This ran between 1933 and 1977 as a means of keeping welfare low, preventing poverty and enhancing the gene pool. Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs, and Virginia and California each sterilised more people than North Carolina. However, their programs were not as aggressive as North Carolina’s. While the state officially apologised in 2002, Governor Bev Perdue is grappling with the state’s obligation to the victims of the program.
A New York Times feature recounts the story of one man, 62-year-old Charles Holt, who was sterilised as a young adult. Government records state that after he showed violent behaviour at school as a teenager, he was sent to a state home for people with mental and emotional problems. In 1968, when he was ready to leave and begin life as an adult, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina decided that he should have a vasectomy. A social worker persuaded his mother.
Do we need to change the name of persistent vegetative state? A feature in the St Louis Post-Dispatch argues that the term is applied “sloppily” and that studies have “undermined the validity of the PVS diagnosis.” Colleen Carroll Campbell, an author and former presidential speechwriter, points out that when American neurologist Fred Plum and Scottish neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett picked the term “vegetative”, they wanted a jargon-free term that could classify severely brain-damaged patients whom they considered awake but unaware. Campbell writes that families of those described as “vegetative” have “long chafed at the dehumanizing and bleak overtones of the label, not to mention the high rates of misdiagnosis among PVS patients.
Campbell also points out two recent cases which have added weight to the complaints and raised concerns about how often patients are written off – when there may be hope. A report was published in The Lancet last month by neuroscientists at…
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The British body for regulating doctors, the General Medical Council, has announced that it is working on guidelines for telling doctors what they should do if a patient asks for help in committing suicide. There is an increasing number of Britons seeking to go to Switzerland to seek death at suicide clinics. There will be a public consultation early next year. Niall Dickson, the Chief Executive of the General Medical Council, said:
“The issue of assisted suicide is complex and sensitive. We already have clear guidance for doctors that they must always act within the law and assisting or encouraging suicide remains a criminal offence. This guidance will not in any way change the legal position for doctors. It is not our role to take a position on whether or not the law should be changed; that is a matter for the relevant legislature.
Current rules and regulations provide adequate safeguards to mitigate risk in clinical trial, says the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. After a survey of federally-sponsored research involving human volunteers after a scandal over highly unethical treatment of Guatemalan patients in the late 1940s by doctors in the Public Health Service, Commission basically gave American research a clean bill of health.
“The Commission is confident that what happened in Guatemala in the 1940s could not happen today,” Commission Chair, Amy Gutmann. said. “However, it is also clear that improvements can be made to protect human subjects going forward.”
As same-sex marriage gains traction in the legal sphere, what about in bioethics? Two bioethicists at the University of Pennsylvania have issued a stirring call for a “queer bioethics” in the leading journal Bioethics. Lance Wahlert and Autumn Fiester point out that many of their colleagues have been insisting that bioethics has to be reimagined to include the powerless and to challenge the status quo. If so, they say, the time has certainly come for bioethical analysis which accommodates LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex) persons.
“Queer bioethics requires us to take a two-fold approach: (1) We must pay greater attention to the topics, identities, and issues that are blatantly queer, for the service of queer persons; and, (2) We must examine the most common, the most pedestrian, and the most germane of universal health issues (those we wouldn’t even instinctively think of as ‘queer’) and imagine how they might…
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Sex selection is one of the few bioethical issues which are opposed by both progressives and conservatives. As evidence of how unnatural the practice is, its opponents cite increasingly skewed “sex ratios”. The natural ratio of girls to boys at birth is about 105, so ratios of up to 130 in parts of China are described as perverse.
However, bioethicist Timothy F. Murphy, at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago, argues in the journal Bioethics, that “the natural sex ratio cannot be a sound moral basis for prohibiting parents from selecting the sex of their children”. What he objects to is the notion that there exists a natural state of affairs which should not be changed.
“If we move away from the view that a divine, or semi-divine, or even just a superior-to-human intelligence undergirds the operations of nature as a whole, human beings are free to choose the…
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A new scheme launched by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service has made getting the morning after pill as easy as ordering a pizza – but unlike pizza, it will be free.
