With any luck, the nuts real-world work schedule of the past few months* will begin to ease in a few days, so I should be able to start blogging more frequently soon; but I thought I’d take a moment out from writing jurisprudence lectures to do some thinking out loud about Belgium’s recent change to […]
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The Definition of Mental Disorder: Evolving but Dysfunctional?
Guest post by Rachel Bingham In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the official classification of ‘mental disorders’. This was the result of a successful public campaign and changing political views. Yet, if homosexuality could be (wrongly) diagnosed as a mental disorder – using an official classification – what does this say about […]
Medical Information for Sale?
Reader Keith emailed me a week or so ago to tip me off about the government’s plans to allow private firms to access medical information. It’s a story that has subsequently been picked up by – inter alia – The Guardian. As with the last post I made here, I’m going to have to cry off from saying […]
Sex-Selection and Abortion: Is there a Problem?
This is just a quick post, and it’s mainly to draw your attention to a couple of other posts worth reading elsewhere. A little background: there’s been a minor fuss* in the media over the last few days concerning sex-specific abortion**, after The Independent reported that [t]he practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that […]
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 […]
Some stories, if true,
just don’t need additional comment: The Italian woman was sedated and her baby delivered against her will, after Essex social services obtained a court order in August 2012 for the birth “to be enforced by way of caesarean section”. […] After the C-section, the woman, who has two other children and is divorced, was sent […]
From the File Marked “This Can’t End Well”
… and cross-referenced with the file marked “You Wouldn’t Let It Lie”. Francesca Minerva has a paper in Bioethics in which she refers – none-too-obliquely – to the furore surrounding The Paper Of Which We Do Not Speak. Her central claim is that there is a threat to academic freedom posed by modern communications, inasmuch […]
Genes and Confidentiality: Tricky!*
A couple of weeks ago, the D–ly M–l** asked me to comment on the Personal Genome Project‘s call for 100 000 volunteers who’d be willing to have their DNA sequenced so that it could be correlated with their health records and used as a tool for research. As it happens, my peals of wisdom never made […]
Call for Participants: Evolution or Revolution? The Biomaterials Property Debate and Changing Ethical, Legal, and Social Norms
Over the past thirty years, there has been considerable debate over the legal status of human body parts. While the body and biomaterials were traditionally considered to be outside of the realm of property in common law jurisdictions, recent legal decisions have challenged this. There has been a gradual shift towards recognition of some proprietary […]