Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.com
Website:http://www.mercatornet.com/
Is bioethics compatible with democracy? This is not a question that surfaces very often in policy debates featuring prestigious bioethicists.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
Controversy continues to rage over whether or not to establish a market in organs to shorten steadily growing waiting lists. One objection is that applying a market model will result in exploitation and moral corruption..
Date posted: 2013-05-19
Euthanasia claimed its most famous victim last Saturday. At the age of 95, Belgian Nobel laureate Christian de Duve was killed with a lethal injection. He died in his home, surrounded by his four children.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
India and China are not the only countries with lop-sided sex ratios due to sex-selective abortions. Georgia, a former member of the USSR in the Caucasus with a population of about 4.5 million, has a distorted sex ratio at birth of 114 boys to 100 girls. One-third of the 36,000 abortion performed last year in Georgia were for sex selection. The natural ratio is about 105 to 100.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
Of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, about 100 are on a hunger strike. About 20 are being force-fed, according to the New York Times. About 40 medical staff have arrived to ensure that the detainees are fed.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
Why is the media frothing over criticism of a long-dead homosexual economist?
Date posted: 2013-05-19
The euthanasia of Nobel laureate Christian de Duve in Belgium is a worrying precedent for the world's baby boomers.
Date posted: 2013-05-19
This is not the way the era of assisted reproduction was supposed to work. An unnamed woman in the UK has been jailed for five years after artificially inseminating her 14-year-old adopted daughter in order to get another child.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Five people have been convicted of organ trafficking in Kosovo by the European Union court which runs the legal system in the quasi-independent territory. The controversial case ended with a jail term of 8 years for a prominent urologist in Pristina, Lutfi Dervishi, for "organised crime and human trafficking".
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Some bioethicists who feel at home in the utilitarian common room of the Journal of Medical Ethics described the imbroglio as an attack on academic freedom. Udo Schüklenk, of Queen's University, in Ontario, who is also the editor of Bioethics, a distinguished international journal, complained bitterly that "bioethics journals are under increasing and sustained fire from political activists" of all stripes, from "the left, feminists, disability activists [to] religious conservatives".
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva's article in the UK-based Journal of Medical Ethics was "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?" It wasn't a very original argument for the morality of infanticide - Peter Singer and Michael Tooley had made the same point decades ago - but the arresting title tossed even more petrol on the blaze. The authors contended that the same reasons which justify abortion are also sufficient to justify killing a child up for an unspecified time after birth.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Scientific studies are used to support controversial social policies like same-sex marriage. But can we rely on them?
Date posted: 2013-05-05
A new Australian think tank has issued a call for the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Utah has become the first state to allow prisoners, even prisoners on death row, to donate organs.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
A feature story in the new online magazine Matter gives an exclusive account of how an American man found a surgeon in Asia who was willing to amputate his healthy leg.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Deregistration, heavy fines and jail terms threaten those who voice their opposition to abortion.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Two IVF stories from opposite ends of the globe are a sobering reminder that "foetal reduction" remains a failsafe position in clinical practice.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Why can't embryos be bought and sold like any other commodity? Making this surprising proposal is less surprising than where it was made - in the America's leading medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
"It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this project: if it succeeds, I will have shown that the prevailing justifications offered for the regulation of reproduction, and most of the regulations they seek to justify, are either intellectually bankrupt or carry with them disturbing and problematic implications such that they are better off discarded... much of the existing law in this area cannot be justified."
Date posted: 2013-05-05
The first drug to help people with Down syndrome overcome cognitive deficits is being tested on humans, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has announced.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
In any case, Dr Verhagen points out, the official opinion of the American Academy of Pediatrics is that it is morally permissible to withdraw or withhold hydration and nutrition from newborns in some cases.
Date posted: 2013-05-05
Turkish doctors have announced that the first woman ever to receive a uterus from a deceased donor is two weeks pregnant with an IVF baby.
Date posted: 2013-05-04
Robert Edwards, the inventor of IVF, died two days after Margaret Thatcher. History may show that his impact was even greater than hers
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Another controversial review of the mental health risks of abortion has been published, this time in the peer-reviewed Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
The leading cancer centre in Washington state has published in the New England Journal of Medicine a blueprint of how to implement a dying-with-dignity program, now that assisted suicide has been legalised.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Scientists at a number of top American universities failed to inform parents of the grave risks of enrolling in a clinical trial on blindness in premature babies, says the federal agency overseeing the welfare of people in research projects.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
"It is an issue that is more serious now in some ways because of the commercialisation of reproductive medicine, increasingly so with climate change, global warming, water shortages, food shortages, conflict and burgeoning technology that is not always well controlled by governments. It may well be an area that will rear its ugly head again. We should be on our guard against it."
