The Scottish Parliament recently sought evidence in relation to the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill; I responded to that call, and most of what I said would not be new to people who know me, or who read this blog. However, I did make a point there that I’ve not given an outing before; […]
Category: Life and Death
More on the Oklahoma Abortion Law
A couple of weeks ago, I posted something here about the progress of a handful of Bills working their way through the Oklahoma legislature that would, among other things, require that women have an unnecessary scan – potentially internal – before being allowed an abortion. I think that the proposals are pretty much indefensible. Not […]
Oklahoma, OK?
Roe v Wade ensured that women in the US had a constitutionally-guaranteed right to abortion protection from interference in decisions to terminate their pregnancy. What it didn’t do, though, was ensure that women could access an abortion easily. This means that there’s a number of means by which laws can be passed that make it extraordinarily […]
You and Me and Baby Makes more than Three
News emerged last night of a new technique for avoiding mitochondrial disease. From what I can tell, the technique looks like a version of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, and it involves removing the nucleus from a fertilised egg and placing it into an enucleated donor egg. Doing this means that any problems with the mitochondria […]
Don’t Go Outside… You Might Break the Baby
A couple of days ago, I made a post about Nicaragua’s abortion laws and their – ahem – unfortunate consequences. However, it would appear that the atmosphere that generated them is a model of liberalism in comparison to the atmosphere further north. I have in mind here Utah’s Criminal Homicide and Abortion Amendments (HB12), recently passed […]
DPP on Assisted Suicide, Redux
The Director of Public Prosecutions published his guidelines on assisted suicide yesterday, after consultation on the provisional guidelines that I discussed here. The most recent publication is slightly different from the consultation version and the full list of considerations is available here. Most of the considerations strike me as being well-intentioned, and pretty inoffensive – […]
Nicaragua’s Abortion Law and the Moral Cost of Saving Lives
Regardless of where you stand on questions about the permissibility of abortion, the nature of the debate is much less polarised than it would seem. Pro-choice types are perfectly capable of admitting that abortions are matters of regret in their own terms; pro-lifers, overwhelmingly, will admit that there are times when the termination of a […]
Terry Pratchett Shakes Hands with Death
This is probably a bit de trop, because I suspect that many watched it as broadcast – but those who haven’t seen Terry Pratchett‘s Dimbleby Lecture can watch it here; I believe that most things on the iplayer get taken down after a while, but I can’t see any indication of there being a limited […]
On the Lack of Socialised Healthcare
It’s very easy for a European to feel very smug about socialised medicine. Maybe the American system isn’t as bad as all that. Maybe we should be a bit more open about its merits. And maybe we should, in the process, ignore cases like that of JoAnn Knutson. Knutson was 72, and had a fall […]
Killing, Letting Die, and Epistemology
David Shoemaker has an interesting post on PEASoup about the epistemology of advance directives. Starting from a fairly standard thought-experiment about an older, dementing person who wants to accept treatment that her younger, pre-demented person had refused, he adds to the standard metaphysical arguments a claim that the real puzzle for ADs isn’t metaphysical, it’s […]