Guest post by Sandi Dheensa, Angela Fenwick and Anneke Lucassen Imagine you’re a clinician in genetic medicine. For a while, you’ve been seeing Joe Bloggs, a patient with a mutation in a gene that’s caused a hereditary form of colon cancer. As is your standard practice, you help Joe identify who in his family is also […]
Category: Guest Post
Recent Attempts to Restrict the Abortion Law in Poland: A Commentary
Guest post by Dr Atina Krajewska, University of Sheffield A couple of weeks ago news hit the headlines about attempts to introduce a total ban on abortion in Poland. The legislative proposal that caused outrange among women’s rights organisations has been drafted by a citizen’s initiative, “Stop Abortion”, and is the fourth attempt to restrict abortion […]
No to Conscientious Objection Accommodation in Health Care
Guest post by Udo Schuklenk Canada is currently in the midst of a national debate about the scope of assisted dying regulations and policies. It’s a result of a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that declared parts of the country’s Criminal Code null and void that criminalises assisted dying. As you would expect, there is a […]
How We Feel about Human Cloning
Guest post by Joshua May Suppose you desperately want a healthy child to build a family of your own. As is increasingly common, however, you can’t do it naturally – whether from infertility, a genetic disease you don’t want to pass on, or a non-traditional relationship. If you seek a genetic connection with the child, […]
Nurses Cannot be Good Catholics
Guest Post by John Olusegun Adenitire It seems that if you are a nurse you cannot be a good Catholic. Or, better: if you want to work as a nurse then you might have to give up some of your religious beliefs. A relatively recent decision of the UK Supreme Court, the highest court in the […]
The Curious Case of Informed Consent for Egg Donation
Guest Post by Alana Rose Cattapan As Michael Dunn writes in a recent editorial for the JME, “no medical ethicist worth their salt would deny that consent is a foundational concept in contemporary medical ethics,” and it is an extraordinary understatement to say that much ink has been spilled on the topic. The spaces between […]
Should Doctors Perform “Minor” Forms of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a Compromise to Respect Culture?
by Brian D. Earp / (@briandavidearp), with a separate guest post by Robert Darby A small surgical “nick” to a girl’s clitoris or other purportedly minimalist procedures on the vulvae of young women and girls should be legally permitted, argue two gynecologists this week in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Their proposal is offered as a “compromise” […]
A Tool to Help Address Key Ethical Issues in Research
Guest post by Rebecca H. Li and Holly Fernandez Lynch One of the most important responsibilities of a clinical project lead at a biotech company or an academic research team is to generate clinical trial protocols. The protocol dictates how a trial will be conducted and details background information on prior research, scientific objectives, study […]
Zika, Gandhi and the CDC
Guest Post by Agomoni Ganguli Mitra Three pieces of news over the last weeks particularly troubled me. In the first, and perhaps most radical of them all, Latin American governments began to urge women not to become pregnant over the next couple of years, as a public health measure to restrict the number of children […]
Controversial Views on “FGM”
by Brian D. Earp / (@briandavidearp), with a separate guest post by Matthew Johnson Even the term is controversial. Female genital mutilation/FGM? Many women from societies that practice such traditional initiation rites find the term offensive. Female genital alteration? But that could refer to a wide range of procedures, including some that might be medically advised. Female […]