“Ireland's law and Catholic culture allowed Savita Halappanavar to die” was a typical headline over news last October that a 31-year-old pregnant woman died of septicaemia after pleading vainly with doctors to abort the child. There were demonstrations in the streets and fiery editorials calling for the legalisation of abortion in Ireland.
However, the outcome of the official coroner’s inquest was that Ms Halappanavar died in University Hospital Galway as a result of “medical misadventure”.
The jury unanimously agreed that the cause of death was septic shock from a highly toxic strain of E. coli bacteria, but it also accepted the coroner’s nine recommendations for improving hospital care. The first of these was that the Irish Medical Council should draft new guidelines on when doctors can intervene to save the life of a mother.
Why can’t embryos be bought and sold like any other commodity? Making this surprising proposal is less surprising than where it was made – in the America’s leading medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine.
Even in the Wild West of assisted reproductive technology, trading embryos is almost universally condemned. Even the peak body for US IVF clinics, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), has declared flatly that “the selling of embryos per se is ethically unacceptable.”
However, as I. Glenn Cohen, a bioethicist at Harvard Law School, and Dr Eli Y. Adashi, of Brown University’s medical school, point out, this prohibition is not as absolute as it sounds. After all, embryo donation is permitted, even though it is not a major part of clinical practice.
Margaret Somerville, of McGill University, and Nikola Biller-Andorno, of the Institute of Biomedical Ethics of the University of Zurich, debate physician-assisted suicide on a podcast by the New England Journal of Medicine. Quite fascinating.
"If I can't find a donor in this country I have to decide whether I'm willing to take on my soul the ethical burden of purchasing a kidney from somebody, or to die," says says a patient in Ric Esther Bienstock' new documentary about the organ trade. "That is really the choice I'm facing." Tales from the Organ Trade is a fascinating film which takes a chilling look at the characters in the international black market in organs. One is a Turkish surgeon, Dr Yousef Sonmez, who has done thousands of transplants. He is wanted by Interpol for involvement in a racket in Kosovo, but Turkey refuses to extradite him.
The US military came under fire this week for force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay. A testimony from Yemeni prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, published in the New York Times, has described the forcible use of intravenous feeding tubes by prison staff. According to Moqbel, detainees are routinely restrained and fed through IV tubes:
“I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way... I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone…Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down.”
Moqbel claims this is the widespread practice of the prison officers: “There aren’t enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings… They are feeding people around the clock.”
A study of more than 6 million American seniors has found that 21% received a prescription for at least one potentially harmful "high-risk medication”, and 5% received at least two. Questionable prescriptions are more common in the southern states and among people who live in poor areas.
The study, published in this month's edition of The Journal of General Internal Medicine, was based on 2009 data of seniors on Medicare Advantage plans. The authors defined ‘high risk medication’ as any drug on the drugs to avoid in the elderly list, compiled by the National Committee for Quality Assurance.
The study indicates that the prescription of dangerous medications is far more common in the South. Compared with people 65 and older living in New England, those living in the southern region from Texas to South Carolina were about 12% more likely to be prescribed a high-risk medication.
The creator of the first IVF baby and 2010 Nobel Laureate Robert Edwards died this week. Obituaries and eulogies by colleagues, friends and admirers spoke of a passionate man with boundless energy, driven by a desire to bring happiness to infertile couples.
Edwards was born in 1925 in Yorkshire. After a slow start in his research career, he began working in human reproduction in the mid-1950s. He teamed up with Dr Patrick Steptoe, an expert in the new field of laparoscopy in 1968. By 1969 they provided the first compelling evidence that fertilisation could take place outside the human body.
Edwards was not just a scientist; he was a crusader. He took every opportunity to tell the press of his plans for in vitro fertilisation. At the time, the scientific establishment – to say nothing of the churches -- was strongly opposed. The reaction of the British…
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Lord Robert Winston, IVF pioneer, is stumping about the British countryside doing what he does best, acting the gadfly. In a three-lecture series called Sex in Three Cities, organised by the Society for Reproduction and Fertility, he predicts the revival of eugenics. Society must be prepared, he told The Scotsman newspaper:
“It is an issue that is more serious now in some ways because of the commercialisation of reproductive medicine, increasingly so with climate change, global warming, water shortages, food shortages, conflict and burgeoning technology that is not always well controlled by governments. It may well be an area that will rear its ugly head again. We should be on our guard against it.”
The new eugenics will be privatised and in sync with the market economy:
Scientists at a number of top American universities failed to inform parents of the grave risks of enrolling in a clinical trial on blindness in premature babies, says the federal agency overseeing the welfare of people in research projects.
In a letter to dozens of participants in a trial known as the SUPPORT study, the Office for Human Research Protections has demanded an explanation of why parents were not told that their children would have an increased risk of blindness or death.
The researchers, who published their findings in 2010 in the New England Journal of Medicine, were examining one of the major cause of infant blindness in the US, retinopathy of prematurity. If premature infants get too much oxygen their eyesight can be damaged. If they get too little, they can suffer brain damage and death. About 500 babies become blind every year for this…
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The leading cancer centre in Washington state has published in the New England Journal of Medicine a blueprint of how to implement a dying-with-dignity program, now that assisted suicide has been legalised.
The Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which is associated with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, says that the protocols it followed to help 40 of its patients die were designed to “adhere to legal regulations, maintain safety, and ensure the quality of patient care”. These include liaising with a social worker, identifying a doctor who will prescribe the lethal dose, helping with paperwork, and conducting a psychosocial assessment.
Of the 40, 24 died after taking secobarbital and 16 died later of their disease. Patients and families were “grateful” to receive the lethal prescription whether or not it was used. One of the 24 took more than a day to die, an outcome which distressed his family and the doctor. None of…
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The US military came under fire this week for force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay. 
Lord Robert Winston, IVF pioneer, is stumping about the British countryside doing what he does best, acting the gadfly. In a three-lecture series called Sex in Three Cities, organised by the Society for Reproduction and Fertility, he predicts the revival of eugenics. Society must be prepared, he told 
The leading cancer centre in Washington state has published in the 
