The recent case of the Glasgow midwives, Mary Doogan and Concepta Wood, highlighted again the scope of the ‘conscience clause’ relating to the Abortion Act 1967, and to which tasks it could be applied in relation specifically to their role as Labour Ward Co-ordinators. However, as members of the Catholic Church, this case had specific resonances for them in relation to their beliefs, both from a moral-theological and canonical perspective, the latter of which carries potential ecclesiastical penalties. This article looks at the decisions handed down by the courts, and analyses the issues arising in relation to principles of Catholic morality and the relevant canons in the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

Civil law jurisdictions have more than others effectively resisted the commodification of gestation capacities, relying on the old Roman aphorism mater semper certa est (‘it is always certain who the mother is’). Faced with the complexities of stratified reproduction [Anagnost, A., 2004. Maternal labor in transnational circuits. In: J. S. Taylor, L. L. Layne, and D. F. Wozniak, eds. Consuming motherhood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 139–167], the mater semper certa est rule allows for the birth mother to be considered as the legal mother. Thus, the gestational model of motherhood, that rules in countries such as Spain, France, and Italy, acts as a deterrent against prospective parents’ entering into a surrogacy contract, both domestically as well as at the international level. This paper offers a vindication of the Roman aphorism as a fair principle to protect birth mothers and their children from the abuses of reproductive market forces.

It is a truth universally acknowledged (apologies to Jane Austen) that complex and fast-moving new biotechnologies inevitably outstrip legal regulation and ethical scrutiny. Surrogacy, the subject ...

This contribution aims to unpack the ontological nexus of cyborg identity and culture. It highlights a set of core assumptions driving its operations that merit critical attention as cyborgic and AI discourses continue to unfold and penetrate societies deeper, ultimately questioning the normative and conceptual logic and social distribution of these core assumptions.

This paper examines the Court of Protection decision in Briggs v Briggs. It considers whether the approach of the Court, which gave effective decisive weight to a patient’s previously expressed wishes about whether he should be kept alive in a minimally conscious state, is a proper application of the ‘best interests’ test under the Mental Capacity Act 2005. It assesses whether the Briggs approach is effectively applying a ‘substituted judgement’ test and considers the difficulties in ascertaining what a person’s actual wishes are.

When doctors become aware of a threat to public health, they have a professional duty to try to mitigate the threat. Climate change is a recognized major threat to planetary and public health that requires actions to both mitigate, and adapt to, climate change. The limited time and resources available to change what humankind are doing and protect planetary health add urgency to the threat. Some doctors take non-violent direct actions if their governments fail to take the effective actions needed. Professional regulatory organizations like the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC) are charged with protecting the health of patients by setting standards for, giving ethical advice about, and supervising the behaviour of doctors. This article examines the conflict between climate activist doctors and the GMC interpretation of a doctor’s duty of care when there is threat to public health from climate change.

Experimental therapies with embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and, more recently, human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) are steadily gaining ground in clinical practice. The implementation of such novel high-risk/high-potential treatments calls for proper safeguards for the interests of the public and, most importantly, of research participants directly affected by the design and outcomes of trials. We argue that the active involvement of stakeholders in decision-making is ethically required. Public and patient involvement is a necessary prerequisite for dealing responsibly with high-risk/high-potential clinical research such as stem-cell research. Moreover, there is an urgent need for public debate, regionally and globally, about the present and future value of such types of research. A stakeholder approach that pays attention to all of the people and institutions involved, including patients and their organizations, will guide the translational process and maintain the public’s trust in such a rapidly evolving scientific field.

Recently, Henrik Friberg-Fernros replied (2019) to my paper ‘The Ethics of Killing: Strengthening the Substance View with Time-relative Interests’ (Blackshaw 2019) to clarify his position regarding...

A key question has been underexplored in the literature on conscientious objection: if a physician is required to perform ‘medical activities,’ what is a medical activity? This paper explores the question by employing a teleological evaluation of medicine and examining the analogy of military conscripts, commonly cited in the conscientious objection debate. It argues that physicians (and other healthcare professionals) can only be expected to perform and support medical acts – acts directed towards their patients’ health. That is, physicians cannot be forced to provide or support services that are not medical in nature, even if such activities support other socially desirable pursuits. This does not necessarily mean that medical professionals cannot or should not provide non-medical services, but only that they are under no obligation to provide them.

The advantages and risks of a number of new genome modifying procedures seeking to create healthy or enhanced individuals, such as Maternal Spindle Transfer, Pronuclear Transfer, Cytoplasmic Transfer and Genome Editing, are currently being assessed from an ethical perspective, by national and international policy organizations. One important aspect being examined concerns the effects of these procedures on different kinds of identity. In other words, whether or not a procedure only modifies the qualities or properties of an existing human being, meaning that merely the qualitative identity of this single individual is affected, or whether a procedure results in the creation of a new individual, meaning that a numerically distinct human being would have come into existence. In this article, the different identity arguments proposed, so far, are presented with respect to these novel reproductive procedures. An alternative view is then developed using the Origin Essentialism argument to indicate that any change in the creative conditions of an individual such as in his or her biology but also the moment in time, and the three dimensions of space, will have a numerical identity effect and bring into existence a new individual who would not, otherwise, have existed. Because of this, it is concluded that a form of selection may have taken place in which a preference was expressed for one new possible individual instead of another, based on some frame of reference. This may then mean that a selection between persons has occured contravening the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights which was ratified in 2000.