By Rebecca Bennett and Catherine Bowden Since a link was established between alcohol consumption in pregnancy and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) there have been attempts to reduce women’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy. As a result, many jurisdictions, including the UK have taken what is called ‘abstinence only approach’ as the basis for all policies […]
Latest articles
Pandemic political strategy – an impossible comparison?
By Rhea Mittal. One of the greatest assets of a nation is the health of its citizens, and this is inextricably linked with governance. In a COVID-19 era, the impact and diversity of political strategy in relation to health outcomes has been demonstrated on a global level. The 2019 Varsity Medical Ethics Debate was on […]
Should doctors help patients import medicines?
By Narcyz Ghinea. In the mid 2010s, breakthrough medicines that promised to cure hepatitis C came onto the market. The catch was, the pharmaceutical company Gilead set the price of up to £70 000 for a 3-month course of treatment. No government would pay that much given the number of people with hepatitis C. In the […]
Thinking critically about race and ethnicity in biomedical research
By Bradley Kawano. As a senior at Occidental College, I had the privilege to hear Rev. William Barber deliver a speech on race and the political divide in the U.S. Speaking about our politics, he asserted that we could not avoid the problem of race. Instead, we must confront it head-on. In science, we face […]
Conscientious objection, the referral requirement and morally permissible moral mistakes
By Nathan Emmerich In a recent paper, Nir Ben-Moshe suggested that the problems of moral complicity associated with conscientious objection—such as those generated by requiring those who conscientiously object to the termination of pregnancy or to voluntary assisted dying to refer patients to non-objecting providers—are in need of a ‘a creative solution.’ My paper Conscientious […]
Three observations about justifying AI
By Anantharaman Muralidharan, G Owen Schaefer, Julian Savulescu. Consider the following kind of medical AI. It consists of 2 parts. The first part consists of a core deep machine learning algorithm. These blackbox algorithms may be more accurate than human judgment or interpretable algorithms, but are notoriously opaque in terms of telling us on what […]
Securing a future without COVID-19: The need to prioritise concerted global action on global access to vaccines
By Dr Aisling McMahon & Prof Susi Geiger In the last number of weeks, many emergency pandemic related health measures were removed in Ireland and the UK, and there is an expectation in many other high-income countries that remaining measures will end in the very near future. This news has been greeted with understandable relief […]
Was Djokovic unethically blamed and shamed?
By Dominic Wilkinson, Julian Savulescu and Jonathan Pugh. [Cross post from Practical Ethics blog] The decision about whether to grant tennis star Novak Djokovic a visa allowing him to stay in Australia to compete in the Australian Open Championship has generated significant controversy. Last week, the Australian Immigration minister exercised his power to cancel the player’s […]
Getting “done” for concealment of pregnancy: Does a woman have a duty to inform healthcare staff of her pregnancy status?
By Gemma McKenzie. In England a pregnant woman – like any adult with mental capacity – enjoys the rights to autonomy and bodily integrity. As a result, she can only be subjected to a medical intervention with her informed consent. The law does not consider a human fetus as a separate legal entity; therefore, a […]
The cost of preventing pediatric influenza deaths
By Dianela Perdomo. How much is the life of one child worth? That is part of the question I asked myself when reflecting on influenza’s latest disappearance. In the U.S., the past three flu seasons have resulted in 144 to 199 pediatric deaths from influenza infection. Strikingly, only one pediatric flu death was recorded during […]