published in the BMJ.
Date posted: 2013-11-09
A tribunal to provide sympathetic and speedy consideration for terminally-ill patients who wish to end their lives has been proposed by a British legal expert.
Date posted: 2013-11-09
A heated debate on proposals to legalise euthanasia for minors in Belgium intensified this week. The governing Socialist party has proposed the bill while the Christian Democratic Flemish party has declared that it will challenge it in the European Court of Human Rights, if it were to become law.
Date posted: 2013-11-09
More revelations about the medical profession under the Nazis in this week's Slate. A riveting article by Emily Bazelon demonstrates that medicine still has not acknowledged that some areas of anatomy still carry the taint of Nazi atrocities.
Date posted: 2013-11-09
How can we ensure that doctors resist pressure to participate in unethical activities?
Date posted: 2013-11-09
An independent report has highlighted ongoing violations of medical ethics at Guantanamo Bay and called on the Department of Defense (DoD) and the medical community to conform to ethical principles.
Date posted: 2013-11-09
Is it possible to "cure" Down syndrome? Jeanne Lawrence, of the University Massachusetts Medical School, believes that it could happen some day.
Date posted: 2013-11-03
The Indian surrogacy industry keeps tweaking its product line to keep up with the market. The latest trend to emerge in the media is twiblings - children born at the same time to two surrogate mothers.
Date posted: 2013-11-03
Like human dignity, autonomy is a word more honoured than analysed, even though it is the cornerstone of most contemporary bioethics approaches.
Date posted: 2013-11-03
Bioethics is like ice cream: there are many different flavours on a common base. There is utilitarian bioethics, deontological bioethics, natural law bioethics, principalist bioethics, Islamic bioethics, and so on. What they have in common is that some things are moral and others are immoral.
Date posted: 2013-10-20
Forty-six years after it was legalized in the UK, the legal status of abortion is still in a muddle. The Director of Public Prosecutions decided earlier this month not to prosecute two doctors who had agreed to do sex-selective abortions.
Date posted: 2013-10-20
Obesity, one of the great health issues of our time, is provoking some controversial treatments by doctors. Here are two recent issues which ought to ring bioethical alarm bells.
Date posted: 2013-10-20
Here's a familiar script: medical researchers in the 1950s in a democratic country conduct forgotten experiments which yield no useful data on a vulnerable population.
Date posted: 2013-10-20
This op-ed appeared in today's issue of The Mercury, the main newspaper in Hobart, Tasmania, where members of Parliament are gearing up for a debate on euthanasia. It was a companion piece to an article in favour of legalisation by Emeritus Professor Colin Wendell-Smith, convenor of Doctors for Dying with Dignity and co-convenor of Doctors for Voluntary Euthanasia.
Date posted: 2013-10-20
A general practitioner in the Australian state of Victoria is under investigation for refusing to get involved in a sex-selective abortion.
Date posted: 2013-10-20
Opponents of the UK's plans to legalise "three-parent embryos" have not given up. A group of 34 European politicians from the Council of Europe, including eight British MPs and peers, have signed a declaration denouncing the idea as "eugenic".
Date posted: 2013-10-20
A controversy is raging over a patent awarded to the American company 23andMe for predictive genetics software. By using its Family Traits Inheritor Calculator, clients will be able to estimate the probability of having a child with certain genetic traits.
Date posted: 2013-10-20
American scientists contend that the way to make people more moral is to get them to think about science.
Date posted: 2013-10-03
One of Britain's leading neuroscientists, John Hardy, of University College London, has used the magazine New Scientist to call for a ban on boxing. He says that he does not want to be a killjoy, but the wretched lives of punchdrunk boxers are sufficient argument to end a sport which consists in targeting the brain.
Date posted: 2013-09-21
The public should treat scientists with a bit less reverence, says a senior editor of Nature in a controversial column in The Guardian. Henry Gee writes that scientists acquired an undeserved aura of absolute authority in the 20th century.
Date posted: 2013-09-21
Thanks to frozen sperm and frozen embryos, it is possible for a man to have offspring after death, even many years after his death. This is leading to complex legal issues for rich and poor alike, according to an article in the New York Times.
Date posted: 2013-09-21
Even pro-choice supporters in England have expressed their exasperation at a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to bring to trial doctors who agreed to do illegal sex-selective abortions. The CPS says that it would not be "in the public interest" as the doctors are still be investigated by the General Medical Council.
Date posted: 2013-09-21
Should a mentally incompetent person be allowed to donate organs? Surprisingly, according to an article in the European Journal of Health Law, national laws give very different answers to this question.
Date posted: 2013-09-21
Louise Casey, the head of the British government's troubled families programme, says that some mothers of large, expensive and troubled children should be forcefully counselled about using contraception.
Date posted: 2013-09-21
Eugenics is alive and well in British academia. Stephen Wilkinson, of Lancaster University, recently published a long discussion paper, "Eugenics and the Ethics of Selective Reproduction", together with another bioethicist, Eve Garrard.
Date posted: 2013-09-21
The rainbow flag sank like a stone in last weekend's election. But there's no room for complacency.
Date posted: 2013-09-15
The heart of a 37-year-old diesel mechanic stopped beating for 45 minutes - so long that doctors thought he was dead.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
The Chinese government and the Chinese Medical Association have called for life-bans for doctors convicted of unethical behaviour.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
With legal surrogate mothers in short supply, gay and single men in the US are paying as much as US$175,000 for the privilege of raising their own child.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
Opponents of euthanasia in Belgium are highlighting the state of disability services there.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
With more than 5 million IVF babies born since 1978, most people think that infertility is easily fixed.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) officially endorsed same-sex marriage this week. Although it touched upon the human rights dimension of the debate, its main argument is that legalizing gay marriage would help women's health.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
Even the most seasoned campaigners for euthanasia and assisted suicide are wary of Australia's best-known advocate, Dr Philip Nitschke.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
Canadian neuroscientists have detected conscious activity in a patient who has been in a "vegetative state" for 12 years using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Date posted: 2013-09-08
A new report from the Dartmouth Atlas Project finds that although the use of hospice care for Medicare patients with advanced cancer is increasing, many patients do not receive it until they are literally on their deathbed, within three days of the end of life.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
Manipulating memories has been a popular theme in science fiction films like Inception or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is based on more than a shred of truth.
Date posted: 2013-09-08
Is Britain going Dutch in assisted reproduction? The peculiar attitude of the Dutch towards statutes has allowed practices (like euthanasia) which are clearly illegal in black-letter law to be carried out and even regulated in a kind of shadow legal system.
Date posted: 2013-08-27
Indian health officials are gravely concerned about illegal sex-selective abortions in the country's surrogacy industry. According to officials in charge of monitoring sex-selection which was banned in 1994, hospital records show a remarkable discrepancy between the delivery of girls and boys in surrogacy cases.
Date posted: 2013-08-27
Now that gay marriage has become legal in France, there may be commercial opportunities for les nourrices. A 29-year-old nurse has posted an advertisement on a French version of Craigslist, offering to rent out her breasts to gay couples for 100 Euros a day, guaranteeing at least 10 feeds for a baby.
Date posted: 2013-08-27
Yesterday evening's discussion of same-sex marriage on SBS Insight was both great fun and a frightening omen. Insight is a bit like cage fighting for intellectuals. Representatives of opposing views say their piece and are booed or clapped by a carefully vetted audience.
Date posted: 2013-08-27
The reasoning is the same; the rewards are the same. Why not?
Date posted: 2013-08-15
With euthanasia and assisted suicide on the legislative agenda in a number of jurisdictions around the world, there is a blizzard of reports for and against. A British group called Living and Dying Well, composed mostly of members of the House of Lords, and chaired by a barrister and a palliative care expert, has produced a stern rebuttal of claims that assisted suicide is safe.
Date posted: 2013-08-15
The fight over conscientious objection to abortion has moved from the evening news to the academic journals. In the April issue of the American Journal of Public Health, two defenders of reproductive rights outline strategies to restrict abortion rights. They complain that "unregulated conscientious objection" seems to be growing, especially in countries where opposition to abortion is strong.
