I know, I know. I keep banging on about the irrelevance of genetics when it comes to families – about why parenthood isn’t a genetic thing. But, actually, now I think about it – Duchess of Cambridge blah blah baby blah… I wonder what, if any, constitutional implications there’d be if the heir to the […]
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News from Wisconsin: It’s not OK if your Child Dies, even if you’re Praying
(Note: I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t actually post it for some reason. I’ve no idea why it’s taken me so long. But it’s here now…) Via Facebook a couple of weeks ago, I came across this story, about a couple whose conviction over the death of their child has been upheld: A […]
Book Review: Kevin Yuill, “Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalization”
Basingstoke/ New York: Plagrave Macmillan, 2013; 188+xx pp Can there be anything new to say on the subject of assisted death of one form or another? One acquaintance of mine has suggested that there ought to be a five-year moratorium on papers about it, on the grounds that there almost certainly isn’t. At the very […]
Bye-bye, rhino…
It would appear that the western black rhino has bitten the dust. Not a western black rhino, but the western black rhino. There’s no more of them. It’s sometimes hard to say exactly what causes an extinction – something like predation might be the effective cause, but if the population of a species is not […]
The Value of Role Reversal
Guest Post by Rebecca Dresser, Washington University in St. Louis Not so long ago, medical researchers had a habit of using themselves as guinea pigs. Many scientists saw self-experimentation as the most ethical way to try out their ideas. By going first, researchers could test their hypotheses and see how novel interventions affected human beings. Today […]
Winston Churchill and the Spirochaetes
Did you hear the programme about syphilis on Radio 3 on Sunday? If not, you can catch up on it here – and I’d thoroughly recommend doing so: it was superb. One bit in particular caught my attention; it had to do with the use of penicillin to treat the illness during World War II. […]
Say twenty hail Autonomy’s and reflect on what you have done – bioethicists as having some, but not priestly authority.
Nathan Emmerich, occasional commentator here at the JME blog has recently published an interesting piece in the Guardian which argues against us taking bioethicists as having a particular type of expertise. While I enjoyed and agree with much of what he argues I do have a couple of quibbles – in particular I worry that […]
The kindest cut?
It goes without saying that castrating sex offenders in order to control their behaviour is highly controversial. Likewise, describing something that damages a person physically as ‘treatment’ is problematic for many. That’s partly because of the image, reinforced even by publications as prominent as Time, that castration involves excising a man’s testicles with the single […]
Is the NIMH Turning its Back on DSM-V?
Thanks to Brian Earp for bringing this release from the US’ National Institute of Mental Health to my attention; it concerns the Institute’s decision to move away from DSM as its diagnostic tool. DSM has been enormously successful – in terms of having established itself at the centre of psychiatry – but it has been […]
JME Special Edition on Infanticide and “After-Birth Abortion”
It’s going to be a little while before regular blogging resumes here – I’m aiming to get back up to speed in the next 10 days or so – but, in the meantime, the special edition of the JME devoted to The Paper Of Which We Do Not Speak is now out and available here. […]