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Presumed consent, abortion and Falconer Commission on menu at BMA annual meeting
The British Medical Association’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) takes place at the end of this…

Using organs from euthanasia victims now an established procedure in ‘brave new Belgium’
Recently I blogged about Jack Kevorkian, the American pathologist known by many as ‘Dr Death’ for…

Papageno and Werther effects – public policy lessons for the prevention of suicide
I recently blogged about the new German film ‘Goethe’, a study of the early life of the celebrated…

Kevorkian’s life and death is sober warning of the dangers of legalising assisted suicide
Jack Kevorkian, the American pathologist known by many as ‘Dr Death’ for his role in helping over…

Paying less for vaccines – marketing strategy or an answer to prayer?
The giant pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has announced it will be making its Rotarix…

BBC to show Dignitas death – further bias and will fuel more suicides
The BBC’s decision to screen a man's dying moments at the Dignitas suicide facility in a documentary…

Telegraph highlights our comments on End of Life Charter not addressing religious beliefs
On returning from a trip to Canada, for the Third International Symposium on preventing assisted suicide…

The Problem with Care – more questions raised by BBC Panorama
Another week, and another story about poor care standards – this time an exposé on the BBC’s…

Altering the Body: the rise and rise of cosmetic surgery
This week the 90 second daily 4thought.tv programme on ethical topics tackles cosmetic surgery, under…

New End of Life Patient Charter is a good start but does not go far enough
More than 8,000 GP surgeries in England will be asked to display a new patient charter on end of life…

Times newspaper unwisely joins campaign to legalise assisted suicide
The Times newspaper has today (Monday, 30 May) devoted two whole pages and an editorial to the pro-assisted…
Candour in the NHS: Speaking the truth in love?
We would all want a good degree of honesty from anyone caring for us or treating us for a medical condition. Trust is one of the essential components of a good nurse/patient or doctor/patient relationship. One of the issues Robert Francis exposed in his reports into the Mid-Staff Scandal was that there was a culture […]
Nurses caught up in immigration battle
The annual congress of the Royal College of Nursing opened on Sunday, and it began with a warning. New UK government immigration rules, that requires that people gaining a work visa to the UK will need to be earning in excess of £35,000 after five years, will mean most migrant nurses from outside of the […]
Morning-after pill is now available to all girls UNDER the age of consent
News that the morning-after pill, ellaOne (which can be effective up to five days after sex), is now available for use by any woman of reproductive age in Europe, without parental consent, from pharmacies everywhere, is – to put it mildly – ill-advised. To put it less mildly, it is an ill-conceived knee-jerk response to Britain’s […]
Elisabeth Elliot enters ‘the gates of splendor’
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” ― Jim Elliot When I was 11 my father became seriously ill and I was parceled out to stay with relatives. I found myself sharing a farm worker’s hut: bare floorboards, a rough iron-framed bed, and certainly […]
How safe is the school cancer vaccination for young girls?
New reports (including on the front page of the Independent) are adding to the evolving story of inadequate research on a vaccine that almost every teenage girl in the UK will have been given since 2008. News that (apparently) thousands of young girls have been enduring various debilitating illnesses after taking the routine injection […]
The new ethical frontier: DIY eugenics
The single most controversial development in biology in 2015 is a relatively cheap, easily manipulated technology for modifying the human genome. Called Crispr, this tool allows scientists to “edit” the genome by deleting or adding DNA sequences. In just a couple of years, frenetic activity in labs around the world has taught scientists how to […]
Scottish Assisted Suicide Bill gets short shrift from MSPs
Patrick Harvie’s Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill has been defeated today in a free vote by 82 votes to 36 in the Scottish Parliament. The MSP took over the bill following the death of Margo Macdonald MSP in April 2014. It was proposing an ‘Oregon type system’ with trained ‘licensed facilitators’ but with a wide scope for mentally competent […]
Thirteen ‘solutions’ to mitochondrial disease assessed
Mitochondrial disorders are passed on through a mother’s mitochondrial DNA. They are progressive and can be very disabling but are thankfully relatively rare. They can cause stillbirth, death in babies and children, or may onset with severe effects in adulthood, such as blindness or heart failure. As there is currently no treatment for most of […]
24/7 NHS – will it work?
The first major policy announcement from the re-elected Prime Minister on Monday was, perhaps rather surprisingly, about the NHS. This may be because the whole topic of the future of the health service was kicked around a lot at the General Election and there are, no doubt, fears still lingering in the wider electorate that there […]
More evidence of a possible link between abortion and breast cancer
The authors of a newly published research paper on the genetic regulation of breast cancer formation have made a surprising admission. It is hidden away in an interview the authors gave about their findings, where they state, almost in passing, that: ‘…there is an increased risk of breast cancer if the first pregnancy occurs after […]
Home Secretary surgically dissected on Today Programme over new extremism disruption orders
This week Prime Minister David Cameron unveiled plans for a new counter-terrorism bill he intends to include in the Queen’s speech on 27 May. The bill will include provision for extremism disruption orders giving the police powers to apply to the high court to limit the ‘harmful activities’ of an ‘extremist’ individual. The orders were […]
Nepal – facing up to further tragedy
As if things in Nepal weren’t already bad enough, early on Tuesday morning a second, massive earthquake hit, 47 miles northeast of the capital Kathmandu. Not as powerful as the earthquake that cost over 8,000 lives last week, it was still powerful enough (7.3-magnitude) to cause considerable damage and loss of life – the scale […]