By Anna Nelson & Elizabeth Chloe Romanis During the COVID-19 pandemic pregnant and birthing people saw significant changes to the services they were offered. From March 2020 substantial restrictions were introduced in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus, with some notable examples including bans on partners attending scans, limitations on the number […]
Latest articles
How much money would it take for you to be infected with COVID-19 for research?
By Olivia Grimwade and Julian Savulescu. Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) research involves infecting otherwise healthy people with a disease in order to improve our knowledge of the disease and/or to test vaccine candidates. In the hope of halting the deaths, infections and lockdowns caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, CHIMs have been identified as […]
Would you enroll in this Covid-19 vaccine trial? — Ethical considerations for protecting the options of subjects in primary epidemic vaccine trials
By Arthur L. Caplan and Jerrold L. Abraham. We responded to the review in JME by Monrad about ethical issues in vaccine trials, in which the discussion was limited to secondary vaccine trials (i.e. testing additional vaccines after one or more vaccines have been approved). We are concerned that the ethics of ongoing primary vaccine […]
The problem in nursing homes is not Covid-19 – it is nursing homes
By Tania Moerenhout A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published a scathing article on how the pandemic was handled in Belgian nursing homes, focusing on instances where elderly were declined hospitalisation despite the fact that intensive care beds remained available. Refusing hospital care to nursing home residents was never the official policy, […]
Immunity passports, fundamental rights and public health hazards: A reply to Brown et al.
By Iñigo de Miguel Beriain and Jon Rueda Etxebarria In a recent article published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, Brown et al. analysed several ethical aspects around immunity passports and put forward some recommendations for implementing them. When we first read this paper, we considered that it was an excellent piece of analysis, but […]
Lockdown is not levelling down
By Jonathan A Hughes In their article “Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong” and their related JME Blog post, Savulescu and Cameron argue for selective isolation of the elderly as preferable to a continuation of general lockdown. Central to their argument is the claim that the […]
The public provision of ARTs in England: old arguments, new inequalities
By Laura O’Donovan and Sacha Waxman Criticism of the disparities in the public provision of fertility treatment in England is nothing new. The so-called ‘IVF postcode lottery’ emerged due to widespread divergence in local commissioning policies restricting access to treatment services. Unfairness in that process results not only from the different amounts of treatment available in […]
Pride or shame? Access to sex robots for older people with disabilities
By Nancy S. Jecker. Sex is about so much more than pleasure. It relates to some of the most central things we can do and be as human beings, such as generate a personally meaningful narrative of our lives; be physically, mentally and emotionally healthy; experience bodily integrity; affiliate and bond; feel and express a […]
NICE Draft Quality Standards on FASD: A misplaced focus?
By Rachel Arkell. In early March, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) launched the consultation period for the first draft of their Quality Standards on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), which covers the assessment and diagnosis of those affected by FASD. It is, of course, vital that diagnosis and support services are […]
Answering the critics of the impairment argument against abortion
By Bruce P. Blackshaw When Perry Hendricks’ impairment argument was first published in 2018, I was impressed that someone had come up with what seemed to be a novel argument for the immorality of abortion. Importantly, it wasn’t based on the moral status of the fetus. Instead, it used an uncontroversial moral claim—that deliberately inflicting […]