By Anthony McCarthy Some women regret their abortions. Does this tell us anything interesting about whether abortion is, morally or prudentially, a choice worth making? A number of empirical papers have assessed the prevalence of abortion regret, reporting that a large majority of women do not regret their abortions. While use of the Turnaway Study data […]
Latest articles
Re-thinking consent for treatment: clinical interests and the public interest
By Abeezar I. Sarela. In its recent guidance on consent, the General Medical Council (GMC) advises doctors to not provide treatment that ‘you (the doctor) don’t think would be in their (the patient’s) clinical interests’. It follows that doctors should only provide treatments that are in the patient’s clinical interests. But, what exactly is meant […]
Have ethicists overlooked obvious benefits of financial incentives for antipsychotics?
By Nathan Hodson. It is late evening on an acute psychiatry ward and I’m the on-call doctor responsible for clerking a new patient with acute psychosis. I look in the notes and see that despite a history of detention for paranoid schizophrenia, he has been well on an antipsychotic depot for 5 years. Why relapse […]
It seems important to study public values regarding priority setting principles, but why exactly?
By Erik Gustavsson and Lars Lindblom. If you visit a conference or workshop on priority setting there will most certainly be several slots on empirical studies exploring public values about principles for priority setting. Over the last 20 years, there has been numerous such studies, and the interest among researchers to perform such studies accentuated […]
The furore around whole bodily gestational donation: a tale of misplaced anger?
By Anna Nelson. Prompted by a sensationalist headline in the Daily Mail, there has been a furore on social media around an article published last year by bioethicist Anna Smajdor in which she defends ‘Whole Bodily Gestational Donation’ (WBGD). Put simply WBGD means that, with prior consent, the bodies of women in a permanent vegetative […]
Developing an honesty test for doctors
By Daniel Sokol. When not working as a barrister, I teach medical ethics to doctors who are going through disciplinary proceedings. The majority are in trouble because of dishonest conduct. They may have lied on a job application, cheated in a membership exam, or forged a document for personal gain. Medical Practitioners Tribunals have often […]
Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and doctors’ conscientious commitment to provide abortion care
By Alberto Giubilini, Udo Schuklenk, Francesca Minerva. Julian Savulescu. The reversal of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling by the US Supreme Court in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed the Constitutional protection of women’s right to access abortion services in the US. This decision has resulted in renewed interest in the […]
Housestaff unionization in the United States and our duties to each other
By Karel-Bart Celie. In a recent issue of JAMA, Ahmed et al. published data on healthcare unionization in the United States between 2009 and 2021. Despite the observed association between unionization and higher wages, better benefits, and more equitable compensation, unionization among healthcare workers has evidently remained low. Richman and Schulman (R&S) wrote a commentary […]
What’s the big deal with ‘whole body gestational donation’? On defending bioethics
By J. Y. Lee. Over the past week, a flurry of articles on the internet (for example: 1, 2, 3) sensationalized the contents of a journal article published by philosopher Anna Smadjor, on what she calls “Whole body gestational donation” – with discussants on social media largely condemning the proposed concept, and implying that “bioethics” […]
Reassessing the “VaxTax”
By Nathan Petrovic. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that inequalities are still a worldwide problem concerning healthcare, especially regarding the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. As more affluent countries bought massive stocks of vaccines, lower and middle income (LMICs) countries struggled to gather enough vaccines. To counteract this predicament, Albertsen and Germani et al. have proposed […]