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 […]
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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 […]
Justifying the Consequences of Trainee Medicine
By Connor Brenna and Sunit Das. Are we doing the best we can for our patients? At face-value, this seems to be a straightforward (albeit broad) question. In this piece, we dive deeper into the ethics of trainee medicine to find that the answer is really contingent on how one interprets who it is that […]
Privacy and health data: How can we protect information after it’s been shared?
By T.J. Kasperbauer. We have already lost significant control of our health data. To some, that means we’ve also lost our privacy. But there are many ways of protecting health data even after it has been shared. When health data are widely shared, we must develop strategies for protecting health data regardless of who can […]
The errant ways we talk about brain death
By Jordan Potter and Jason Lesandrini On November 4, 2019, newspapers across the USA reported on the tragic and untimely death of Mr. Nebane Abienwi – a 37-year-old asylum-seeking migrant from Cameroon who died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after suffering a brain hemorrhage. Per an ICE report, physicians at Sharp […]
Caring for each other through the ethical challenges of MAiD in Canada
By Mary Kathleen Deutscher Heilman and Tracy J. Trothen Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) generates strong emotions among Canadians. What has been striking to us is the fact that while academics have been engaged in an epic battle about who has a right to what protections under the law, the average person seems to want […]