by David Shipley
A friend of mine is a therapist. She faced the following dilemma.
My friend specialises in enhancing fertility and was approached by a prospective patient who wished to become pregnant but could not afford to pay the standard fee of £45 per treatment as she was on benefits. The woman was aged 40 and had no children. What should my friend the therapist have done?
by Julian Savulescu
Paije Richardson's dreams of a new life were crushed tonight as the public voted him from the X Factor final rounds. On Dec 9, the fate of another young hopeful will be decided by the people’s choice. But this time it will be a life and death choice. A couple have allegedly given the life of their baby over to popular vote; they are considering having an abortion and have created a public poll which will decide whether they have an abortion or not (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1330860/Should-abortion–decide-U-S-couple-set-website-unborn-child.html)
The abortion vote has been described as “spine-chilling.” The baby is 17 weeks gestation and a healthy boy called “Wiggles.” One pro-lifer was outraged:
'This is shocking.The first thing that came to my mind when I heard of this was the Roman Colosseum, when the mob picked who lived and who died. They are talking about a baby that is 17 weeks old, it has a beating heart, its brain is working and nerve endings throughout its body'
Deciding human life by vote is shocking, but is it wrong?
by Anders Sandberg
The pope approves of the use of condoms to fight AIDS: according to an upcoming book he says it is acceptable when the intention is to reduce the risk of infection. While he still views abstinence as the proper way of fighting the disease, "In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality." Now, how does this fit with the doctrine of double effect? According to this doctrine, it is sometimes permissible when acting towards a good result to bring about a foreseen side effect that on its own would be impermissible. Is contraception hence a permissible side effect of trying to reduce infection risk?
by Julian Savulescu
Toby Ord is a brilliant young Oxford post doc. He has established Giving What We Can. On the website, you can calculate how many lives you could save by giving to the most effective charities he has evaluated. He calculates that even a person on the median salary could save 1350 lives. Here is an example of how Toby calculates the number of lives which could be saved.
by Alexandre Erler
Jerome Kagan’s latest book, The Temperamental Thread, is – as usual with Kagan – a fascinating read. It draws on the three decades of research done by Kagan on the topic of human temperament. In a famous series of studies, Kagan examined the way infants reacted to unfamiliar or unexpected events. He found that about 20 per cent of these infants were unusually responsive to such events, exhibiting vigorous motor activity and frequent crying. He calls these infants “high reactives”, and found after following their evolution during their subsequent years that they were biased to become timid, subdued toddlers and shy adolescents who become uneasy when they cannot predict or control the future. About 20 per cent of these high reactives proved unable to cope with their temperament and were subsequently diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, depression, or both. By contrast, another other group of infants showed a high threshold of excitability to the same events. Kagan calls them “low reactives”. They tended to become outgoing, relatively fearless children and relaxed adolescents who like risk and challenge [3]. In the wake of Kagan’s earlier work The Long Shadow of Temperament, The Temperamental Thread paints a rich and detailed picture of the differences between these two psychological types.
The UK's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has suggested that the state should limit the provision of social security benefits to large, unemployed families. Hunt said last week that
The number of children that you have is a choice and what we're saying is that if people are living on benefits, then they make choices but they also have to have responsibility for those choices . . . It's not going to be the role of the state to finance those choices.
Two quite different arguments might be offered in support of such a move.
by Rebecca Roache
The BBC recently reported that some homeopaths are offering their patients homeopathic remedies designed to replace the MMR vaccine. Given that the efficacy of homeopathic remedies is notoriously unproven, this points to the worrying conclusion that some parents who have chosen a homeopathic alternative to the MMR vaccine believe that their children are immune to measles, mumps, and rubella, when in fact they are unprotected against these diseases.
This development marks another blow for the ongoing campaign to ensure that children receive the recommended vaccinations. Sir Sandy Macara, ex-chairman of the British Medical Association, has claimed that the UK has lower immunisation rates than some developing countries in which people have poor access to healthcare. The percentage of the UK population currently vaccinated against MMR falls well below the level needed to achieve ‘herd immunity’ – where the number of immune individuals in the population prevents the spread of disease, thereby protecting those who are not immune – and recent outbreaks of measles in Wales has led the Welsh Assembly to consider making the MMR vaccine compulsory. Such a move would be highly controversial, but is this a price worth paying to protect public health?
Read More »Should we force parents to vaccinate their children? No: let’s just scare them instead
A colleague recently emailed me. Her daughter, just turned
12, had come back from school bearing an information leaflet about HPV vaccination
with the Glaxo Cervarix vaccine, and a consent form for the parent to sign.
The consent form nodded inelegantly to Gillick, asserting that ‘[t]he decision to consent or refuse is
legally [the girl’s], as long as she understands the issues in giving consent.’
There was no indication given, in the consent form or the accompanying
literature, as to whether and if so how that understanding would be tested. The
reality is that it won’t be tested at all.
Read More »Is the UK’s HPV vaccination programme unethical and/or unlawful?
A fascinating study in the Lancet this week has suggested that a very commonly used and simple analgesic in newborn infants may not actually be preventing them from experiencing pain. The study’s authors suggest that this medicine should no longer be used routinely in newborn infants. A headline in the Guardian reads “Newborn babies should not be given sugar as pain relief”. But there are scientific, philosophical and ethical reasons why this conclusion, though possibly correct, is premature.
by Rebecca Roache
The Brazilian
model Gisele Bundchen recently—and controversially—claimed that mothers should
be required by law to breastfeed their babies for the first six months of their
lives.
A few days later, she partially retracted the claim on her blog, insisting that her talk of a breastfeeding law should
not be taken literally. It was simply a way of expressing her belief in the
importance of doing the best for her child.
After all, legally enforcing breastfeeding would be madness, right?
Not
according to the Indonesian government.
It recently passed a law giving babies the right to six months of
exclusive breastfeeding,
except in cases where medical problems prevent their mothers from breastfeeding. Mothers who do not comply face a year in
prison or a fine of 100,000,000 Rupiahs (around £7,100), and those who prevent
mothers from fulfilling their breastfeeding obligations also face punishments. Scientists and health professionals generally
agree that breastfeeding is healthier for babies than the alternatives (see,
for example, here),
that not enough mothers do it (see here),
and governments around the world invest huge sums trying to get mothers to
breastfeed. But is criminalising non-breastfeeding mothers a good idea?