Date posted: 2013-08-15
After Rio, it's clear that Christianity is not about to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
British physiologist Robert Edwards, who died earlier this year, received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in developing IVF. His colleague, gynaeologist Patrick Steptoe, would no doubt have shared it, but he had passed away in 1988.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
Utilitarian notions of reproductive autonomy may not be as simple to apply as they seem. For several years Oxford's Julian Savulescu has been preaching the principle of procreative beneficence.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
By now you must be used to the idea of the US National Security Agency siphoning up your Facebook account, your email account, your Skype calls, your phone records, your chats, and your browsing history. What's left for them to trawl through? How about your genome?
Date posted: 2013-08-01
Chinese scientists have created induced pluripotent (iPS) cells by adding chemicals but not extra genes that might cause mutations or cancer.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
It could be a novel or a movie, but it's real life: when her own husband suddenly becomes a quadriplegic, a bioethicist famous for her advocacy of legalised voluntary euthanasia keeps him alive even though he wants to die.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
A chromosome therapy for Down syndrome may be possible, according to ground-breaking research published in Nature.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
Sterilization of intellectually disabled people should be banned unless they can consent, an Australian Senate Committee has recommended (see report). And taking children overseas to be sterilized should be made a criminal offense.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
A major study in the UK has found that the risk of birth defects doubles from 3% to 6% if the spouses are first cousins.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
Ireland was treated to a rare spectacle this week: a politician who opposed a prime minister on a matter of conscience, lost a ministry, was expelled from her party, and parted without rancour.
Date posted: 2013-08-01
The Belgian parliament is currently debating whether or not to give children the right to euthanasia. But several other issues have surfaced as well, amongst them a complaint about how much euthanasia doctors are paid. It's far too little, says Belgium's leading euthanasia doctor, Wim Distelmans.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
Dr Sarah Van Laer, who has euthanased 28 patients since legalisation in 2002, has complained bitterly to the Belgian newspaper De Standaard about the burdens of her work.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
Another case of a loving couple choosing euthanasia so that they would not be separated has emerged in Belgium.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
Advance directives give peace of mind to patients and their loved ones because they can be sure that their health care wishes will be followed even if they are not able to communicate.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
French President François Hollande wants a national debate on euthanasia so that parliament can vote on it before the end of the year.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
There is a wider issue at stake here, which is that the story reveals information about the genetic make-up of someone who has not consented to any DNA tests.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
The UK government has decided that it will allow the creation of three-parent embryos to prevent the births of children with mitochondrial diseases.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
"Signs of adjustment problems could be behaviour problems, such as aggressive or antisocial behaviour, or emotional problems, such as anxiety or depression," Dr Golombok told NBC Today.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
At least 83 people died last year in Washington state after taking a dose of lethal but legally-prescribed drugs, according to the state's fourth annual Death with Dignity Act report.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
The Quebec government has tabled euthanasia legislation after nearly five years of debate. If approved by the province's assembly, it will be the most radical end-of-life law in North America.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University is launching an open-source journal dealing with the application of philosophy to public policy.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
Scores of doctors have signed an open letter in The Lancet to President Obama asking him to heed a letter written by 13 hunger-striking Guantanamo detainees to their doctors.
Date posted: 2013-07-13
Sterilization of poor Indian women is still a major tool used by state governments to slow population growth. India carries out 37% of the world's female sterilizations - 4.6 million of them last year.
Date posted: 2013-06-22
A convicted Israeli paedophile adopted a 4-year-old girl from a surrogate mother in India, the Jewish Chronicle has reported.
Date posted: 2013-06-22
This week the Administration abandoned the fight. The morning-after contraceptive pill will now be sold as freely as headache tablets.
Date posted: 2013-06-22
Distress felt by parents of a dying newborn can justify the child's euthanasia, says Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG), which represents doctors in the Netherlands.
Date posted: 2013-06-22
After more than a decade of research on embryonic stem cells, scientists are quietly moving on to greener pastures.
Date posted: 2013-06-21
There was a consensus that gays did not want to be married, as gays do not aspire after bourgeois respectability.
Date posted: 2013-06-21
When is the Australian Army going to learn about the birds and the bees?
Date posted: 2013-06-21
In a stunning development, Dutch doctors say that the anguish of parents is another reason to euthanase disabled babies.
Date posted: 2013-06-21
The ethics of using killer robots is adding a new subspeciality to bioethics. This week the United Nations Human Rights Council debated the use of lethal autonomous robots in Geneva. UN special rapporteur Christof Heyns, a South African legal expert, called for a moratorium while legal and ethical issues are knotted out.
Date posted: 2013-06-21
Politicians in the Netherlands are pushing the organisation which represents Dutch doctors to overcome its misgivings over euthanasia for patients with dementia.
Date posted: 2013-06-21
What is the position of the law on assisted suicide in Switzerland? Journalists often make the mistake of asserting that euthanasia is allowed there. This is not true: only assisted suicide - but this has been legal, astonishingly, since the 1930s.
Date posted: 2013-06-21
To describe Switzerland as a Mecca for suicide tourism is hyperbole, but suicide facilities would draw as many people as yodelling and cowbells.
Date posted: 2013-06-21
It is hard to imagine a more inhumane policy than China's one-child policy. But there is one: the two-child policy imposed on Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims.
Date posted: 2013-06-21
This 25-minute documentary by Al-Jazeera presents a balanced view of the campaign for euthanasia in Australia.
Date posted: 2013-05-26
Last week we reported that researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University had finally cloned human embryos and successfully extracted embryonic stem cells. Unfortunately, the most recent paper has also been criticised for image duplication, evoking the nightmarish Hwang scandal.
Date posted: 2013-05-26
Following the highly publicised pre-emptive double mastectomy of Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie, it has emerged that a 53-year-old British man has become the first in the world to have a pre-emptive removal of his prostate.
Date posted: 2013-05-26
A Montana man brain cancer diagnosis shows how difficult it is to determine whether or not a person has a "terminal illness".
Date posted: 2013-05-26
Negative attitudes towards Alzheimer's disease are undue influence on the euthanasia debate, claims an Australian bioethicist.
Date posted: 2013-05-26
The Australian winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine is leveraging her discovery to market a test which will help people know their true health status and biological age.
Date posted: 2013-05-26
Angelina Jolie's decision to have a double mastectomy made headlines around the world. But is she sending women the right message?
Date posted: 2013-05-26
Is bioethics compatible with democracy? This is not a question that surfaces very often in policy debates featuring prestigious bioethicists.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
Controversy continues to rage over whether or not to establish a market in organs to shorten steadily growing waiting lists. One objection is that applying a market model will result in exploitation and moral corruption..
Date posted: 2013-05-19
Euthanasia claimed its most famous victim last Saturday. At the age of 95, Belgian Nobel laureate Christian de Duve was killed with a lethal injection. He died in his home, surrounded by his four children.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
India and China are not the only countries with lop-sided sex ratios due to sex-selective abortions. Georgia, a former member of the USSR in the Caucasus with a population of about 4.5 million, has a distorted sex ratio at birth of 114 boys to 100 girls. One-third of the 36,000 abortion performed last year in Georgia were for sex selection. The natural ratio is about 105 to 100.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
Of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, about 100 are on a hunger strike. About 20 are being force-fed, according to the New York Times. About 40 medical staff have arrived to ensure that the detainees are fed.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
Why is the media frothing over criticism of a long-dead homosexual economist?
Date posted: 2013-05-19
The euthanasia of Nobel laureate Christian de Duve in Belgium is a worrying precedent for the world's baby boomers.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
This is not the way the era of assisted reproduction was supposed to work. An unnamed woman in the UK has been jailed for five years after artificially inseminating her 14-year-old adopted daughter in order to get another child.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Five people have been convicted of organ trafficking in Kosovo by the European Union court which runs the legal system in the quasi-independent territory. The controversial case ended with a jail term of 8 years for a prominent urologist in Pristina, Lutfi Dervishi, for "organised crime and human trafficking".
