The debate „Abortion is Immoral?“ (affermative – Stephanie Gray, negative – Peter Singer) debate took place on October 22nd, 2020 as apart of the first annual Mildred Fay Jefferson Symposium, which was hosted by Harvard Right to Life and Massachusetts Citizens for Life.
Thousands of women are protesting against Poland’s new abortion laws in cities across the country. A court banned almost all abortions – with exceptions only for cases of rape, incest, or where the mother’s health is at risk. Abortions carried out when the foetus is malformed, which accounted for 98% of legal terminations last year, have now been outlawed. Poland already had some of the EU’s strictest abortion laws.
The Dutch government has approved plans to allow euthanasia for terminally ill children aged between one and 12.
Euthanasia is currently legal in the Netherlands for children older than 12, with mandatory consent from the patient and their parents. It is also legal for babies up to a year old with parental consent. But there is no provision for those aged between one and 12 who are terminally ill.
Argentina on October, 9 formally became the first country in the world to approve the use of drought-resistant genetically modified (GMO) wheat, prompting fierce criticism by the country’s massive export agriculture industry.
The 10-year limit for storing eggs frozen for social reasons could be scrapped to give people concerned about declining fertility more time and options, says a UK ethics body.
A new treatment could help children with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, grow taller and avoid health problems in later life. But there are concerns about whether this is ethical.
The British government is exploring the possibility of clinical trials in which volunteers are deliberately exposed to coronavirus to test the effectiveness of vaccine candidates. In so-called „challenge trials,“ researchers give study subjects an experimental vaccine and then intentionally expose them to coronavirus to see if the vaccine works. Such trials were used in early research with smallpox, yellow fever and malaria.
As 38 clinical trials seek tens of thousands of volunteers to receive doses of experimental vaccines, researchers are discussing how to find and recruit participants effectively and ethically. Some researchers argue that including prisoners in studies could offer outsize health benefits.
Scientists have used gene-editing to create pigs, goats and cattle that can serve as so-called “surrogate sires” – male animals providing sperm that carry the genetic traits of elite donor animals – in a bid to tackle global food insecurity.
Powerful genome editing procedures that could prevent parents from passing on heritable diseases to their children are far from ready for clinical use, and must be proved safe and effective before nations permit them, leading scientists have warned.
