By Ilaria Bertini. Finally last week, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill drafted by Kim Leadbeater MP has been published ahead of the Second Reading debate and vote on 29 November 2024. The proposed law on physician assisted dying (PAD) is mooted as being one of the strictest in the world in ensuring […]
Category: Life and Death
What does it mean to diagnose and live with cancer risk?
By Elspeth Davies In the past, people only became patients when they felt unwell and visited their doctor in search of remedies. In recent decades, a shift towards prevention in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has meant that people can become patients on the basis of their future risk of disease, rather than only […]
Grieving those frozen between life and death
By Robin Hillenbrink. This paper was inspired by a 2019 documentary about the youngest person to ever be cryopreserved. The documentary, “Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice” , tells the story of a Thai Buddhist couple who decide to cryopreserve their 2-year-old daughter Einz, after she passes away from brain cancer. Cryopreservation, or cryonics, […]
Urgency, Delayed Decision-making and Ethics in the Court of Protection
By Dominic Wilkinson. [Cross post from the Practical Ethics blog] On 11th June 2021, I was a public observer (via MS Teams) of a case in the Court of Protection: Case No. 1375980T Re GU (also blogged about by Jenny Kitzinger here). The case was (though I did not know it beforehand) related closely to issues that I […]
Up close and personal: Using AI to predict patient preferences?
By Nikola Biller-Andorno. Have you ever tried to put together a ballpoint pen that has fallen apart? Or, more ambitiously, tried to repair your child’s programmable toy robot that continues to bump into walls? There is nothing like building, taking apart and rebuilding to understand a gadget or system’s flaws and weaknesses. This is what […]
Why ‘gestaticide’ is morally equivalent to infanticide
By Daniel Rodger, Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce P. Blackshaw Artificial womb technology may one day permit a fetus to be surgically removed from its mother’s body and placed into an artificial environment, mimicking life in utero. Following Elizabeth Chloe Romanis, let’s call the subjects living inside artificial wombs ‘gestatelings.’ An important question that arises is how […]
Supreme Court rules on the first prosecution of a Dutch doctor since the euthanasia act
Eva C.A. Asscher and Suzanne van de Vathorst. On April 21st the Supreme Court passed judgement on the case of the first doctor to be prosecuted since the 2002 Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act. In September 2019 a Dutch nursing home doctor performing euthanasia on a patient with severe […]
Having a possible escape to end life at your own timing offers reassurance and changes the perspective on current and prospective suffering
By Martijn Hagens. In a recent blog, Ben Colburn discusses that ‘the option of assisted dying is good for you even if you don’t want to die. In the paper related to that blog, he argues that “if someone knows they have a (potentially) acceptable escape, it changes the character of the choice set as a […]
Can survival be a harm? The German Federal Court of Justice rules on a claim for damages after life-sustaining treatment
Ulrich Pfeifer and Ruth Horn. Should it be permissible to convict a doctor who has performed life-sustaining treatment (LST) without medical indication? At first sight, the answer seems obvious: a medical intervention is only lawful if there is 1) valid consent and 2) a medical necessity that is medical indication. In the absence of either […]
Revisiting the lessons of Frankenstein
By Julian Koplin & John Massie The story of Frankenstein came to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in a nightmare. It was a miserable, wet summer in 1816, and Mary Shelley was visiting the poet Lord Byron with her sister, Claire Clairmont, and her soon-to-be husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They spend much of the summer […]