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Some bioethicists who feel at home in the utilitarian common room of the Journal of Medical Ethics described the imbroglio as an attack on academic freedom. Udo Scheklenk, of Queen's University, in Ontario, who is also the editor of Bioethics, a distinguished international journal, complained bitterly that "bioethics journals are under increasing and sustained fire from political activists" of all stripes, from "the left, feminists, disability activists [to] religious conservatives".
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva's article in the UK-based Journal of Medical Ethics was "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?" It wasn't a very original argument for the morality of infanticide - Peter Singer and Michael Tooley had made the same point decades ago - but the arresting title tossed even more petrol on the blaze. The authors contended that the same reasons which justify abortion are also sufficient to justify killing a child up for an unspecified time after birth.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Scientific studies are used to support controversial social policies like same-sex marriage. But can we rely on them?
Date posted: 2013-05-05
A new Australian think tank has issued a call for the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Utah has become the first state to allow prisoners, even prisoners on death row, to donate organs.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
A feature story in the new online magazine Matter gives an exclusive account of how an American man found a surgeon in Asia who was willing to amputate his healthy leg.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Deregistration, heavy fines and jail terms threaten those who voice their opposition to abortion.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Two IVF stories from opposite ends of the globe are a sobering reminder that "foetal reduction" remains a failsafe position in clinical practice.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Why can't embryos be bought and sold like any other commodity? Making this surprising proposal is less surprising than where it was made - in the America's leading medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
"It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this project: if it succeeds, I will have shown that the prevailing justifications offered for the regulation of reproduction, and most of the regulations they seek to justify, are either intellectually bankrupt or carry with them disturbing and problematic implications such that they are better off discarded... much of the existing law in this area cannot be justified."
Date posted: 2013-05-05
The first drug to help people with Down syndrome overcome cognitive deficits is being tested on humans, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has announced.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
In any case, Dr Verhagen points out, the official opinion of the American Academy of Pediatrics is that it is morally permissible to withdraw or withhold hydration and nutrition from newborns in some cases.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Turkish doctors have announced that the first woman ever to receive a uterus from a deceased donor is two weeks pregnant with an IVF baby.
Date posted: 2013-05-04
Robert Edwards, the inventor of IVF, died two days after Margaret Thatcher. History may show that his impact was even greater than hers
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Another controversial review of the mental health risks of abortion has been published, this time in the peer-reviewed Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
The leading cancer centre in Washington state has published in the New England Journal of Medicine a blueprint of how to implement a dying-with-dignity program, now that assisted suicide has been legalised.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Scientists at a number of top American universities failed to inform parents of the grave risks of enrolling in a clinical trial on blindness in premature babies, says the federal agency overseeing the welfare of people in research projects.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
"It is an issue that is more serious now in some ways because of the commercialisation of reproductive medicine, increasingly so with climate change, global warming, water shortages, food shortages, conflict and burgeoning technology that is not always well controlled by governments. It may well be an area that will rear its ugly head again. We should be on our guard against it."
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Research confirms all the cliches about "little emperors", the children of parents who were forced to stop at one.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
A Brazilian doctor is being investigated for the murders of more than 300 intensive care patients. Dr Virginia Soares de Souza, 56, and seven members of her medical team allegedly administered a muscle-relaxant drug which impaired patients' ability to breathe and then reduced their oxygen supply, causing them to die of asphyxiation.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
The UK is moving closer to three-parent children after the fertility regulator informed the government that the public would back a controversial embryo treatment.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Until now women who wanted to preserve their eggs until the alarm rings on their reproductive clock had to freeze their eggs and store them at an IVF clinic.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Even by the rigorous standards of Saudi Arabian justice, the sentence meted out to Ali al-Khawahir is gruesome.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Taking a peek into the future, an Australian bioethicist says that it will be possible to use stem cell technology to breed better humans in a Petri dish. Robert Sparrow, of Monash University, writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics that it is not too early to launch a debate about what he calls "in vitro eugenics".
Date posted: 2013-04-20
But what about "African exceptionalism"? Two experts, John Bongaarts and John Casterline, examine this intriguing notion in the latest issue of the world's leading demography journal, the Population and Development Review.
Date posted: 2013-04-18
Who are the gatekeepers in bioethics? Does editorial bias or institutional racism exist in leading bioethics journals?
Date posted: 2013-03-31
A retired Scottish doctor has admitted in a newspaper interview that he supplied three patients with lethal medication so that they could end their lives.
Date posted: 2013-03-31
The leading opponent of defining death as the death of the brain is D. Alan Shewmon, a professor of paediatric neurology at UCLA Medical Center.
Date posted: 2013-03-31
Walter Glennon, of the University of Calgary, breathes new life into the Epicurean argument that death does not matter: "where death is, I am not; and where I am, death is not. So death is not to be feared, since it is nothing."
Date posted: 2013-03-31
What about the children? A woman who conceives at 50 could die when her child is a teenager. This, the ethics committee acknowledges, is "one of the most stressful life events for children or adolescents". The statement leaves the question unanswered. It simply says that this is a problem which parents will have to deal with.
Date posted: 2013-03-31
Judging from his 2011 book Sobre Cielo y Tierra (On heaven and earth), a series of conversations on contemporary issues with an Argentinian rabbi, Pope Francis's stand on bioethical issues is fully in sync with his predecessors.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
Will a Pope from Argentina be able to brake the increasing secularisation of life in the West?
Date posted: 2013-03-21
The UK wants to ban prisoners from accessing government-funded fertility treatment while they are behind bars.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
A new United Nations report frames number of bioethical questions as issues of torture, giving a new twist to a number of controversial issues.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
The Tasmanian bill goes even further, however, possibly making it one of the most radical bills in the world. Even volunteer pregnancy counsellors will be required to refer clients for abortions or be penalised with a heavy fine.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
Disheartened Catholics mustn't waste a good crisis after the disgrace of Cardinal Keith O'Brien.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
One of the most easily grasped ethical obligations of a doctor is not to incite people to mass murder.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
Whether you call it polygamy, or polyamory, or consensual nonmonogamy, multiple partners in a single relationship is just over the horizon.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
Public outrage over a crass remark about disabled people has cost a councillor in Britain his job.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A closer study of ancestry claims shows that they are very easy to make.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
The debate over parental duties of sperm donors has flared up again - this time in response to an American man being sued for medical expenses of the child of his donated sperm.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
For decades the Indian government has been encouraging women to be voluntarily sterilized - and they have coopted state and local governments to help persuade the women.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A fascinating case is unfolding in Israel pitting a anonymous sperm donor against a woman who demands his sperm. The arguments are worthy of a novel - or at least an afternoon soap opera.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
Euthanasia is legal in Belgium under certain conditions, but not for minors, boys and girls under 18. Now the upper house of the Belgian parliament is studying whether to extend the privilege of euthanasia to them as well.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
"Cross amputation is a form of state-sponsored torture," said Dr Vincent Iacopino, senior medical advisor at Physicians for Human Rights.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
BBC World Service features a very interesting documentary on assisted dying.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
According to Green member of parliament Liesbeth van Tongeren, there are already between 20,000 and 25,000 children living in patchwork families.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A scathing report earlier this month on an English hospital run by the National Health Service recommended that NHS "gagging clauses" be banned if they are intended to limit discussion of patient care or safety.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
It is an exciting and ambitious project - but there are sceptics. Neuroscientist Christopher Chabris, of Union College, in upstate New York, pours cold water on the proposal in his blog. First, 10 years may not be long enough. The brain is so complex that a decade may be needed to map every neuron in the drosophila brain..
