For Jono Lancaster, who has Treacher Collins syndrome, the decision about whether to have a baby or not is agonising.
So let’s listen to two of the staunchest defenders of individual rights and liberty ever to take pen to paper — Mill and Holmes. If you infect my newborn or my grandmom because you put your liberty over your duty to help protect the weak and the vulnerable and chose not to get vaccinated then you are responsible for the harm you do and you ought to be liable for it.
A review of research carried out over 20 years suggests that UK doctors appear to consistently oppose euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS). These examined UK doctors’ attitudes to either assisted voluntary euthanasia (AVE), or PAS, or both. The majority of doctors opposed AVE in all of the studies but one (11 of the studies examined attitudes to AVE).
The editors of 16 medical journals have retracted “unethical” studies by an influential German anaesthetist.
The point is that end-of-life care is an individual decision that should be thoroughly discussed with one’s family and physicians. Studies have shown that when doctors don’t know a patient’s wishes, they are inclined to use every possible procedure and medication to try to postpone the inevitable. More often than not, this shortens patients’ lives and prolongs bereavement for the survivors.
A Philadelphia doctor performed thousands of illegal late-term abortions and murdered newborns after inducing labour, prosecutors have said. Performing abortions well past the state’s statutory cut-off of 24 weeks, his clinic would induce labour, then killed the babies, the grand jury said in its report.
Most people would agree that when the time comes, they want a “good death.” But what that means is all too often left up in the air until a crisis strikes or the stricken person is no longer able to communicate his wishes or his advance planning documents are not clear. When that happens, spouses, adult children, siblings and others find themselves in the unenviable role of surrogate decision-makers, trying to divine, sometimes with very few facts and under very emotional circumstances, what people they love would have decided to do if they were able to choose.
Many health advocacy organizations rely on financial support from drug companies. But few disclose the extent of that funding or make information easily accessible, according to a new report published Thursday by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
The groups often sit on important federal advisory boards and press lawmakers for greater funding for medical research, more generous reimbursement for brand-name drugs, and easy access to diagnostic tests and medical devices for people afflicted by various illnesses.
A final lesson from the history of bioethics is the consensus that if you can’t offer a patient anything to prevent or to ameliorate a terrible disease, why test for it? For newborns with diseases such as Phenylketonuria (PKU), we can test, intervene and prevent bad effects, but as of now, this is not true for Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s.
A new body to regulate all health research in the UK should be established, according to a report by the Academy of Medical Sciences. The proposed Health Research Agency would be the only place giving ethical approval.
