By David Shaw On the 16th of January it was reported that the Scottish Football Association is to ban children under the age of 12 from heading the ball at football training. The change is due to the results of a study published in 2019, which showed that death rates from neurodegenerative disease including dementia […]
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After death let men donate sperm to infertile people
By Nathan Hodson and Joshua Parker Of all the revolutionary advances provided by artificial reproductive techniques, few would have imagined that it would allow men to have their sperm removed after death and used to successfully produce offspring. Yet recent cases show that it is possible and apparently safe. In these cases it is the loved ones of the man […]
Sexual rights as healthcare rights?
By Ezio Di Nucci Thanks to Steven J. Firth and Ivars Neiders for continuing to engage with my ‘absurd’ sexual rights puzzle, according to which ‘universal positive sexual rights are incompatible with universal negative sexual rights’. In this short post I will address their proposed solution to the puzzle, which consists in normalizing sexual rights […]
Capacity-based decision-making for transgender adolescents
By Timothy F. Murphy 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. Readers may be interested in the companion piece ‘Transgender children: limits on consent to permanent interventions’ by Heather Brunskell-Evans. Academics, clinicians, and trans people have focused […]
Transgender children: limits on consent to permanent interventions
By Heather Brunskell-Evans 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. Be sure to check out the companion piece ‘Capacity-based decision-making for transgender adolescents’ by Timothy F. Murphy. When we talk about ‘transgender children’, we are referring […]
Fetal pain and abortion
By Stuart WG Derbyshire and John C Bockmann. In the early 1990s new techniques for fetal surgery emerged and a group working at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital were posed a question by their pregnant patients that they had not previously considered: will it hurt the fetus when you inject it? Obviously the surgeons could not ask […]
Do you, and should you, own your clinical data?
By Angela Ballantyne Rhetoric of ‘ownership’ is increasingly important to debates about the ethical management of clinical data. But the precise meaning of “ownership” remains opaque. A dominant refrain in the media and some bioethics literature is that patients own their health data: “There is broad agreement that it is individuals who should not only […]
Being, and getting, in the know
By Sara Filoche, Peter Stone, Fiona Cram, Sondra Bacharach, Anthony Dowell, Dianne Sika-Paotonu, Angela Beard, Judy Ormandy, Christina Buchanan, Michelle Thunders, and Kevin Dew Have you ever been a patient where you felt that a healthcare practitioner was merely talking at you, rather than with you? Or that your opinion (or value) didn’t count? If […]
A sexual rights puzzle, un-puzzled!
By Steven J. Firth and Ivars Neiders The debate over sexual rights for the disabled is of profound political, ethical, and philosophical importance. In a recent debate in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Steven J. Firth argues for a welfare founded ‘sex doula’ programme. This blog post stands as a criticism of Di Nucci’s response to […]
William Osler’s lasting influence on medical ethics
Originally posted on the BMJ Opinion By Daniel Sokol One hundred years ago, on 29 December 1919, Sir William Osler died in Oxford from a haemorrhage following an operation to treat his empyema. He was 70. In his obituary of Osler in the New York Evening Post two days later, the celebrated haematologist Richard Cabot wrote: “I doubt […]