The lasting anguish of moral injury
On a Sunday evening in September 1994, David Peters drove to a church service in Beckley, West Virginia, as the sun set over the horizon....
Unauthorised pelvic exams continue in American hospitals
Unauthorised pelvic exams are still being carried out on women as part of medical education in the United States. In 2020 the New York Times...
Re-examining autonomy
The buzzword cutting through the noisy controversy over the US Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade is “reproductive autonomy”. This is raised on a...
Happy the elephant is not a ‘person’
Happy the elephant, a long-time resident of the Bronx Zoo, can remain there after the New York court of appeals ruled she is not legally...
Should institutions enjoy freedom of conscience?
One of the most difficult issues in contemporary bioethics is “institutional freedom of conscience”. Should a healthcare facilities or nursing homes in a liberal democracy...
JAMA appoints new editor for new times
Last year, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) lost both its deputy editor and its editor. To rephrase Oscar Wilde’s quip: to lose...
Will brainwashing make a comeback?
Imagine this scenario: the American military captures a fanatical soldier of the Islamic State who has been responsible for the deaths of several Americans. What...
Building the business of bundles of joy
Surrogacy, especially commercial surrogacy, is often criticised in BioEdge. So it’s only fair to give the surrogacy industry’s point of view from time to time....
IVF: a great investment opportunity
IVF is Big Business. Not as big as Big Tech or Big Pharma, perhaps, but Big. A bidding war for an Australian stock-exchange listed company...
Conscientious objection is ‘indefensible’, says WHO
The latest abortion care guidelines from the World Health Organization severely criticise conscientious objection (CO) as a major obstacle to making abortion freely available. “Conscientious...
Bioethics after Ukraine
In a thoughtful essay in The Hastings Center blog, Jonathan Moreno, a leading bioethicist, reflects on how bioethics will change after the war in Ukraine....
Bioethics must repudiate its white past to confront racism
The Black Lives Matter movement has exposed a crisis in bioethics, argues Camisha Russell, of the University of Oregon, in the American Journal of Bioethics....