Maybe it’s all those essays I’ve been marking that’ve melted my brain a bit and made me unduly receptive to the potential for puerile jokes about pregnancy porn… but I saw this on the BBC News front page last night, and it made me giggle…

A short time ago, I mentioned George Pitcher’s extraordinarily lame showing on the Today programme, when he was invited to talk about assisted suicide.  I included a link to his blog - and, I admit it, this was partly intended so that he’d get an “incoming link” notification and either make a comment here, or refer to my post there.

As far as I can tell, he’s done neither.  However, he has excelled himself when it comes to euthanasia paranoia.  He posted on the subject on the day of the Radio 4 interview, and you can read the full thing here if you really want.  I’m going to pick on a short extract:

And another thing: We have a growing elderly population, living longer, and palliative care is very expensive. It couldn’t be that the Government sees the ballooning NHS budget and realises that one way to save a bit would be for our senior citizens to be encouraged to top themselves?

Nothing would surprise me anymore.

Ahhh… wild speculation and scaremongering dressed as argument.  Rewarding stuff.

Of course, I’d like to think that things couldn’t get stupider… but, it seems, they can.  One should never underoverestimate the contributors to Telegraph blogs.  “BritishPatriot” has to have his poorly-spelled say on the subject:

In 1970 when Aborion was legalised they said it would only be used in extreme circumstances, we now have abortion clinics, err, sorry pregnancy advice centres in every town where potential mothers are lulled into aborting what they are told are ‘just cells’
7.2 Million British Babies later, we face a Demographics Timebomb.
Now they want to sterilise our Schoolgirls.
This Euthenasia drive they are trying ti get us to agree to is so they can asset strip the British Elderly then do away with them in their Privatised ‘clinic’
The EU doesn’t want you, they know you will not vote for the EU so they are getting rid of you every way they can.
WAKE UP !!!!

If I don’t contribute to this blog for a while, it’ll be for one of two reasons.  Either Gordon Brown and the entire staff of the European Commission will personally have come round to my house to euthanise me (coldly ignoring my cries of “No!  Really!  I’m all in favour of the EU and would sign up to Schengen and the Euro lickety-split!”), or I’ll have bought shares in Bacofoil and have moved to a private island in the Carribean.

Because there seems to be a growing market in tinfoil hats that needs to be exploited.

I have to admit that I’m a bit suspicious of empirical work in ethics: my general instinct is to be less interested in what people actually think or do or want than in what they ought to think or do or want.  But it’s also true that empirical work can confirm or cast doubt on predictions about how a moral claim or policy is received or implemented - it has a role to play in assessing “pure” - or “armchair”, if you prefer - ethics.  It can help us survey the ethical landscape.  And, every now and then, it can reveal something that makes you go wow.

Rosie Steele’s paper in this latest JME is one of those.  It compares attitudes to abortion among medical students in Northern Ireland and Norway, and there’s some incredible results.  Of cultural interest is the number of students in either case who profess a religious belief.  Now, that Norn Iron should have more people describing themselves as religious than Norway isn’t entirely a surprise: anyone who’s even half awake has probably noticed that religion plays a bigger part in everyday life in Ulster than in most other places.  But it’s nevertheless a surprise to see just how big the difference is: almost half of the Oslo students claimed no religious affliliation, while only 5% of those in Belfast made a similar claim.

That abortions are much harder to get in Northern Ireland than in Norway doubtless goes some way to explain the finding that “students at [Oslo] were much more likely to have seen an abortion during their training than those at [Belfast]” - there’re fewer to see, I’d guess.  Nevertheless,

[h]alf of the students at [Belfast] would be unwilling to watch an abortion. However, the [Belfast] students stated that abortion had not been adequately covered during their medical school teaching.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons.  One has to do with the question of willingness, and what difference that makes.  Granted that it’s hard to force students to observe a given procedure, there’s still an interesting question to be asked about the scope of the right to opt out.  Would it be permissible to say, “You want to be a medic; this is a medical procedure; your private conscience cannot hold the curriculum hostage”, or should there be an opt-out for students who don’t want to learn about things?  (Or to practice them, for that matter…)  After all, it’s possible that at some stage in a doctor’s career there’ll be cause to perform an abortion - possibly in an emergency situation, for example - and it doesn’t seem too wild to suppose that at least a basic idea of what goes where is the sort of thing that we might expect.  I do wonder how students expect to be better taught about abortion if they’re unwilling to observe one, too - although that musing is tempered by the thought that, perhaps, if there was better or more teaching about the procedure they’d be more willing at least to observe it in practice.