Date posted: 2013-03-05
Governments around the world should stop squandering resources fighting an "unwinnable war" against illegal drugs, such as cocaine and heroin. Instead, they should work on curbing antibiotic misuse, which poses a far more serious threat to human health.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A stinging report by a Belgian bioethics think tank last December warned that euthanasia there was being trivialised. "Initially legalized under very strict conditions, euthanasia has gradually become a very normal and even ordinary act," said the European Institute of Bioethics (IEB), in Brussels.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
After President Obama reversed his predecessor's stand on embryo research in 2009 shortly after his inauguration, the battles seemed over. The main ethical consideration was ensuring that the donors of embryos and gametes gave their informed consent to research.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A bombshell report shows that Christians are making a demographic comeback in Lebanon because of tumbling Muslim birth rates.
Date posted: 2013-03-02
About 100,000 children have been born in Germany through sperm donation.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
The decision was supported by a telephone survey of 605 French doctors which showed that 60% were in favour of active euthanasia.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, losing one minister because he plagiarised his PhD thesis is a misforture; losing two looks like carelessness.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
A conference in Singapore recently cast bioethics in a different light. Jim Sabin, a professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote on his blog that he was delighted to see the emergence of a family-centred bioethics at an event organised by The Ethics of Family in Health and Social Care Research Consortium.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
The complications of euthanasia keep bubbling away in Belgium.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Tasmanians are once again gearing up for a debate over euthanasia. Labor Premier Lara Giddings and her Greens Deputy Nick McKim released a report this week arguing that euthanasia and assisted suicide are compassionate responses for "patients who are dying in prolonged suffering".
Date posted: 2013-02-18
The politics of "personhood" has been a big issue in Colorado in recent years.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
After 3000 years of speculation, a German neurologist has finally located the source of evil. Well, at least Das Bild says he has.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
IVF has often been accused of being an immoral procedure, although in recent years ethical objections have been smothered by the jubilation of parents -- and shareholders in IVF clinics.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Tasmanians are once again gearing up for a debate over euthanasia. Labor Premier Lara Giddings and her Greens Deputy Nick McKim released a report yesterday arguing that euthanasia and assisted suicide are compassionate responses for "patients who are dying in prolonged suffering".
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Whether humanity is worth saving or what precautions we are prepared to take could be the biggest bioethics questions of all!
Date posted: 2013-02-18
It seems that De Grazia values moral behaviour more than moral freedom and that a safe, orderly, non-violent world would be worth the sacrifice.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Years of rumours that Ethiopian women were pressured into having contraceptive injections by Israeli officials have finally been confirmed.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Transsexuals have won a major victory in Sweden. A court has ruled unconstitutional a law which required them to be sterilized before they could be legally recognised as another gender.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Doctors should routinely screen women and teenagers for "reproductive coercion", says a committee of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In its official opinion paper, it paints a sombre picture of coercive and domineering men who force partners to have sex and become pregnant. "The most common forms of reproductive coercion," it says, "include sabotage of contraceptive methods, pregnancy coercion, and pregnancy pressure." Some male partners go so far as to forcefully remove intrauterine devices and vaginal rings, poke holes in condoms, or destroy birth control pills.
Date posted: 2013-02-17
Male scientists are far more likely to commit fraud than females, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have claimed. And there is no difference whether a scientist is beginning his career or has tenure.
Date posted: 2013-02-17
What's the truth? Well, in point of fact, Professor Church really wants to see a cloned Neanderthal, a process which requires an "extremely adventurous female human". It's just that the obstacle is societal opposition to cloning.
Date posted: 2013-02-17
Two weeks before Christmas, a doctor euthanased them at Brussels University Hospital. It was a perfectly legal procedure. All the boxes had been ticked and all the documents signed. The two men were deaf and slowly going blind as well. They had nothing to live for. They qualified.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Quebec is slowly moving towards legal, or quasi-legal, euthanasia. A committee of legal experts has delivered a 400-page report to the provincial government which argues that it should allow "medical assistance to die" when a patient is close to death is suffering from unbearable physical or psychological pain.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
The German Medical Association has investigated nearly 1,000 cases of corrupt doctors over the past few years, according to its president, Frank Ulrich Montgomery.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Professor Chris Gastmans, of the Catholic University of Leuven, criticised the deaths as an impoverished response to disability. "Is this the only humane response that we can offer in such situations? I feel uncomfortable here as ethicist. Today it seems that euthanasia is the only right way to end life. And I think that's not a good thing. In a society as wealthy as ours, we must find another, caring way to deal with human frailty."
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Loose regulations and corrupt officials make it easy for surrogacy to turn into baby-trafficking.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Is India finally cracking down on surrogacy for foreigners?
Date posted: 2013-01-26
This brief but touching video speaks for itself. Felicia Hogan, from British Columbia, discovered that the twins she was expecting were conjoined.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Why are so many rampage killers the sons of divorce?
Date posted: 2012-12-30
The credibility of the field of social psychology is at risk, a Dutch panel has found after reviewing massive misconduct by a researcher who published dozens of articles based on fraudulent data in 15 years at three universities.
Date posted: 2012-12-30
What will the new eugenics look like? In the last century, the fashion was to eliminate "degenerates" through sterilization or murder. In the 21st century, eugenicists may call for physical and intellectual genetic enhancement. Those who cannot afford it will drop behind, doomed to become mere drones.
Date posted: 2012-12-30
Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has hopped onto the anti-ageing bandwagon.
Date posted: 2012-12-30
Australia should legalize commercial surrogacy to stop the exploitation of women overseas and to ensure that agreements are properly regulated to protect children, surrogates and commissioning parents, says the Chief Federal Court Magistrate John Pascoe.
Date posted: 2012-12-30
Why isn't the media interested in the facts about the controversial practice of female genital mutilation?
Date posted: 2012-12-30
The central theme of the report is the ineffectiveness and bias of the body established by the legislation to allay the misgivings of the public by monitoring and controlling euthanasia.
Date posted: 2012-12-30
One blot on the happy picture sketched in this study is that only 35% of the couples interviewed had told the child about the use of donor sperm.
Date posted: 2012-12-30
At the same time as IVF experts in the UK issue dire warning to women that their fertility drops rapidly with age, they are also touting the possibility freezing their eggs as an insurance policy
Date posted: 2012-12-30
Ahead of a debate in the Bundestag next week, Hans-Michael Goldmann, chairman of the parliamentary agricultural committee, has declared that animals should not be used ";for personal sexual activities or made available to third parties for sexual activities" thereby forcing them to behave in ways that are inappropriate to their species
Date posted: 2012-12-30
The report fails to deal with the problem of doctors who do not report euthanasia. In an article in The Lancet, an American physician, Dr Bernard Lo pointed out earlier this year that about 20% of the doctors who administered euthanasia did not report it. Were these deaths voluntary or non-voluntary? No one knows, because they were not reported.
Date posted: 2012-12-30
The theme of this year's conference was "Writing the Future". Its focus was communicating transhumanist ideas -- advances in robotics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, human enhancement, brain-computer integration, regenerative medicine, and radical life extension - so that the public is prepared for the future.
Date posted: 2012-12-30
At the heart of this gigantic report are unanswered questions about the nature of privacy.
Date posted: 2012-12-29
Eugenics, discredited nowadays, was public policy less than a hundred years ago. The disabled, the retarded, or the racially impure should not be allowed to breed.
Date posted: 2012-11-24
Ireland's restrictive abortion laws are under attack after a 31-year-old pregnant woman died of septicaemia after pleading vainly with doctors to abort the child. Savita Halappanavar, an Indian dentist working in Galway, has become a martyr for abortion reform.
Date posted: 2012-11-24
China will begin phase out organ donation from executed criminals next years, as it moves towards a voluntary system, says a government expert.
Date posted: 2012-11-24
Surrogacy may be the "new normal" on American television -- glamorous, funny and quirky.
