2005 mbr january for website.doc

MBR JANUARY 2005 vol. 24 no. 1

EDITORIAL

NEWS IN BRIEF
HIV ‘explosion’ prompts call for action Over half of the world’s children are severely deprived Missing Prozac papers to be reviewed by FDA Israelis and Palestinians collaborate on health journal US medics in Iraq and Afghanistan may have participated in abusive Millions of people threatened by disease outbreaks following tsunami
AT THE CENTRE
Centre offers two new subjects to first year undergraduate students Centre sponsors Ethics Officer po sition at WHO Human Genetics Programme
ARTICLES
Human cloning and ‘posthuman’ society
Russell Blackford

ABSTRACT
Since early 1997, when the creation of Dolly the sheep by somatic cell
nuclear transfer was announced in Nature, numerous government reports,
essays, articles and books have considered the ethical problems and
policy issues surrounding human reproductive cloning. In this article, I
consider what response a modern liberal society should give to the
prospect of human cloning, if it became safe and practical. Some
opponents of human cloning have argued that permitting it would place us
on a slippery slope to a repugnant future society, comparable to that
portrayed in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World.
I conclude that, leaving aside concerns about safety, none of the psychological or social considerations discussed in this article provides an adequate policy justification for invoking the state's coercive powers to prevent human cloning.
Should older and postmenopausal women have access to assisted
reproductive technology?
Imogen Goold
ABSTRACT
In vitro fertilisation and other assisted reproductive technologies (ART) now
enable many women to have children, who would otherwise have remaine d
childless. The most obvious application for these technologies is to help
physically infertile, but otherwise healthy young women to have children.
However, increasingly, other groups are seeking access to ART to conceive,
raising ethical questions about who should be allowed to use these
technologies to bear children. In particular, the question of access to ART by
lesbian couples and single women has roused considerable ethical, legal
and public debate.

This paper examines the perhaps less often considered issue of older and postmenopausal women, who are infertile due to age, using ART to conceive. A range of objections have been made to allowing these women access to ART, including concerns about their ability to care for the child, the risk of birth defects and the ‘unnaturalness’ of extending childbearing capacity beyond the menopause. This paper examines these objections and provides some responses.
WHISTLE-BLOWING DISCUSSION
Coherence and healthcare whistle-blowing: A response to Parker
ABSTRACT
None provided

Whistle-blowing in the medical curriculum: A response to Faunce
ABSTRACT
We agree with Faunce’s proposal that academic legitimacy is important in ensuring that whistle-blowing is included in medical curricula. We disagree, however, with the assertion that this is best achieved by means of an over-arching theoretical foundation for health care whistle -blowing of the kind suggested by Faunce. We propose that systematic theoretical justification is neither the sole nor the main determinant of academic legitimacy when it comes to matters for inclusion in medical school curricula, and outline an alternative view, together with a practical example of a healthcare whistle-blowing topic.
The ethical status of whistle-blowers
Grant Gillet
ETHICS COMMITTEE SUPPLEMENT
JOTTINGS
Recalled arthritis drug facilities underestimated Call for standards to guide microbicide research in African countries Brazil moves to break patents on foreign AIDS drugs Indian clinical trial accused of being unethical Nevirapine safety fears may lead to backlash
ETHICS COMMITTEE REFLECTION
Payments to research subjects
Martin Wilkinson

BOOK REVIEW

Source: http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/bioethics/files/2012/09/mbr241tocabstracts.pdf