It’s another blow to fatherhood, the traditional family, and all things good and pure, squeals the Daily Heil.* What could raise such spleen? By the looks of it, it’s Part 2 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (2008), although the paper doesn’t have the good grace to provide a link. This piece of legislation reduces […]
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Purdy and the Role of the Law
Having spent a chunk of my weekend reading the Purdy ruling, one of the things that it seems to illustrate is the way in which ethics and law sometimes seem to come apart. The ruling notes that Purdy and Puente are faced with “an impossible dilemma”, and that “although Mr Puente would be willing to […]
Conference: The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008: New Directions in Biolaw and Bioethics
Keele, March 30th. Details below the fold. […]
Update on Purdy
Debbie Purdy has lost her case for clarification of the law on assisted suicide. Details are all over your preferred news source: the BBC site seems to have crashed at the moment. I’ll post something more thought-through later. […]
Money for Octuplets
I don’t think that anyone has mentioned the increasingly curious Suleman octuplet story yet on this blog. So I’ll just quickly point out that Nadya Suleman has – obviously – a website, on which she asks for comments and – erm – donations. If someone could tell me what to think about this in a sane and […]
Drugs are Bad, m’kaaaay?
As widely predicted, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has advised that ecstasy be downgraded from a class-A to a class-B drug. This comes in the wake of the Council’s chair, David Nutt, suggesting that ecstasy ought to be considered no more dangerous than horse-riding. (The full article can be found here, but for non-institutional readers, a […]
Population Control, Chinese Style?
Enough with one child per family, already – let the kids smoke themselves into population control… Apologies for having to link it: I can’t seem to get LiveLeak to embed. I fail at computer. (Thanks to Garen FD for the pointer.) […]
Homeopathy: Healing the World (in very very very small doses)
PZ Meyers has picked up a strange story: apparently, there’s an organisation called Homeopaths Without Borders – clearly picking up on MSF’s name – that intends to send crack teams of homeopaths to disaster areas. Their site’s mainly in German at the moment – they promise updates – but here’s a taste of what they […]
Shit Priorities
Here’s a handful of moral statements that, I guess, many people would take to be trivially true: We ought to save lives where possible; Saving more lives is better than saving fewer; It is a good thing to save lives as efficiently as possible; Saving lives is more important than improving tolerable lives. Nothing too […]
Barbados, HIV and Nursing Policy
There is a controversy brewing in Barbados concerning Nigerian nurses and HIV – in particular, concerning the way the story was reported by the CBC, which provoked industrial action. As Alison Mayers points out in a (fairly impassioned) guest column in The Nation, there are many things that we might ask about HIV and the use of Nigerian […]