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Research confirms all the cliches about "little emperors", the children of parents who were forced to stop at one.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
A Brazilian doctor is being investigated for the murders of more than 300 intensive care patients. Dr Virginia Soares de Souza, 56, and seven members of her medical team allegedly administered a muscle-relaxant drug which impaired patients' ability to breathe and then reduced their oxygen supply, causing them to die of asphyxiation.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
The UK is moving closer to three-parent children after the fertility regulator informed the government that the public would back a controversial embryo treatment.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Until now women who wanted to preserve their eggs until the alarm rings on their reproductive clock had to freeze their eggs and store them at an IVF clinic.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Even by the rigorous standards of Saudi Arabian justice, the sentence meted out to Ali al-Khawahir is gruesome.
Date posted: 2013-04-20
Taking a peek into the future, an Australian bioethicist says that it will be possible to use stem cell technology to breed better humans in a Petri dish. Robert Sparrow, of Monash University, writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics that it is not too early to launch a debate about what he calls "in vitro eugenics".
Date posted: 2013-04-20
But what about "African exceptionalism"? Two experts, John Bongaarts and John Casterline, examine this intriguing notion in the latest issue of the world's leading demography journal, the Population and Development Review.
Date posted: 2013-04-18
Who are the gatekeepers in bioethics? Does editorial bias or institutional racism exist in leading bioethics journals?
Date posted: 2013-03-31
A retired Scottish doctor has admitted in a newspaper interview that he supplied three patients with lethal medication so that they could end their lives.
Date posted: 2013-03-31
The leading opponent of defining death as the death of the brain is D. Alan Shewmon, a professor of paediatric neurology at UCLA Medical Center.
Date posted: 2013-03-31
Walter Glennon, of the University of Calgary, breathes new life into the Epicurean argument that death does not matter: "where death is, I am not; and where I am, death is not. So death is not to be feared, since it is nothing."
Date posted: 2013-03-31
What about the children? A woman who conceives at 50 could die when her child is a teenager. This, the ethics committee acknowledges, is "one of the most stressful life events for children or adolescents". The statement leaves the question unanswered. It simply says that this is a problem which parents will have to deal with.
Date posted: 2013-03-31
Judging from his 2011 book Sobre Cielo y Tierra (On heaven and earth), a series of conversations on contemporary issues with an Argentinian rabbi, Pope Francis's stand on bioethical issues is fully in sync with his predecessors.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
Will a Pope from Argentina be able to brake the increasing secularisation of life in the West?
Date posted: 2013-03-21
The UK wants to ban prisoners from accessing government-funded fertility treatment while they are behind bars.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
A new United Nations report frames number of bioethical questions as issues of torture, giving a new twist to a number of controversial issues.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
The Tasmanian bill goes even further, however, possibly making it one of the most radical bills in the world. Even volunteer pregnancy counsellors will be required to refer clients for abortions or be penalised with a heavy fine.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
Disheartened Catholics mustn't waste a good crisis after the disgrace of Cardinal Keith O'Brien.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
One of the most easily grasped ethical obligations of a doctor is not to incite people to mass murder.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
Whether you call it polygamy, or polyamory, or consensual nonmonogamy, multiple partners in a single relationship is just over the horizon.
Date posted: 2013-03-21
Public outrage over a crass remark about disabled people has cost a councillor in Britain his job.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A closer study of ancestry claims shows that they are very easy to make.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
The debate over parental duties of sperm donors has flared up again - this time in response to an American man being sued for medical expenses of the child of his donated sperm.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
For decades the Indian government has been encouraging women to be voluntarily sterilized - and they have coopted state and local governments to help persuade the women.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A fascinating case is unfolding in Israel pitting a anonymous sperm donor against a woman who demands his sperm. The arguments are worthy of a novel - or at least an afternoon soap opera.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
Euthanasia is legal in Belgium under certain conditions, but not for minors, boys and girls under 18. Now the upper house of the Belgian parliament is studying whether to extend the privilege of euthanasia to them as well.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
"Cross amputation is a form of state-sponsored torture," said Dr Vincent Iacopino, senior medical advisor at Physicians for Human Rights.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
BBC World Service features a very interesting documentary on assisted dying.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
According to Green member of parliament Liesbeth van Tongeren, there are already between 20,000 and 25,000 children living in patchwork families.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A scathing report earlier this month on an English hospital run by the National Health Service recommended that NHS "gagging clauses" be banned if they are intended to limit discussion of patient care or safety.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
It is an exciting and ambitious project - but there are sceptics. Neuroscientist Christopher Chabris, of Union College, in upstate New York, pours cold water on the proposal in his blog. First, 10 years may not be long enough. The brain is so complex that a decade may be needed to map every neuron in the drosophila brain..
