By Megan Dean, Laura Guidry-Grimes and Elizabeth Victor. Do you know what’s in your food? Food is a site of physical and epistemic vulnerability for us all–we rely on often invisible others to produce, store, transport, prepare, and serve our food safely, without contamination or adulteration, and to be honest and accurate when describing and […]
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A bird in the hand or two in the bush? On ethics of HCV screening in pregnancy
By Marielle Gross. Since the beginning of my medical career, the American opioid crisis-turned-epidemic made nearly daily headlines. It reflected a complex set of challenges for our healthcare system which concern me not only as a physician and surgeon, but as a bioethicist focused on dismantling “prejudice-based medicine.” It is a perfect storm of moneyed […]
How should we regulate child sex robots: restriction or experimentation?
By John Danaher This post is part of a series on ethical and legal perspectives in sexual and reproductive health first posted on the BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health blog. In 2017, the Crown Prosecution Services (CPS) decided to clamp down on the importation of child sex dolls into the UK. In doing so, they faced […]
Justifying the Consequences of Trainee Medicine
By Connor Brenna and Sunit Das. Are we doing the best we can for our patients? At face-value, this seems to be a straightforward (albeit broad) question. In this piece, we dive deeper into the ethics of trainee medicine to find that the answer is really contingent on how one interprets who it is that […]
Conscientious objection and professional interpreters working in healthcare settings
By Nathan Emmerich and Christine Phillips. If one knows anything about the recent literature on conscientious objection in healthcare it is that there is a lot of it. Indeed, in the past few months two different journals have published special issues on the topic. Whilst this coverage is to be welcomed, and this complex topic […]
Should pregnant women pay for non-invasive prenatal testing?
By Eline M. Bunnik & Adriana Kater-Kuipers. Today, pregnant women can use non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) in the first trimester of their pregnancy to screen for chromosomal abnormalities. NIPT requires only a blood draw, is more reliable than previous screening modalities, and leads to fewer false positive results, thus saving women from unnecessary invasive follow-up […]
The Subjects of Ectogenesis: Are “Gestatelings” Fetuses, Newborns, or Neither?
By Nick Colgrove Artificial womb technology is not (yet) available for use on human subjects. It may become available in the near future, however. Should artificial womb technology be made available for use on human subjects, one might wonder: What is the nature of the subjects inside of artificial wombs? Are they fetuses, newborns, or […]
Should the more severely ill get priority?
By Daniel M. Hausman. According to surveys most of the population in many countries maintain that health policy should favour treating those who are more severely ill, even if the benefit to them is somewhat less than the benefit the same resources could have provided to those who are less severely ill. Most bioethicists who […]
Mandatory Reporting in Sports Medicine
By Amanda Szabo & Zachary Winkelmann. Athletic trainers (ATs) are sports medicine healthcare professional who are in continuous contact with patients, typically adolescents. While ATs are typically familiar with the legal obligations in the United States to provide the proper standard of care to their patients and are familiar with state practice acts regarding services […]
Charging migrant women for pregnancy care is a worrying sign of the times
By Arianne Shahvisi and Fionnuala Finnerty Precious is a 26-year-old Eritrean woman who has recently arrived in the UK. She wishes to apply for asylum but is yet to do so. Precious is destitute and is living in a church and relying on the kindness of the Eritrean community. She sees a GP at an […]