Date posted: 2012-11-24
Another chapter in the Wild West of reproductive technology ended abruptly on Thursday. A brain-damaged 19-year-old man, Rufus McGill II, died in Roanoke, Virginia, after his life-support system was removed at the request of his parents
Date posted: 2012-11-23
Blood samples left over from newborn screening tests are a genetic treasure trove which should be available to researchers, argue bioethicists in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Date posted: 2012-11-15
More and more single women in Australia are turning to IVF, clinics claim. Over the past three years, the numbers have risen by 10%, mostly older heterosexual women.
Date posted: 2012-11-15
British woman Carole Horlock, 49, plans to retire from a long and prolific career as a surrogate mother. After bearing 13 children for other people from 9 pregnancies, she holds the world record for surrogacies. But her current pregnancy is going to be her last.
Date posted: 2012-11-15
The UK's High Court is to hold a full judicial review of do-not-resuscitate orders in February. It is currently investigating stinging allegations that doctors in the National Health Service let patients die without seeking consent from them or their carers.
Date posted: 2012-11-15
A Colorado family is mourning this week the death of a son who was born without a brain. Although anencephaly - a condition in which babies are born with only a brain stem - affects 1 in 10,000 births, most live only a few hours or days. Nickolas Coke lived three years before succumbing to pneumonia.
Date posted: 2012-11-11
Dr Ezekiel J. Emanuel was one of the most reviled figures of the Obama Administration during the debate over its health care bill. He was even called a "Deadly Doctor" who wanted to ration health care. Last year he left the Administration and returned to academia, but no doubt some foes of Obama still regard him as a fan of euthanasia.
Date posted: 2012-11-11
The World Medical Association has strengthened its opposition to capital punishment with a resolution at its recent conference in Bangkok that "physicians will not facilitate the importation or prescription of drugs for execution."
Date posted: 2012-11-11
A girl conceived with donated eggs and sperm for an elderly Italian couple will be put up for adoption after a court found that they were too narcissistic and negligent to care for her properly.
Date posted: 2012-11-11
A gay man in the UK has been startled to learn that he will have to pay child support for two children he fathered - 13 years after the first child was born.
Date posted: 2012-11-11
The commissioning parents, known as TJS and ALS, had attempted to take the safest possible legal route to parentage. An embryo created with the father's sperm and a donated egg was placed in the womb of ";gestational carrier" AF.
Date posted: 2012-11-11
Australia regards itself as a champion of human rights, but in 2011 the United Nations Human Rights Council has detected an abuse - the involuntary sterilisation of women and girls with disabilities (report, 86.39). Now a Senate committee has launched an inquiry.
Date posted: 2012-11-11
Singer nonetheless believes that abortion is ethical, because even a viable fetus is not a rational, self-aware person with desires and plans, which would be cut short by death; hence it should not have the same right as humans who have such qualities. Abortion is also justified, Singer added, both as a female right and as a method for curbing overpopulation.
Date posted: 2012-11-06
Despite campaigns in several states for the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia and the existence of legal assisted suicide in Oregon and Washington state, the American Nurses Association (ANA) still strongly opposes both end-of-life options.
Date posted: 2012-11-06
However, the picture is still not completely clear. The ASRM says that egg freezing could be beneficial for women who are infertile after treatments for other diseases and some genetic conditions. It stresses that career women who want to delay child-bearing should not rely upon egg-freezing as fertility insurance.
Date posted: 2012-11-06
Every culture, it seems, has distinctive permutations of the conundrums of surrogate motherhood. A dispute from Pakistan illustrates the thorny issue of surrogacy in a Muslim society which allows polygamy.
Date posted: 2012-11-06
Pressure from the British media has forced an investigation into the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway by National Health Service and the Association of Palliative Medicine.
Date posted: 2012-11-06
Respect for conscience and conscientious objection is being eroded in the medical profession.
Date posted: 2012-10-24
On November 6 Massachusetts voters will choose whether or not their state should legalize assisted suicide. If they vote Yes, it will become the third American state to approve it, after Oregon and Washington.
Date posted: 2012-10-24
The world of organ donation in Denmark is in turmoil. A documentary was aired earlier this month which showed family members reacting in anguish to the news that their 19-year-old daughter was brain dead after a car accident, agreeing to donate her organs and allowing doctors to turn off her respirator. About 1.7 million viewers tuned in to the heart-rending drama.
Date posted: 2012-10-24
Are bioethicists reviving mediaeval inquiries into how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Date posted: 2012-10-24
Whole genome sequencing is a double-edged sword, says the US government's leading bioethics advisory group, and safeguards are needed to protect the privacy of patients.
Date posted: 2012-10-24
This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine was shared by a Briton and a Japanese who respects the dignity of the human embryo.
Date posted: 2012-10-10
"This is not about finding a cure. It is about preventing people with MCD being born. We need first to be clear that these new technologies, even if they are eventually shown to work, will do nothing for the thousands of people already suffering from mitochondrial disease or for those who will be born with it in the future."
Date posted: 2012-10-09
"Improvements in treatment of dementia over the last decade have improved prognosis. But that means there needs to be an increase in care and support, both for those living at home, and for those in the last years of life, in formalised care settings."
Date posted: 2012-10-09
In 2011 there were 3,695 cases of euthanasia, an increase of 18% over the previous year. The figure is double the number in 2006. There were 4 cases of medical negligence, according to the report. One is being investigated by the public prosecutor.
Date posted: 2012-10-08
The foundation myth of bioethics, the 'demi-discipline's' self-professed raison d'etre is at best inadequate if not demonstrably false.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Everybody is talking about internet addiction - many people spend hours online and immediately start feeling bad if they are unable to do so.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
The wife of a Palestinian prisoner held in an Israeli jail has given birth to his son, even though she has not seen him for 15 years. Ammar Ziban, 37, smuggled his sperm to an IVF clinic in the West Bank where his wife Dalal was artificially inseminated.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
China, a nation notorious for stifling fertility with its draconian one-child policy, is now worried about an epidemic of infertility.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Another prisoner - been in jail for 27 years for two murders - has also asked for euthanasia. His request has not been approved yet.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Are drones really compatible with "our traditions of rule of law and due process", as President Obama claims?
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Teachers and chaplains who openly oppose the UK's Government's redefinition of marriage face being disciplined, or sacked for their views if the law is changed, warns a top legal expert.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Stem cell research fraud continues, though not as spectacularly as in the lab of disgraced South Korean Hwang Woo-suk.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
The moment when scientists will be able to create artificial sperm from a skin cell is drawing closer.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
There has been tremendous interest in the media about patients in a permanent vegetative state who had actually been in a minimally conscious state (MCS).
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Palliative care physicians have to negotiate the shoals of misunderstanding and the reefs of fear in an emotionally demanding environment.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
The JME regards Greasley's long and detailed paper as "an original and important contribution" which helps to clarify issues in the on-going debate over the moral permissibility of abortion which she believes "substantially depends on what moral standing is rightly accorded to the fetus"
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Tasmania could become the first Australian state to legalise same-sex marriage. Is this just a smokescreen for its economic problems?
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Nearly six months ago Prince Friso, the son of Queen Beatrix, of the Netherlands, was buried in an avalanche while skiing in Austria. By the time he was rescued, he had already suffered severe brain damage.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Two contemporary trends have been linked by a recent article in Nature: the rising age of first-time fathers and the increasing rate of autism.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Men are becoming less and less relevant to reproduction and parenting, according to an op-ed in the New York Times.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Among the hot topics in bioethics, prostitution does not rank highly. A quick search of the ETHXWeb bioethics database at Georgetown University yielded ten times as many articles on surrogacy than on prostitution, even though it could be argued that they are related.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
The world record for a birth from frozen sperm has risen to 40 years, a Minneapolis company claims.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
The New Zealand prime minister has given legalised euthanasia a ringing personal endorsement.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke seems to have jumped the gun by telling the media that the South Pacific island of Fiji was considering his plans for establishing a suicide clinic in the city of Nadi.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
We won't make any progress unless we unpack some of the fundamental issues.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Believe it or not, it is possible for people to find happiness in the strangest places - even quadriplegia.