Date posted: 2013-03-05
Governments around the world should stop squandering resources fighting an "unwinnable war" against illegal drugs, such as cocaine and heroin. Instead, they should work on curbing antibiotic misuse, which poses a far more serious threat to human health.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A stinging report by a Belgian bioethics think tank last December warned that euthanasia there was being trivialised. "Initially legalized under very strict conditions, euthanasia has gradually become a very normal and even ordinary act," said the European Institute of Bioethics (IEB), in Brussels.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
After President Obama reversed his predecessor's stand on embryo research in 2009 shortly after his inauguration, the battles seemed over. The main ethical consideration was ensuring that the donors of embryos and gametes gave their informed consent to research.
Date posted: 2013-03-05
A bombshell report shows that Christians are making a demographic comeback in Lebanon because of tumbling Muslim birth rates.
Date posted: 2013-03-02
About 100,000 children have been born in Germany through sperm donation.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
The decision was supported by a telephone survey of 605 French doctors which showed that 60% were in favour of active euthanasia.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, losing one minister because he plagiarised his PhD thesis is a misforture; losing two looks like carelessness.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
A conference in Singapore recently cast bioethics in a different light. Jim Sabin, a professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote on his blog that he was delighted to see the emergence of a family-centred bioethics at an event organised by The Ethics of Family in Health and Social Care Research Consortium.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
The complications of euthanasia keep bubbling away in Belgium.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Tasmanians are once again gearing up for a debate over euthanasia. Labor Premier Lara Giddings and her Greens Deputy Nick McKim released a report this week arguing that euthanasia and assisted suicide are compassionate responses for "patients who are dying in prolonged suffering".
Date posted: 2013-02-18
The politics of "personhood" has been a big issue in Colorado in recent years.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
After 3000 years of speculation, a German neurologist has finally located the source of evil. Well, at least Das Bild says he has.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
IVF has often been accused of being an immoral procedure, although in recent years ethical objections have been smothered by the jubilation of parents -- and shareholders in IVF clinics.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Tasmanians are once again gearing up for a debate over euthanasia. Labor Premier Lara Giddings and her Greens Deputy Nick McKim released a report yesterday arguing that euthanasia and assisted suicide are compassionate responses for "patients who are dying in prolonged suffering".
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Whether humanity is worth saving or what precautions we are prepared to take could be the biggest bioethics questions of all!
Date posted: 2013-02-18
It seems that De Grazia values moral behaviour more than moral freedom and that a safe, orderly, non-violent world would be worth the sacrifice.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Years of rumours that Ethiopian women were pressured into having contraceptive injections by Israeli officials have finally been confirmed.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Transsexuals have won a major victory in Sweden. A court has ruled unconstitutional a law which required them to be sterilized before they could be legally recognised as another gender.
Date posted: 2013-02-18
Doctors should routinely screen women and teenagers for "reproductive coercion", says a committee of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In its official opinion paper, it paints a sombre picture of coercive and domineering men who force partners to have sex and become pregnant. "The most common forms of reproductive coercion," it says, "include sabotage of contraceptive methods, pregnancy coercion, and pregnancy pressure." Some male partners go so far as to forcefully remove intrauterine devices and vaginal rings, poke holes in condoms, or destroy birth control pills.
Date posted: 2013-02-17
Male scientists are far more likely to commit fraud than females, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have claimed. And there is no difference whether a scientist is beginning his career or has tenure.
Date posted: 2013-02-17
What's the truth? Well, in point of fact, Professor Church really wants to see a cloned Neanderthal, a process which requires an "extremely adventurous female human". It's just that the obstacle is societal opposition to cloning.
Date posted: 2013-02-17
Two weeks before Christmas, a doctor euthanased them at Brussels University Hospital. It was a perfectly legal procedure. All the boxes had been ticked and all the documents signed. The two men were deaf and slowly going blind as well. They had nothing to live for. They qualified.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Quebec is slowly moving towards legal, or quasi-legal, euthanasia. A committee of legal experts has delivered a 400-page report to the provincial government which argues that it should allow "medical assistance to die" when a patient is close to death is suffering from unbearable physical or psychological pain.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
The German Medical Association has investigated nearly 1,000 cases of corrupt doctors over the past few years, according to its president, Frank Ulrich Montgomery.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Professor Chris Gastmans, of the Catholic University of Leuven, criticised the deaths as an impoverished response to disability. "Is this the only humane response that we can offer in such situations? I feel uncomfortable here as ethicist. Today it seems that euthanasia is the only right way to end life. And I think that's not a good thing. In a society as wealthy as ours, we must find another, caring way to deal with human frailty."
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Loose regulations and corrupt officials make it easy for surrogacy to turn into baby-trafficking.
Date posted: 2013-01-26
Is India finally cracking down on surrogacy for foreigners?
Date posted: 2013-01-26
This brief but touching video speaks for itself. Felicia Hogan, from British Columbia, discovered that the twins she was expecting were conjoined.
Date posted: 2013-01-26