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Un-Mixing the Sexes

The coalition government is finalizing plans for swingeing cuts in the public sector.   Nonetheless, in one part of the National Health Service costs are set to rise: for the Health Minister has confirmed that the government is phasing out mixed-sex wards. 

Almost all wards are now segregated by sex, but those mixed-sex wards that remain are thought to be difficult and expensive to convert.   Surveys suggest that although it’s not the most significant concern patients have about hospital care, it ranks quite high – especially for female patients.    The BBC quoted a woman treated on a mixed-sex ward:  ‘I didn’t feel comfortable with men there.  You weren’t properly dressed and sometimes they did procedures at your bedside and the curtains weren’t properly closed’.

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Cosmetic Surgery – What is the Matter with Dr Salesman?

Written by Roman Gaehwiler

Reconstructive plastic surgery to correct ravages of disease and injuries as well as gross physical abnormalities constitutes a core medical practice. Reconstructive procedures, however, lie along a continuum, without any clear boundary between therapeutic reconstructive surgery for diagnosable problem and purely cosmetic surgery.[1]

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Is it criminal not to breastfeed?

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?

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Do we harm our children by revealing their sex?

by Rebecca Roache

I am over a
month late reading the news of the Swedish couple who have chosen to keep the
sex of their toddler a closely-guarded secret, but the story is too interesting
to pass up the opportunity to write about it here.

The parents
of the two-and-a-half year old child, known as Pop, explain, ‘We want Pop to
grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the
outset.  It's cruel to bring a child into
the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead’.  The wish to protect one’s child from gender
stereotyping is understandable, but is refusing to reveal Pop’s sex going
too far?

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Why public health campaigns should not promote enhancement

by Rebecca Roache

Human
enhancement is a hot topic in bioethics. 
Typically conceived as the use of technology to raise human capacities
above what is merely healthy or normal, it attracts questions such as, Is it
ethical?  Is it desirable?  Is it cheating? and, Should the state
subsidise it?  A common view is that,
whilst therapy—which aims to restore human capacities to what is healthy or
normal, but not to raise them above this level—is desirable; enhancement is at
best unnecessary [1], and at worst unethical [2].  Human enhancement, one might be tempted to
think, is for oddballs only: the average person is content merely to be
healthy.

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Greeks and geeks

At Harvard Medical School someone is screaming, reports the Boston Globe. ‘Death!’, he shrieks, ‘Why after all these years have you not appeared?’ He begs for euthanasia, tormented by his pain. Medical students listen to him.

His lines were written by Sophocles, and the students are listening because they have to: it is part of their curriculum.

The remarkable thing is not that Harvard medical students are being marinated in Sophocles, but that the Globe thought it worth reporting. Most medical students in mainstream western universities will get some ethics teaching. Sophocles is just one tool in the teachers’ toolkit. It’s a very effective one, by all accounts, but no different in kind from the lectures and seminars more conventionally deployed. Ethics teaching aims to teach students some problem-solving strategies, and to help them to recognise, evaluate, criticise, cull or cultivate the values that they themselves bring to the wards. 

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Special Guest Blog – The problem of militarism

by Tony Coady

Israel’s decision to institute an inquiry into the military misadventure with the flotilla attempting to break its blockade of Gaza and its subsequent partial relaxation of restrictions on aid to Gaza represent grudging concessions to international outrage about the flotilla episode. Any recognition by Israel that its military policies are offensive to so many in the outside world is surely welcome. But the flotilla episode will be misunderstood if it is seen only as a failure in public relations or an instance of military mismanagement. Certainly it constitutes both of these since it has badly damaged Israel’s image throughout the world and alienated its few friends in the region as well as called into question the competence of its much-vaunted armed forces. But there is a deeper lesson to this tragic fiasco and that concerns the influence and failings of the spirit of militarism.

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The Rational Bigot

There are a few old white ladies in their 80s who might wish to blow up a plane, but on the whole, if your job is in airline security and security is your only concern, it would be rational to pay closer scrutiny to passengers who are single, young males, probably of south Asian or Middle Eastern or East African appearance. In yesterday’s Comment Is Free, Simon Woolley wrote disapprovingly about the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The EHRC had written to several police forces because it had identified that ethnic minorities in their areas had been disproportionately stopped and searched.

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Australians support women’s access to late abortion


by Lachlan de Crespigny, Thomas Douglas, Mark Textor and Julian Savulescu

Regular calls to limit numbers of abortions are a familiar cry. Yet people are outraged if a friend or family member with a serious complication in much wanted pregnancy reluctantly requests an abortion but encounters resistance. Or when a woman faces a criminal court, as will happen to Tegan Leach next month in Queensland.

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An Ethical Approach to Abortion

by Julian Savulescu

Abortion should be decriminalised. Early abortion should be freely and easily available on request. Late abortion should be freely and easily available at least for those who have a valid justification: significant fetal abnormality, threat to woman’s health or a serious social reason, for example child pregnancy or rape. Family planning, including safe, free and open abortion services, is an essential part of a civilized society.

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