… there’s this, from last week’s Independent: Thousands of unborn foetuses incinerated to heat UK hospitals The bodies of more than 15,000 unborn foetuses have been incinerated in the UK, an investigation has found, with some treated as “clinical waste” and others burned to heat hospitals. The practice was carried out by 27 NHS trusts, […]
Category: Politics
Who’s the SilLIer?
It’s funny how things come together sometimes. A few months ago, I mentioned a slightly strange JAMA paper that suggested that non-compliance with treatment regimes should be treated as a treatable condition in its own right. The subtext there was fairly clear: that there’s potential scope for what we might term “psychiatric mission-creep”, whereby behaviour gets […]
Identity and IVF
It’s good to see that Stephen Latham is blogging again after a short hiatus; and he’s come back with a really thought-provoking post on IVF and problems of identity. The background is this: apparently, there is evidence that children conceived by IVF are at an elevated risk of health problems compared to kids conceived naturally: […]
Welcome to Britain.
It having been a long time since my last post, and this being the season of good-will, I wasn’t going to comment on the government’s new policy of charging migrants for A&E services. Noone needs that kind of spleen on a dreich Monday; besides: I’ve got a PhD thesis that needs assessing, and a bathroom […]
Drug Legalisation in Uruguay: Opening up Pandora’s Box
Guest post by Melissa Bone, University of Manchester Uruguay is poised to become the first country in the world to legalise and regulate the sale of cannabis for recreational use. On the 31st July 2013 a draft bill legalising cannabis was passed by members of Uruguay’s lower house of congress, where 50 out of a […]
Say twenty hail Autonomy’s and reflect on what you have done – bioethicists as having some, but not priestly authority.
By David Hunter Nathan Emmerich, occasional commentator here at the JME blog has recently published an interesting piece in the Guardian which argues against us taking bioethicists as having a particular type of expertise. While I enjoyed and agree with much of what he argues I do have a couple of quibbles – in particular […]
Are Biomedical Ethics Journals Institutionally Racist?
So there’s this letter published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry that moots the idea that the top biomedical ethics journals might be institutionally racist. In it, Subrata Chattopadhyay, Catherine Myser and Raymond De Vries point out that the editorial boards of a good number of journals are dominated by members who are located in the global North – countries officially listed as […]
Torture and Fitness to Practise
I’m running a bit late with this, but the BMJ reported last week that Mohammed Al-Byati had been suspended from the medical register for 12 months for complicity in torture. So far, the decision hasn’t been uploaded to the list of Fitness to Practise decisions, but the outline of the case is available here, on the […]
But that’s not what it says, is it?
Today’s blast of righteous indignation is directed towards New Mexico. House Bill 206 says, in essence, that… well, it’s short, so here it is in full: HOUSE BILL 206 51ST LEGISLATURE – STATE OF NEW MEXICO – FIRST SESSION, 2013 INTRODUCED BY Cathrynn N. Brown AN ACT RELATING TO CRIMINAL LAW; SPECIFYING PROCURING OF AN ABORTION AS TAMPERING WITH EVIDENCE IN CASES […]
Cochlear Implants and Minority Cultures
A bit more on the cochlear implant thing that I’ve been mentioning off and on for the past couple of months. William Mager posted a link to something a little while ago on why some members of the deaf community are against CIs. This attitude had always puzzled me. Anyway, this, by Christina Hartmann, is the […]