Date posted: 2012-09-22
Mark Gill, of the Novartis Research Foundation in Switzerland, points out that there could have been developmental abnormalities unnoticed by the researchers or problems which develop later in life. Drug companies have stopped working on male contraceptives because it is too risky.
Date posted: 2012-09-18
"The authors pose the question: 'Should religious beliefs be allowed to stonewall a secular approach to withdrawing and withholding treatment in children?' It's a curious question. The legal and ethical orthodoxy is that no beliefs, religious or secular, should be allowed to stonewall the best interests of the child."
Date posted: 2012-09-07
Many on-line human egg brokers do not adhere to ethical guidelines drawn up by the peak IVF body in the US, a survey published in the journal Fertility & Sterility has found. Some of the violations include failing to warn of the risks of the donating eggs and offering premiums for traits like good looks and good marks.
Date posted: 2012-09-07
A new paper just published in theJournal of Bioethical Inquiry uses extensive Freedom of Information Act findings to detail troubling off-label prescription in the US on pregnant women to intentionally engineer the development of their fetuses for sex normalization purposes.
Date posted: 2012-09-07
Supporters of same-sex marriage must recognise they face a serious moral dilemma. Cheap wombs might bring gay men the happiness of being the father of a child of their own. But the cost of that happiness is often borne by poor and uneducated women.
Date posted: 2012-08-21
Daunting ethical problems lie ahead. The test will be used extensively to abort children who have a genetic "problem".
Date posted: 2012-08-02
Life without kidneys is normally short, but Morrissey argues that the patient is so close to death that it is reasonable to assume that removal of the kidneys cannot be described as the cause of death.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
There are hospitals where women are kept for the whole nine months while they carry someone else's child. There are good stories, where the surrogate is well looked after, but I would like to make people aware of the sheer exploitation of it, the fact that these women are extremely poor.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
The latest incident is a painful reminder that one of the worst scientific frauds of the past century happened in the same field at the same university by another veterinary researcher.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
The president of the Royal College of General Practitioners in the UK, Iona Heath, has taken a strong stand against the legalisation of assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
If we are in the middle of a culture war over gay marriage, why not take advice from someone who knows about combat, former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld? Long after he left the scene, people are still quoting his description of the fog of war: "[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know."
Date posted: 2012-08-02
Two Oxford bioethicists have proposed a novel solution to the scourge of 50% divorce rates - use love drugs to keep the flame of love alive.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
After synthesising a number of studies of patients who had asked for their death to be hasten, the Catalan researchers concluded that "Overall, the WTHD emerges as a phenomenon that does not necessarily imply the wish to die, and it appears as a response to an overwhelming emotional distress among patients in the advanced stages of disease."
Date posted: 2012-08-02
Same-sex couples will have the same access to IVF treatment as heterosexual couples under guidelines issued by the UK's health advisory service.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
The near frontier of human enhancement is coffee on steroids: the drugs of the future that will make you smarter, sharper and quicker. Even now, a quarter of American students are said to use psychostimulants. About 5% of workers in Germany use pharmaceutical drugs to enhance their cognitive functions.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
And who is thinking about the ethics of a technological quick fix?
Date posted: 2012-08-02
There have been no robust academic studies of gay parenting which prove that it is every bit as good as the traditional family.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
The biological revolution is at once exciting, even mesmerising, but terrifying. The genie is out of the bottle. Our challenge is to ethically master the machines we are creating. At present, they are relatively simple and benign. But synthetic biology offers the prospect of annihilating life as we know it.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
The program is virtually immune to oversight by the Legislature or other elected officials. For these reasons and others, it has grappled with only mixed success with changes in stem cell science and politics that have called its original rationale into question.
Date posted: 2012-08-02
I wish that makers of videos presenting "conservative" views would use less Wagnerian music. With that caveat, this video from the Family Research Council makes a good argument against the legalisation of same-sex marriage from a Protestant point of view.
Date posted: 2012-07-25
The joys of bringing a child into the world are not persuasive for some contemporary philosophers.
Date posted: 2012-07-25
A disabled campaigner against China's one-child policy has outwitted the world's most powerful governments.
Date posted: 2012-06-02
Benedict XVI's analysis of the crisis of Western culture is outstanding in its depth and clarity.
Date posted: 2012-05-10
A briefing by the Health Department soon afterwards alleged that there were serious shortcomings in the hospital's procedures.
Date posted: 2012-05-10
According to ADI research, the number of people living with dementia worldwide, estimated at 35.6 million in 2010, is set to nearly double every 20 years, reaching 65.7 million in 2030 and 115.4 million in 2050.
Date posted: 2012-05-10
Very little research has been done on pressures that could be exerted on the elderly and disabled.
Date posted: 2012-05-10
The negative side of IVF birth defects may finally be getting some publicity. IVF clinics are aware that there is a higher incidence of birth defects among children conceived through IVF. However, consumer awareness is low.
Date posted: 2012-04-28
Oregon's public health division has released statistics on deaths under its physician-assisted suicide (PAS)legislation. It shows a steady increase in the number of lethal prescriptions and in the number of deaths. In 1998, the first year after PAS was legalised, there were 24 prescriptions and 16 deaths. In 2011, there were 114 prescriptions and 71 deaths. A total of 935 people have had lethal prescriptions and 596 have died.
Date posted: 2012-04-10
Servile deference to abortion rights has led doctors to think that they are above the law.
Date posted: 2012-04-10
A Michigan State University anthropologist from Bangladesh has published the first in-depth study describing the often horrific experiences of poor people who were victims of organ trafficking. Monir Moniruzzaman interviewed 33 kidney sellers in Bangladesh and found they typically didn't get the money they were promised and were plagued with serious health problems that prevented them from working, shame and depression.
Date posted: 2012-04-10
Despite the prestige that Singer and Savulescu and other utilitarians have, at least in the media, loopiness is hard-wired into their philosophy. A utilitarian bioethicist is always going to be a loose cannon, rolling wildly around the deck in ethical storms, splintering and smashing the fragile public image of his or her profession. If other bioethicists want to repair their dented prestige, shunning utilitarian colleagues would be a good place to start.
Date posted: 2012-04-10
Unfortunately, the notoriety of "After-birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?" threatens to bring the whole profession into disrepute. If a conservative occupies the White House next year, it could even affect the composition of the presidential bioethics commission and government attitudes towards advice offered by bioethicists.
Date posted: 2012-04-10
Would a morality pill with a morning orange juice really turn everyone into Mother Teresa?
Date posted: 2012-04-10
The government itself has acknowledged that many doctors ignore the law.... Nor are all euthanasia deaths voluntary. According to the Groningen Protocol, seriously ill infants may be euthanased with their parents' consent. This is not voluntary euthanasia. Demented patients and patients with psychiatric illnesses may be euthanased, even though their consent is clearly impaired.
Date posted: 2012-04-09
From 1917 to 1991, for more than 80 years, Russia was ruled by an ideology of oppression which paraded as a beacon of liberation. But within 40 years, the masquerade was over, even if the misery remained.
Date posted: 2012-04-02
Some UK abortion clinics are falsifying paperwork so that they can carry out their clients' requests for sex-selective terminations. Undercover reporters for the London Telegraph accompanied pregnant women and taped doctors arranging an abortion after an unequivocal request to abort a child because it was of the wrong sex.
Date posted: 2012-04-02
Within the vast mansion of bioethics there is a small but very active group of purists in the basement policing the ethics of the pragmatists. The bone of contention is not philosophical but financial.
Date posted: 2012-04-02
Once again Dutch legislators are organising a legal work-around for a procedure which is clearly illegal in the Netherlands. This time the issue is commercial surrogacy.
Date posted: 2012-04-02
Women in burqas get a bum rap in the Western media. Photographers portray them as silent statues, pillars of salt in flowing black robes. Cartoonists ridicule them as creatures of silent menace carrying who knows what beneath their ample garments.
