By Omar F. Mirza, Yekaterina Angelova, Marie S. Thearle, Gregg A Robbins-Welty, and Stephanie Cheung Informed consent is part of the bedrock of clinical ethics. Composed of voluntariness, disclosure, and capacity, informed consent is designed to center the patient in their own care amidst an asymmetric power dyad that can easily overpower individual choice. Despite […]
Category: Justice
Global Bioethics and Global Health in the Context of a New Antidemocratic Era
by Gabriela Arguedas-Ramírez Five years ago, I wrote an editorial arguing that authoritarian and right-wing populism were a threat to global health and bioethics. Early this year, with colleagues from the US and the UK, we published a piece about pandemics, bioethics and populism. Since then, the global scenario has become dreadfully worse. What began […]
USAID Cuts: A Moral Failure
By G. Owen Schaefer The effects of recent massive cuts to USAID are still unfolding, but the likely catastrophic consequences for the globe are evident. A recent analysis estimated that the program prevented over 90 million deaths in the past two decades due to efforts in treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other […]
The Fence Around Us: How India’s Medical System Enables Cultural Misogyny
By Anonymous* A baby girl starved to death in a South Indian hospital. No one was held accountable. I first heard about her during a forensic medicine lecture on starvation. The regular faculty were away, so a professor from a different specialty stepped in. As she listed various types of starvation, she paused to reflect […]
Why health inequality is not good enough
By Lasse Nielsen. Mildred and Meagan lead different lives. Mildred resides in an affluent and socially privileged neighbourhood, comes from a higher-middle-income household and is out of a well-educated family. Meagan, on the other hand, is from a non-educated, working-class background, out of a low-income family and lives in a much less salubrious area. What […]
Would a generational smoking ban create a discriminatory, ‘two-tier’ society?
By Johannes Kniess In the year before the 2024 election, few would have predicted that PM Rishi Sunak’s flagship policy wouldn’t be about taxes or Brexit, but about cigarettes. Under the ‘smoke-free generation’ bill, people born in or after 2009 would never be able to legally buy cigarettes. Those born before that year would remain […]
The War in Gaza and its Effects on Israelis
By Zohar Lederman The ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza (and to a lesser degree in the West Bank) is morally abhorrent and is in clear and undeniable violation of international humanitarian law. The war and its effects on Palestinians have been largely ignored by bioethicists, and the little that has been published is mostly […]
The ethics of age-selective restrictions for COVID-19 control
By Bridget Williams, James Cameron, James Trauer, Ben Marais, Romain Ragonnet and Julian Savulescu. One of the major controversies of the COVID-19 pandemic has been disagreement about whether age-selective measures should be introduced, with greater focus on preventing infection in older people but tolerance of some transmission amongst younger people. Some have advocated a path […]
Pandemic prioritarianism: what can we learn from Covid-19?
By Lasse Nielsen. Medical ethics have to learn from actual ethical experiences from the medical practice. The relevant interpretation and application of ethical theories must adhere to issues and questions that arise in clinical practice, and oftentimes we find that our intuitions about practical matters do not fit our theories and principles. In these cases, […]
Prioritizing justice in ventilator allocation
By L. Syd M Johnson As the Covid-19 pandemic intensified worldwide, grim reports out of Italy’s embattled and overwhelmed hospitals foretold the need to plan for rationing ventilators in the event that the number of patients requiring them exceeded the number available. Hospitals, ethics committees, and government agencies around the US began planning for the […]