By David Shaw The last report of the outgoing UK Chief Medical Officer, Dr Sally Davies, is entitled “Time to Solve Childhood Obesity”. It makes many sensible public health recommendations, including increases in the levy on sweet drinks and taxation on snacks, and reducing portion sizes and marketing aimed at children. But a different recommendation […]
Latest articles
The irrelevance and elusiveness of consciousness
By Charles Foster I am aware (as my academic critics will agree) of only a tiny proportion of what I do and what I am. It is not clear what sort of creature I am, but what is clear is that very little of me is visible to myself – let alone to others. We […]
Take care when testing manufactured organs on the deceased
By Laura Kimberly, Brendan Parent Every article about the organ transplant crisis starts something like this: In the United States in 2018, over 116,000 individuals were on the waiting list for an organ transplant. Yet of those on the waiting list, only 36,000 (31%) received a much-needed transplant to treat their end-stage organ failure, and […]
Will you give my kidney back?
By Eisuke Nakazawa and Keiichiro Yamamoto We provide a thought experiment about living donor kidney transplantation. We call this problem ‘organ restitution’. Mr. A offered to be a living related kidney donor for his relative, Mr. B, who developed renal failure. His postoperative course was smooth, and a year went by without any problems. One […]
Unravelling the concept of ‘routinization’ in prenatal screening
By Adriana Kater-Kuipers & Eline M. Bunnik. With the introduction of the non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) the ethical debate about prenatal screening is again in full swing. The new technique for the analysis of cell-free foetal DNA for trisomy 21, 18, and 13, and, in the future, possibly for a range of other abnormalities, requires […]
Should pregnant women pay for non-invasive prenatal testing?
By Eline M. Bunnik & Adriana Kater-Kuipers. Today, pregnant women can use non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) in the first trimester of their pregnancy to screen for chromosomal abnormalities. NIPT requires only a blood draw, is more reliable than previous screening modalities, and leads to fewer false positive results, thus saving women from unnecessary invasive follow-up […]
The first prosecution of a Dutch doctor since the Euthanasia Act of 2002: what does the verdict mean?
By Eva C.A. Asscher and Suzanne van de Vathorst. On September 11th 2019, a verdict was reached in the first prosecution of a doctor for carrying out euthanasia in The Netherlands since the 2002 Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act was passed. The case concerned a patient with severe dementia […]
What does the public think should happen when parents and doctors disagree about life support for a child?
By Claudia Brick and Dominic Wilkinson. The case of Tafida Raqeeb, currently being heard in the High Court, is the latest high profile legal battle between physicians and parents about life sustaining treatment for a seriously ill child. Since suffering a severe stroke in February, five-year old Tafida has been in intensive care at the […]
Fetuses, Newborns, and Parental Responsibility
By Prabhpal Singh Does a fetus have the same moral status as a newborn baby? When we compare the two, we see that both lack traditional morally relevant features (a rational capacity, a certain sort of consciousness, a certain sort of first-person experience, autonomy required for personhood, etc.). Accordingly, some philosophers have thought fetuses and […]
Using Ulysses Contracts to prevent patients from spiralling into relapse
By Harriet Standing Many people have written about Ulysses contracts in relation to the treatment of patients with mental illnesses. However, previous discussions have not focused on the particular phenomenon known as ‘spiralling’. The inspiration for this paper came from a friend with bipolar disorder. Over the years, they had suffered the relapsing and remitting […]