Human Rights Watch is reporting that Brazil is in the process of formulating a law that will give “‘absolute priority’ to the rights of the fertilized ovum”. The proposed bill would require any act or omission that could in any way have a negative impact on a fertilized ovum to be considered illegal. The bill […]
Latest articles
The Backward QALY
There’s an intriguing paper in May’s JME by Christopher Cowley in which he proposes a “retrospective QALY”. […]
Official: The M-Cat is Dead.
So – remember those deaths that were linked to mephedrone use? The ones that started a moral panic and that led to the erstwhile government banning the drug in a desperate attempt to curry favour with the tabloids in the fag-end of the Parliament? Yep – those ones. Well, it turns out that Wainwright and […]
Latest Statistics on Abortion in England and Wales…
… available here. […]
Risking Censure, and the Ontology of Misconduct
An article in a recent BMJ has caught my eye: Yates and James’ “Risk Factors at Medical School for Subsequent Professional Misconduct: Multicentre Retrospective Case-Control Study”. Based on an admittedly-small sample, it suggests that male sex, lower estimated social class, and poor early performance at medical school were independent risk factors for subsequent professional misconduct. […]
Age and Assisted Death in Scotland
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; […]
Consent and Consensus
For the past week, the news in the UK has been all about coalitions, compromise, consensus and that sort of thing. The hung Parliament has been heralded as ushering in a new era of politics-by-agreement, rather than by the traditional Westminster model of simply flattening everyone else. And a lot of people seem to think […]
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 […]
Conference and Public Lecture: Humans and Other Animals
Details below the fold, or from here. […]
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 […]