Date posted: 2012-04-02
The flames of bioethical controversy crackle loudest in the media when stem cells or euthanasia or abortion are tossed onto the flames. But tempers can flare over cosmetic surgery as well.
Date posted: 2012-04-02
The White House says 98% of Catholic women have used contraceptives. Its own statistics do not support this. Politically speaking, President Obama is in a very strong position as he tries to force universal coverage for contraception, including sterilisation and the morning-after pill, upon employers. So why does his Administration have to tell porkies to bolster his case?
Date posted: 2012-04-01
It is now all but certain that human embryonic stem cells will not deliver cures to dread diseases. Apologies, anyone?
Date posted: 2012-02-14
Euthanasia is OK, but circumcising male babies is a bridge too far.
Date posted: 2012-02-14
Margaret Dore, president of Choice is an Illusion and an elder law attorney in Washington state, states: "The initiative's introduction declares that the process will be 'entirely voluntary' for the patient. The act, as written, does not deliver on this promise. The act is instead a recipe for elder abuse."
Date posted: 2012-02-14
The "slippery slope" is often derided as a logical fallacy. But when one of the leading advocacy groups for euthanasia in Belgium posts an article entitled "Euthanasia, time for the next step", it's hard not to think that it may not be so illogical after all.
Date posted: 2012-02-14
The keenness of British journalists to score exclusives and to run down the last details of stories are legendary - or at least they are now, after the News of the World phone hacking scandal.
Date posted: 2012-02-14
China has admitted that it harvests organs from condemned prisoners, but very little information about the practice has emerged in the press. Executed prisoners are believed to account for two-thirds of all transplants, although the government apparently wants to promote a voluntary scheme.
Date posted: 2012-02-14
Same sex marriage can only succeed in a society where traditional marriage is already weak.
Date posted: 2012-02-14
The most serious problem a world of seven billion people faces is not too many people, but too high a proportion of old people. The social and political changes of demographic are not dramatic but day by day they are changing our world. This the real story behind the seven billion. And the scariest thing of all is that almost no one cares.
Date posted: 2011-11-05
A milestone case in the European Court of Justice may signal a new direction in campaigns against human embryo research.
Date posted: 2011-10-26
Could there be a worse place in the world to be a doctor than the Netherlands? Not because of the standard of its health care; it has one of the highest life expectancies in the world and one of the lowest infant mortality rates. But because the professional association of Dutch physicians has decreed that euthanasia is an integral part of a doctor's job.
Date posted: 2011-10-13
Arguments for tolerance of homosexuality work equally well for paedophilia.
Date posted: 2011-10-13
Euthanasia is certainly on the agenda. In half of the doctors' practices, euthanasia is a topic which is increasingly discussed. About 65% had felt pressure from patients or relatives to perform euthanasia and about half of them said that there was pressure to do it quickly. About a third of them felt that the pressure had increased over the last five years.
Date posted: 2011-08-25
The Hippocratic Oath is supposed to be the gold standard for integrity. But how effective has it been in the medical profession?
Date posted: 2011-08-25
Mixing human and animal material should be approached with great caution, says the UK Academy of Medical Sciences in a report issued yesterday. But it recommends that some highly controversial experiments should be allowed to proceed, including modifying an animal's brain to make it more human-like and the generation or propagation of functional human germ cells in animals.
Date posted: 2011-08-07
The peer was outraged at the legal, but apparently secretive, research: "I argued in Parliament against the creation of human-animal hybrids as a matter of principle. None of the scientists who appeared before us could give us any justification in terms of treatment. Ethically it can never be justifiable - it discredits us as a country. It is dabbling in the grotesque. At every stage the justification from scientists has been: if only you allow us to do this, we will find cures for every illness known to mankind. This is emotional blackmail. Of the 80 treatments and cures which have come about from stem cells, all have come from adult stem cells - not embryonic ones. On moral and ethical grounds this fails; and on scientific and medical ones too."
Date posted: 2011-08-05
The best research shows that restraint and fidelity are the solutions to the devastating epidemic. But the bureaucrats aren't listening.
Date posted: 2011-07-14
With the legalisation of same-sex marriage, real marriage becomes just one of a range of legally-recognised options.
Date posted: 2011-07-08
Are supporters of legalised euthanasia willing to listen to reason? Maybe not.
Date posted: 2011-07-05
Most refugees flee to neighbouring countries to escape wars at home. It is the developing world which shoulders most of the burden of caring for them.
Date posted: 2011-06-25
Using organs from euthanased patients seem to have become a well established procedure in Belgium, only nine years after it was legalized. A press release from a team at a hospital in Leuven announced last week that it had successfully transplanted lungs from four euthanased patients between 2007 and 2009.
Date posted: 2011-06-24
Treat animals with kindness, by all means. But don't forget about people.
Date posted: 2011-06-24
Is it ethical to kill fellow soldiers in wartime to ward off worse suffering? If that's confusing, how about wounded enemy soldiers?
Date posted: 2011-06-24
It's easy to imagine a situation where pressure would be put on patients, who are not economically profitable, in order to persuade them to end their life. Such pressure is absolutely immoral. But there have been voices who were actually calling for such pressure.
Date posted: 2011-06-20
The linkage between genetics and eugenics is an oft-told story, but it bears repeating again and again.
Date posted: 2011-06-04
Demography is a science of many facts but surprisingly little accuracy. In the 1960s and 1970s demographers worried about the dangers of over-population. Spaceship Earth was going to be so crowded with people that it would surely crash without some form of population control. What actually happened? Today we face an ageing crisis - there is a dearth of young people in most developed countries.
Date posted: 2011-05-20
It is absurdly exaggerated to claim, as the President did in his speech, that "today's achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people". It was certainly a testament to the skill of the American military. But surely greatness is more than nailing a fugitive. Genuine greatness of spirit lies in following up victory with magnanimity and wisdom.
Date posted: 2011-05-14
The latest figures show that India's child sex ratio is getting even worse. The normal ratio for children between 0 and 6 is about 950 girls to 1000 boys. However, early returns for the 2011 census show that the number of girls to 1,000 boys has shrunk to 914 girls to every 1000 boys, down from 927 in 2001.
Date posted: 2011-04-18
Is it ethical to kill fellow soldiers in wartime to ward off worse suffering? If that's confusing, how about wounded enemy soldiers?
Date posted: 2011-04-04
The proportion of medical students in Austria who are sympathetic to voluntary euthanasia has more than tripled in the past ten years. According to researchers at the Medical University of Graz acceptance of active euthanasia increased from 16.3% to 29.1% to 49.5% in the periods from 2001 to 2003/04 to 2008/09. In the general population it rose from about 49% to 62% between 2000 and 2009.
Date posted: 2011-04-02
"Bioethics is a field that is always evolving because it exists in relation to newly emerging moral questions in society," says Stanford bioethicist Laura Roberts. "The field itself struggles — we are always trying to make sense of things and to understand and resolve complex issues in ways that rely on more than mere intuition."
Date posted: 2011-03-27
Here is a brief video with excellent graphics from The Economist about the arrival of the world's 7 billionth person. I don't share its rather woolly optimism about the future, but in 2 minutes and 21 seconds you can't communicate everything.
Date posted: 2011-03-25
Editorial writers break out into a cold sweat when natural disasters strike. And a tsunami is a nightmare. What can be said to soothe the anguish? What can dull the shock at this reminder of our fragile purchase on life? Words fray and crumble. In fact, most major papers avoided the challenge.
Date posted: 2011-03-15
This is about three women and death: one is Indian, one is Rwandan, and one is American. They come from very different cultures and they are dealing with the end of life in very different ways. One of them is particularly sorrowful -- but it is the shame that hurts, not the pain.
Date posted: 2011-03-08
Increasingly, people believe that their fates are written in their genes.
Date posted: 2011-03-05
Jim Carrey. Ricky Gervais. Adam Sandler. Steve Martin. All well-known funny men. Well, move over, guys. Philip Nitschke, the Australian doctor who is the world's best-known euthanasia activist, is considering a career shift.
