Over at Feminist Philosophers, there’s a great little series of posts by an anonymous female philosopher about her experience of becoming infertile. It’s well worth a read: part 1 is here; part 2 here; and part 3 here. I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing the penultimate paragraph: My partner and I are a […]
Category: Reproduction
Personhood in Mississippi
Phew, I thought, when I heard that Measure 26, the proposal to redefine “personhood” to cover the unborn, had been thrown out by the electorate of Mississippi. To catch up: the prosaically-named piece of legislation would have amend[ed] the Mississippi Constitution to define the word “person” or “persons”, as those terms are used in Article III of […]
C-Sections on Demand? Not Quite…
Stephen Latham has picked up a lead about NICE guidelines on the provision of caesarian sections: An update of a new guidance document being developed by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellenct (“NICE”) would permit caesarian section on maternal request, even when there are no medical indications for the procedure. […] The new […]
Why Use Close Genes?
Real life showing signs of coming back under control, it’s nice to be back blogging again. Hopefully I’ll be up to speed soon. To get back into the swing of things, there’s an interesting post from Ole Martin Moen on the Practical Ethics blog. It’s only short, so I’ll reproduce almost fully here. Today, if […]
Three Quiet Cheers for Uterine Transplants
Charles Foster’s post over at Practical Ethics about the news of the womb-transplant surgery that’s slated to take place in the near future is on the money in many respects. Foster points out that [p]redictably the newspapers loved it. And, equally predictably, clever people from the world’s great universities queued up to be eloquently wise […]
Medicine and the Military Covenant
There’s been a lot in the news over the last couple of days about the Military Covenant, and how there’s a plant to give it a legal footing as part of the Armed Forces Bill. Some of the reportage over the weekend suggested that there would be explicit prioritisation for members and ex-members of the […]
Language and ethics – being “let” to go overdue
The more I think about it the more I think that one issue bioethicists should play much closer attention to is the language used to describe things. This isn’t a new thought, Kongzi (known as Confucius in the West) said: Tsze-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you […]
Wow. South Dakota… just Wow.
I’m a bit bowled over by this. There’s a Bill currently before the South Dakota legislature that would, if passed, change the scope of justifiable homicide laws. FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF […]
Saviour Siblings, Ends and Means: How far can you go?
It would appear that France is being forced to grapple with the idea of saviour siblings in a case that looks to be in essence a copy of the UK’s Hashmi case from 2002. That case concerned a couple who wanted to screen embryos to ensure compatibility in order that cord blood from the baby […]