Remember the Avis Rent-a-Car commercials from the 1960s? Maybe not. Anyhow, they tripled the company’s market share with the slogan, “Avis Is Only No. 2, We Try Harder.” The Belgian right-to-die lobby seems to have the same can-do attitude.

Hey, this is pretty cool: an annotated list of dramas and documentaries about bioethical topics at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics (SCHB). It was launched this week.

Given that chimpanzees are so closely related to us, American researchers should allow them to be used in biomedical research only under stringent conditions, says a report from the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. These include the absence of any other suitable model and inability to ethically perform the research on people.

A New South Wales government proposal to prevent families from overturning their deceased relatives’ wishes on organ donation has garnered mixed reactions.

From the outside, it’s a two-room apartment. However, within its walls, it’s a barn for 15 surrogate mothers, all at various stages of pregnancy.

North Carolina’s eugenic past has made headlines again as legislators push to compensate the estimated 7,600 victims of its eugenics program.

Do we need to change the name of persistent vegetative state?

The UK 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College have used genetic methods to successfully repair cleft lips in mice embryos. The research breakthrough may show the way to prevent or treat the conditions in humans.