The BPAS says that after a brief telephone consultation, it will home-deliver supplies of Levonelle and condoms to help girls from falling pregnant over the Christmas and New Year period. The BPAS website explains:
“The thing is, we see more women with an unplanned pregnancy in January than any other time of the year. We don't want you to be one of them. Getting hold of the 'Morning After Pill' over Christmas can be difficult so it's useful to have it before you need it.”
Under-16s need a prescription for this product, but the BPAS cheerfully admits that some girls “will not be completely honest about their age”.
In a surprise move, the Obama Administration has overruled a decision by the Federal Food and Drug Adminisration to allow girls under 17 to buy the morning-after pill without a prescription.
The head of the FDA had determined that “the product was safe and effective in adolescent females, that adolescent females understood the product was not for routine use, and that the product would not protect them against sexually transmitted disease.” But Health and Human Services Secretarary Kathleen Sibelius told the media that she felt uncomfortable with 11-year-olds accessing the pill.
President Obama supported the decision. “[Secretary Sibelius] could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going to a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could have an adverse effect,” he said. “And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”
China has admitted that it harvests organs from condemned prisoners, but very little information about the practice has emerged in the press. Executed prisoners are believed to account for two-thirds of all transplants, although the government apparently wants to promote a voluntary scheme.
But who are these prisoners? Even less information is available about this, although the Falun Gong, a persecuted indigenous group, claims that its members are being killed for their organs.
A frightening article in the Weekly Standard sheds some light on the situation. Investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann interviewed several Uighur refugees now living in the West who had witnessed the process of organ transplantation. They tell stories of ghastly abuses of political prisoners.
The Uighur ethnic minority live in Xinjiang, the vast, arid Western province of China. They are not Chinese but Turkic; most are Muslims and a few have joined terrorist groups. To…
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The keenness of British journalists to score exclusives and to run down the last details of stories are legendary – or at least they are now, after the News of the World phone hacking scandal.
Which is what makes the ho-hum coverage of this week’s report on mental health and abortion in the UK so puzzling. Commissioned by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and funded by the Department of Health, it is said to be “the world’s largest, most comprehensive and systematic review into the mental health outcomes of induced abortion”, although it does not appear to have been peer-reviewed. Its message is that
“…having an abortion does not increase the risk of mental health problems. The best current evidence suggests that it makes no difference to a woman’s mental health whether she chooses to have an abortion or to continue with the pregnancy.”
The British body for regulating doctors, the General Medical Council, has announced that it is working on guidelines for telling doctors what they should do if a patient asks for help in committing suicide. There is an increasing number of Britons seeking to go to Switzerland to seek death at suicide clinics. There will be a public consultation early next year. Niall Dickson, the Chief Executive of the General Medical Council, said:
The report, 
As same-sex marriage gains traction in the legal sphere, what about in bioethics? Two bioethicists at the University of Pennsylvania have issued a stirring call for a “queer bioethics” in the leading journal Bioethics. Lance Wahlert and Autumn Fiester point out that many of their colleagues have been insisting that bioethics has to be reimagined to include the powerless and to challenge the status quo. If so, they say, the time has certainly come for bioethical analysis which accommodates LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex) persons.
Sex selection is one of the few bioethical issues which are opposed by both progressives and conservatives. As evidence of how unnatural the practice is, its opponents cite increasingly skewed “sex ratios”. The natural ratio of girls to boys at birth is about 105, so ratios of up to 130 in parts of China are described as perverse.
A new scheme launched by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service has made getting the morning after pill as easy as ordering a pizza – but unlike pizza, it will be free.
China has admitted that it harvests organs from condemned prisoners, but very little information about the practice has emerged in the press. Executed prisoners are believed to account for 
The keenness of British journalists to score exclusives and to run down the last details of stories are legendary – or at least they are now, after the News of the World phone hacking scandal.
