bioethics

There was an interesting bioethics ruling in Canada last month at the crossroads of traditional medicine and modern medicine. A young aboriginal girl has leukemia, and a Canadian judge ruled that her mother has a constitutional right to seek indigenous medicine, rather than chemotherapy, to treat her daughter, the Toronto Star's Jacques Gallant reports. The judge later clarified his ruling, writing that "'recognition and implementation of the right to use traditional medicines must remain consistent with the principle that the best interests of the child remain paramount.”'

The girl's treatment team includes a "doctor, a senior pediatric oncologist recommended by the government, and a Haudenosaunee chief who practises traditional medicine and was invited by the family," Gallant reports.

Three University of Pennsylvania bioethicists recently called for reestablishing mental asylums, The Inquirer's Stacey Burling reports. When  large-scale institutions for people with mental illness were abandoned decades ago, smaller, community-based institutions were not created to house people instead. Jails and emergency rooms have become the new mental asylums because there are few community-based beds for people with severe mental illnesses. The bioethicists "argue that what really happened was not deinstitutionalization but transinstitutionalization," Burling reports. "That means that at least some residents of mental hospitals did not thrive in their communities, as hoped, but shifted to inappropriate institutions, most notably prisons." One of the paper's authors told Burling he envisions asylums built on campuses and emphasizing patient autonomy and recovery as much as possible.

Joseph Chamie, former director of the United Nations' population division, writes in a post for the Inter Press Service News Agency that artificial reproductive technologies raise legal and ethical concerns that have not been fully resolved yet. Since 1970, five million people are estimated to have been born because of in vitro fertilization. Chamie notes that "gestational surrogacy raises challenging ethical questions, such as the exploitation of poor women, as well as complex legal issues, especially when transactions cross international borders." The same ethical and legal concerns will be raised by the prospect of people asserting their reproductive rights to be cloned and the development of babies outside the human womb in artificial uteruses, he writes: "Anticipated future medical breakthroughs in human reproduction make it even more imperative for the international community of nations to address the growing challenges and concerns regarding reproductive technologies and rights."

The Atlantic has a profound piece on Australian parents seeking to have their daughters with disabilities sterilized.

On one side, removing women's uteruses can ensure that they will not have children they can't care for and can improve their health in some situations. As one parent whose 31-year-old daughter has the mentality of a three-year-old described it to the magazine, "The hardest part for Sophie’s Sydney-based parents was managing her periods. 'She has an older sister and a younger sister and we tried to get her to use pads, but it just didn’t work,' said Merren Carter, Sophie’s mother."

On the other side, sterilization raises the specter of eugenics. As The Atlantic reported: "One woman’s father, who believed that she should not have children, told her she was going to the hospital to have her tonsils taken out. 'I did not have a sore throat afterwards,' she told the [Australian Senate] committee. It was only when she was trying to have kids with a long-term partner that she had realized what happened. Her partner eventually left her because he wanted children."