Steele’s paper concludes:

This study demonstrates considerable differences in attitudes between medical students at [Oslo] and [Belfast], with 78.2% of the [Oslo] students being pro-abortion versus only 14.3% of the [Belfast] students. The majority of participants from [Oslo] were in favour of abortion for all scenarios relating to the mother and fetus. Students at [Belfast] seemed to agree more readily with abortion when they did not perceive the situation to be the woman’s responsibility—for example, when there is a threat to her life or health or she has been a raped. For less serious conditions relating to mother and fetus, the [Belfast] students were less likely to be in favour of abortion. These differences probably reflect the differing religious, legal and educational experiences of the two groups of students.

The nice thing about a blog is that I can speculate without having to produce too much evidence - and so I’ll end by responding to that conclusion with one word: Probably?

Not so long ago, I blogged about the government’s stupid-and-scary response to the drubbing it got at the ECHR concerning the retention of genetic information gathered from arrestees.

It would appear that the police have managed to make the policy even more dispiriting than it was already: they’re arresting people in order that they can obtain their DNA.  Quoted in the Telegraph, an unnamed officer (and if I was going to say anything this imbecilic, I’d want to dissociate my name from it if at all possible as well) says

[i]t is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy. If you know you have had your DNA taken and it is on a database then you will think twice about committing burglary for a living.  We are often told that we have just one chance to get that DNA sample and if we miss it then that might mean a rape or a murder goes unsolved in the future.

Oh, come off it.  Notice how in one sentence he says that a DNA database is preventative - because that’s really how most criminals work, isn’t it, Columbo? - and in the next he all but admits that it isn’t.

Anders Sandberg has fun taking apart some of the government’s claims about the use of retained genetic information: he’s suspicious of the idea that 1 crime in 15 is solved using genetic information.  I agree with him that this does seem a bit high, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.  I can see how that might work - though it implies that the forensic science bods are remarkably busy with genes.

But the larger point remains this: while (as Anders admits) there might be a reason to have everyone’s DNA stored on the database, it’s not obvious either that it’d be all that good a way of preventing crime, or that it’d feature in the sort of world we’d want to inhabit anyway.  

That promise was to observe the difference between academic ethics and activism, and to eschew the latter.

But please, please, please take a couple of minutes to read this article and the statement that goes with it, and then to sign the petition.

This is not about putting the boot into the British Chiropractic Association.  It’s about preventing the BCA - or anyone else - putting the boot into people who publicly and in good faith dispute their scientific claims.  It’s not about saying that Singh was correct in his criticism; it’s about his - or anyone else’s - right to test others’ claims in case they’re mistaken or misleading.  It’s about the manifest injustice of the well-funded being able not only to refuse to play the scientific scrutiny game, but also to stop others playing it.

We all know the “open future” argument against genetic modification of humans: that it’s part of being a human that we are apparently in control of our own lives and that a parent who tried to impose a “model” on us would thereby wrong us.  I’ve never been sure, in all honesty, whether this tells us about the morality of engineering kids genetically, or about the morality of being a very pushy parent - but, in a sense, it doesn’t much matter.  Closing down an open future might well be morally problematic.

Having said that, xkcd explains the upside…

If you know what is going to happen in bioethics in the future here is the competition for you, courtesy of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Ethics. more…

I don’t think that anyone has mentioned the increasingly curious Suleman octuplet story yet on this blog.  So I’ll just quickly point out that Nadya Suleman has - obviously - a website, on which she asks for comments and - erm - donations.

If someone could tell me what to think about this in a sane and clear way, I’d appreciate it.

Enough with one child per family, already - let the kids smoke themselves into population control…

Apologies for having to link it: I can’t seem to get LiveLeak to embed.  I fail at computer.

(Thanks to Garen FD for the pointer.)