Should Conservative Christians be Allowed to Care for Our Children?
Eunice and Owen Johns are Christian Pentecostalists who believe that sexual relations other than those within marriage between one man and one woman are morally wrong. They also want to be foster parents. Should they be allowed to care for …
Read MoreWho should be allowed to foster?
A Christian couple have been blocked in their attempt to foster children this week. Eunice and Owen Johns had applied to Court to prevent Derby city council from continuously stalling their application to foster children. The council was do…
Read MoreNothing is like mother’s ice cream
The Icecreamists, an ice cream parlour in Covent Garden began selling a human breast-milk based ice cream last month, only to have it confiscated recently by Westminster Council in order to check that it was “fit for human consumption…
Read MoreEthical Lessons From Locked-In Syndrome: What Is a Living Hell?
A recent important study by Stephen Laureys and colleagueson what it is like to be to experience severe brain damage has been widely reported. (eg, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/locked-patients-life/story?id=12984627). Laureys and c…
Read MoreCan forced sterilization ever be ethical?
A British court still needs to decide whether to authorize the sterilization, at her mother’s own request, of a mentally disabled woman (see e.g. here and here). Reading only the headlines and initial paragraphs of the news entries devoted …
Read More61-year-old woman gives birth to her own grandchild, and so what?
The “news” is that a 61 year old from Illinois served as a surrogate mother for her daughter’s son, carrying in her womb the embryo created using her daughter’s and her son-in-law’s egg and sperm. Anyone shocked? I guess no, and this is ins…
Read MoreNursing profession and the ethics of care.
An article appeared last Wednesday on the “Daily Mail” referred to a report of the Healt Service Ombudsman concerning to the treatment given to the elderly in British Hospitals. The report recounted several cases of abuse and ne…
Read MoreHerbal Placebos
The seven-year period within which member states must implement the EU directive on herbal medicine ends next month. In the UK, the government last week announced that herbalists will now be regulated by the Health Professionals Council (HP…
Read MoreCivil Partnership, Religion and the BNP
The government is making plans to lift the ban on gay partnership ceremonies in religious buildings. Among the first to apply to perform such ceremonies are expected to be Quakers, and Liberal Jews. However, it is apparently “not clear whet…
Read MoreIn Brief: New Evidence Shows Expectations Influence Pain
In the current issue of Science Translational Medicine, Oxford neuroscientists in Irene Tracy’s lab have published a new study of the placebo effect with dramatic results. In their experiment, test subjects were subjected to pain in t…
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