Date posted: 2011-03-02
After a passionate debate the French Senate has scuppered a bill allowing physician-assisted suicide. The margin was convincing - 170 to 142.
Date posted: 2011-02-15
The Dutch voluntary euthanasia society (NVVE) is planning to open an eight-person clinic in 2012 where people can go to end their lives. It estimates that about 1,000 people a year would take advantage of its facilities. It would cater for people whose doctors have refused to euthanase them.
Date posted: 2011-02-14
It had to happen sooner or later: a forum for people born from reproductive technologies, especially donor eggs and sperm. There are many forums where IVF mums can swap stories about their pregnancies, but none about the mums' children. Until now.
Date posted: 2011-02-13
A group of Belgian doctors are harvesting "high quality" organs from patients who have been euthanased. This is not a secret project, but one which they described openly at a conference organised by the Belgian Royal Medical Academy in December.
Date posted: 2011-02-12
The Jerry Springer of modern philosophy was in good form when he addressed a packed crowd this week in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney.
Date posted: 2011-02-10
First, sit down. If you are sitting down, take a deep breath. Because all this did not happen in a slum in Phnom Penh, or Sao Paulo, or Kinshasa. It happened in the United States, in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the nation. This is about politicians in one of America's largest states who didn't want to rock the boat. This is about a cowardly bureaucracy in a city renowned for world-class doctors and hospitals. This is about doctors who refused to report one of their own. A horrifying report from Philadelphia's district attorney ought to be abortion's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Date posted: 2011-01-25
Aborted foetuses piled up in a temple mortuary raise questions about Thailand's embrace of family planning.
Date posted: 2011-01-18
We must not minimize the stress of caring for invalids, especially without help from family members or governments. It can exhaust and demoralise even a loving spouse. It is an indictment of a society that allows people to bear a burden like this without help. But making a plan to kill a sick relative is still murder. What else could it be?
Date posted: 2011-01-16
A man who has been a quadriplegic since he was 3 is the latest focus of right-to-die news in the US. For about 18 months Dan Crews, 27, of Antioch, Illinois, has demanded that his ventilator be removed. But his local hospital has refused. Doctors say that he is depressed and is not capable of making an informed decision.
Date posted: 2011-01-04
The tenth anniversary of the legalization of euthanasia in the Netherlands on November 28 passed almost unnoticed. It was the first country in the world to set down legal guidelines which allowed doctors to kill people.
Date posted: 2011-01-02
No. In fact, the leading figure in medical statistics says plainly, "most claimed research findings are false".
Date posted: 2010-12-25
Morality is a tricky business. Experts are held to a higher standard of probity. That's why church sex abuse scandals and the double lives of some televangelists have done such damage to the cause of religious morality. Perhaps, too, this is why academic misconduct by one of the leading exponents of the "new science of morality" has rattled scientists and bioethicists.
Date posted: 2010-10-01
There are many questions about the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but surely the most important is: was it a just war? This was the question when the war began and it is still the question now. How can we move on without confronting it squarely and honestly? ... The website Iraqi Body Count estimates that between 97,700 and 106,600 Iraqi civilians have died violent deaths since 2003. ... These numbers are almost impossible for us to grasp in comfortable countries like the US and Australia.
Date posted: 2010-09-16
In the great tradition of American litigation, will the fate of human embryonic stem cell research be decided in the courts? Earlier this week, US District Judge Royce Lamberth granted an injunction banning Federal funding for the research. This overturns not only President Barack Obama's relatively liberal guidelines for research on embryonic stem cells, but also President George W. Bush's more restrictive ones.
Date posted: 2010-09-14
Same-sex marriage is back on the agenda now that social radicals have the balance of power.
Date posted: 2010-09-13
Have two US presidents and a raft of agencies been misinterpreting a federal law for nearly ten years? A judge says Yes.
Date posted: 2010-09-11
A Federal Court judge has struck down California's constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Date posted: 2010-08-17
Why is 1 in 18 men in the world's richest nation on probation, on parole or in jail?
Date posted: 2010-08-03
Is it high-tech child abuse to rob children of their biological heritage?
Date posted: 2010-07-03
The prosecutor successfully argued that BEOS (Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test) analysis proved that she clearly had "experiential knowledge" of the murder. In other words, certain sections of Ms Sharma's brain would not have lit up unless she had actually participated in the crime. Even if it seemed like a leap of faith in an unfamiliar technology, Judge Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi stated that the expertise of the BEOS operator "can in no way be challenged". He sentenced the young woman to life imprisonment.
Date posted: 2010-06-27
This is more or less what happened last week when the bioethics committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics revised its long-standing opposition to female genital mutilation. Up to now, the AAP's position was simple: never. In the United States, as in many other countries, opposition has been reinforced with legislation. One American father has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for cutting his two-year-old daughter.
Date posted: 2010-06-05
Human dignity is a motherhood concept like freedom of speech or the brotherhood of man. It's great for padding out politicians' speeches. But what happens when it conflicts with another motherhood concept, autonomy, the ability to make free and independent decisions?
Date posted: 2010-04-25
It has taken 20 years, but gendercide has finally made the front page of The Economist. Back in 1990, Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen wrote an astonishing article in the New York Review of Books claiming that 100 million girls had been aborted because of son-preference. This was happening mostly in China and India, but also in other Asian countries.
Date posted: 2010-03-29
Is there a meaning to Haiti? 200,000 dead; 1.5 million homeless; the chaos of looting and raping, hunger, thirst, disease. The randomness of the deaths -- children, an archbishop, a head of United Nations operations, slum dwellers, police. The Haitians were already living in one of the poorest, worst governed nations in the world. Now they have to struggle with the worst humanitarian disaster ever faced by the UN. Why?
Date posted: 2010-03-05
Euthanasia activists in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands have lost touch with reality.
Date posted: 2010-02-22
Whom better to ask than the disabled? They give some surprising answers. ... Suzanne McDermott, of the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, writes that she changed her own mind after studying the issue. At first she believed that assisted suicide was solely a personal autonomy issue. But eventually she was persuaded that it is at the heart of the movement for disability rights: Almost all people at the end of life can be included in the definition of 'disability'. Thus, the practice of assisted suicide results in death for people with disabilities.
Date posted: 2010-02-09
A Korean gynaecologist explains why he abandoned a lucrative procedure and is campaigning to reduce abortions. South Korea has one of the highest rates of abortion in the world, even though abortion is technically illegal there except in a few rare circumstances. According to official government figures, there are 340,000 abortions each year, although one parliamentarian has estimated that there may be as many as 1.5 million. At the same time, Korea's birth rate is the second-lowest in the world -- 1.19 births per woman -- and some Koreans fear that their very survival as a nation is in doubt.
Date posted: 2010-02-06
Is there a meaning to Haiti? 200,000 dead; 1.5 million homeless; the chaos of looting and raping, hunger, thirst, disease. The randomness of the deaths -- children, an archbishop, a head of United Nations operations, slum dwellers, police. The Haitians were already living in one of the poorest, worst governed nations in the world. Now they have to struggle with the worst humanitarian disaster ever faced by the UN. Why?
Date posted: 2010-01-19
The population control lobby is far from dead. There still are highly influential academics who fervently believe that increasing aid for population control (aka reproductive rights, women's health, safe and legal abortion) is absolutely necessary. Without it, the world will turn into an over-heated, war-torn slum heaped with festering mountains of garbage. This is the message that comes through loud and clear in a special issue of an influential British journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, called The Impact of Population Growth on Tomorrow's World.
Date posted: 2009-11-24
The message is finally getting through: the population bomb has fizzled out and fertility is falling nearly everywhere in the world.
Date posted: 2009-11-24
Current studies show that 92 percent of women who receive a definitive prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome choose to terminate their pregnancies. As a consequence Down Syndrome children are vanishing. In Ireland, where abortion is not an option, the sight of a DS person on the street is far more common.
Date posted: 2009-11-11