You may have seen in the news recently the story of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two sisters in Mississippi serving a life prison sentence for armed robbery. Jamie requires dialysis, and has been offered parole on medical grounds; Gladys has been granted parole on condition that she agree to donate a kidney to her sister. (The […]
Category: Life and Death
Two Fathers… and an Inflated Role for Genes?
This is interesting: researchers in Texas are reporting that they’ve generated viable mice with two genetic fathers. The science makes my head hurt, but PZ Myers gives a decent précis (although it’s still a bit long to reproduce here, and I’m not going to attempt even to give a précis of the précis). The technology […]
Conference Report: Consent and Organ Donation Seminar, Keele
Guest post by Sorcha Uí Chonnachtaigh On Thursday, 9 December, the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele hosted a Wellcome funded seminar entitled “Consent and Organ Donation” to coincide with the final lecture in a series on organ donation by visiting Leverhulme Professor Martin Wilkinson. Martin’s lecture on Wednesday evening (8 December), “Reforms for the […]
Assisted Dying Killed off in Scotland
Members of the Scottish Parliament have overwhelmingly rejected Margo MacDonald’s Assistance in Dying Bill, by 85 votes to 16 – which is about as crushing as I think you can get. The Scotsman reports Nicola Sturgeon as saying that I find myself particularly concerned and fundamentally concerned about the difficulty I think would always and […]
Say what you like about the Nazis, but…
Here’s something that occurred to me in the small hours about the argumentum ad hitlerum as it gets applied to the euthanasia dispute. Proponents of the argument point to what happened in the Third Reich as a warning about euthanasia, the claim being that the Nazi so-called euthanasia programme led to the involuntary deaths of many […]
The Anti-Abortion Appropriation of Consent
By far the biggest response that this blog has had came when I had a bit of a rant about Nadine Dorries a couple of weeks ago. I’m back on her case today; she’s the gift that keeps on giving. This video* provides footage of her speech to the Commons on Tuesday night; there’s a transcript available […]
Odone and the CPS: Scaremongering about Euthanasia
The Centre for Policy Studies has recently published a report on euthanasia, authored by Cristina Odone. It’s available to download here, though it would seem that you can also buy a paper version for a tenner. It’s amazing for the sheer poverty of the argument; I might never have thought that so much specious nonsense […]
Egregious Silliness in the Euthanasia Debate…
There’s a report in the Montreal Gazette from last Thursday concerning proposals to legalise euthanasia. And, assuming that the report is accurate, some of the things being said about those proposals are painfully, painfully, painfully daft. Margaret Somerville’s objection to euthanasia seems to be that it is killing, and that killing remains morally wrong “even […]
The Nobel Prize and the Holy See
Robert Edwrds was this week awarded a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on IVF. It’s true, of course, that IVF made possible a range of procedures that generate important ethical questions – Arthur Caplan mentions some of them here (although the article in which he’s quoted is a little lightweight, and gives altogether too much […]
Brain Death, Decapitation and Good Arguments
One of the complaints that I’ve heard made about the JME is that its papers are too short: a word limit of only 3500 words means that arguments have to undergo a process of severe shrinkage to fit, and at least sometimes don’t survive. Sympathetic as I am to the complaint, I’m also aware that […]