Guest post by Sally Sheldon We tend to talk about contraception and abortion as if they were two separate and readily distinguishable practices, the former preventing pregnancy and the latter ending it. This understanding has a very important effect in current British law, where a relatively permissive approach to the availability of contraception stands in […]
Category: Reproduction
The Moral Desirability of Early Fatherhood
Guest Post by Kevin Smith It is well known that the risk of disorders resulting from chromosomal abnormalities, such as Down’s syndrome, correlates with advancing maternal age. Less widely known is the correlation between the age of fathers and an increased risk of a range of disorders in their resultant offspring, the most prominent of […]
Does Religion Deserve a Place in Secular Medicine?
By Brian D. Earp The latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics is out, and in it, Professor Nigel Biggar—an Oxford theologian—argues that “religion” should have a place in secular medicine (click here for a link to the article). Some people will feel a shiver go down their spines—and not only the non-religious. After […]
Free Speech and the CMF
Despite a slight reticence when it comes to quoting Mill approvingly, I do have to admit that sometimes he does articulate a thought clearly and pithily, and sometimes it’s a thought in which all right-thinking people ought to see the merit. Like, for example, this, from the opening paragraph of chapter III in On Liberty: An opinion […]
Should Anyone get IVF?
Cast your mind back to this summer, and Christina Richie’s paper about the provision of ARTs. It attracted a fair bit of controversy because of the way it talked about gay people’s rights to access ARTs, and their “voluntary” infertility. For my money, that was the weakest part of the paper, and it should have been […]
Film Review: “Obvious Child”
We’ve not had a film review here before, have we? As far as I can tell, the ratio of talked-about-ness to actual screenings of Obvious Child is unusually high; it doesn’t seem to have got all that much time in mainstream cinemas, which meant that I had to schlep along to Manchester’s Cornerhouse to see it. (I […]
Oh, dear, Richard…
Look, I know that Twitter really isn’t the place for nuanced debate. But, by that token, everyone else should realise that as well – especially intellectual superstars. So how, then, to explain Richard Dawkins’ spectacular foot-in-mouth moment earlier today? It started off reasonably enough, with him tweeting about Catholicism’s stance on abortion and providing a […]
On Conflicts of Interest
It’s only a few days since Richie’s paper on providing IVF in the context of global warming was published, but already there’s been a couple of lines of objection to it that have been fairly widespread; I thought it might be worth nodding to one, and perhaps offering an attempt of a defence against the […]
Gaia Doesn’t Care where your Baby Comes From
Guest Post by Dominic Wilkinson, Associate Editor, Journal of Medical Ethics In a provocative paper published today in the Journal of Medical Ethics, US theologian Cristina Richie argues that the carbon cost and environmental impact of population growth in the West should lead to restrictions on artificial reproduction. She points to the substantial carbon emissions that […]
ARTs in a Warming World
There are some people who disagree, but we can take some things as read: there is such a thing as global climate change, it is at least substantially anthropogenic, and there are moral reasons to try to minimise it. With that in mind, how should we think about reproductive technologies? These are techniques whose intent […]