Authors: Anna Smajdor, Daniela Cutas and Tuija Takala Article: Artificial gametes, the unnatural and the artefactual Increasingly, science offers new ways for human beings to design, create and control living organisms. Among other avenues of research, work towards the creation of ‘artificial’ (or, as they used to be called, ‘synthetic’) gametes has attracted considerable media attention […]
Category: Reproduction
Guest Post: Lesbian Motherhood and Mitochondrial Replacement Techniques: Reproductive Freedom and Genetic Kinship
Authors Giulia Cavaliere, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London César Palacios-González, Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, Dickson Poon School od Law, King’s College London Full Paper: Lesbian Motherhood and Mitochondrial Replacement Techniques: Reproductive Freedom and Genetic Kinship [open access] Since the UK parliamentary vote that led to their approval in February […]
Toby Young, Eugenics, IQ, and the Poor (part 2)
By Iain Brassington Having staked out the claim in my last post that even if Toby Young’s claims about intelligence and embryo selection in his essay are eugenic, that’s not the end of the moral argument, I’m now going to have a quick look at the reasons why I think his claim does fail. The roots of […]
Toby Young, Eugenics, IQ, and the Poor (part 1)
By Iain Brassington The response to Toby Young’s appointment to the new Office for Students has covered the whole range from “He’s not the best person for the job” to “He’s the worst person for the job”. Some of the reasons offered have to do with unsavoury comments about women; some have to do with his […]
Ethics of Fertility Preservation for Prepubertal Children: Should Clinicians Offer Procedures Where Efficacy is Largely Unproven?
Guest Post: Rosalind J McDougall, Lynn Gillam, Clare Delany, Yasmin Jayasinghe Article: Ethics of fertility preservation for prepubertal children: should clinicians offer procedures where efficacy is largely unproven? Should we offer a procedure with so little evidence? Isn’t it burdening a sick child without real justification? But it’s often low risk – if we don’t offer, are we depriving the […]
“Top of the Lake” may Sink as a Procedural, but Look Beneath the Surface
By Iain Brassington A couple of weeks ago, BioNews invited me to review Top of the Lake; but since it’s relevant to the kinds of things that appear in the JME, I thought I’d repost it here. There’s a moment in the final episode of this second series of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake where Nicole […]
Chappell on Midwives and Regulation
Richard Yetter Chappell has drawn my attention to this – a blog post in which he bemoans the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s rules about indemnity insurance, and the effects that they’ll have on independent midwives. (I’d never heard of independent midwives – but an IM – according to Independent Midwives UK – is “a fully […]
Are Single Men in the UK Entitled to have a Baby using Fertility Treatment?
Guest post by Atina Krajewska, Rachel Cahill-O’Callaghan, and Melanie Fellowes The World Health Organisation is currently considering a change in the definition of infertility according to which, it has been reported, “single men and women without medical issues [would] be classed as ‘infertile’, if they do not have children but want to become a parent.” Although […]
Natal Nativism
Scene: the boardroom of a large NHS Trust, somewhere in England. “And so that brings us neatly to the last item on the agenda: passport checks for pregnant women who want a checkup. The thing is, you see, that it turns out that we’ve been providing obstetric care to some women who aren’t actually UK citizens. […]
A World Without Bioethicists? On Sally Phillip’s “A World Without Down’s”
Guest Post by Nathan Emmerich, Queen’s University Belfast On Wednesday night, BBC2 broadcast a documentary entitled ‘A World Without Down’s Syndrome?’ Even if you did not see the programme itself, you may have heard about it on the radio, read some of the commentary published over the past week, or spotted it on Twitter under the […]