Eugenic or Not, Sterilization Makes Sense for “P”
The current case before a British judge as to whether a mentally disabled woman identified only as “P” should be sterilized has raised the ire of medical ethicists and the disability community. The...
View ArticleBuilding the Better Baby
by Craig Klugman, Ph.D. In the 1997 film GATTACA, a couple anxious to have a child sit down with their doctor. He shows them the very best embryos that were produced from combining their gametes. The...
View ArticleGenetic Testing For All: Is It Eugenics?
<p style="line-height: 19.0400009155273px;">In recent weeks, there’s been talk of three types of genetic testing transitioning from targeted populations to the general public: carrier screens for...
View ArticleBioethics Exam
In keeping with the evaluation-obsessed spirit of the time, here is a little bioethics test. No multiple-choice fill-in-the-bubbles here, no simple true/false; but bioethics usually isn’t so simple, is...
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Ethics & Society Newsfeed: March 4, 2016
NIH vowed to move its research chimps from labs, but only 7 got safe haven in 2015 Nearly three years after the National Institutes of Health announced that hundreds of chimpanzees held for invasive...
View ArticleTaking a ride down the slippery slope
Did you know: we can now make sperm from embryonic stem cells (in mice). Not only can we create this sperm, but we can use it to successfully fertilize an egg and develop into a fully grown mouse....
View ArticleTesting, testing: Prenatal genetic screening
The June 2016 issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology includes a study of the conversations between patients and “Health Care Providers” about prenatal genetic screening (PGS). The objective of the study...
View ArticleA “disabled” person speaks out against a particular form of discrimination
Amidst lots of dark and tragic stories, a bright ray on the BBC website this week: Kathleen Humberstone, a 17 year-old English girl with Down syndrome, addressed the UN in Geneva to mark World Down...
View ArticleHow to make Nazi doctors
Most people who go into medicine have as at least part of their motivation the desire to help other people. I’m sure this was as true in 1930’s Germany as anywhere else. So how did a cadre of Nazi...
View ArticleAll We Need is (Unconditional) Love
On March 24, 2017, Joe Gibes posted an entry on this blog, entitled “A ‘disabled’ person speaks out against a particular form of discrimination.”[1] That post featured links to several stories about...
View ArticleBuck v Bell at 90 years old
Last month marked the 90th anniversary of Buck v Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the Supreme Court decision that ruled that Virginia’s sterilization law was constitutional and infamously...
View ArticleSterilization for Prisoners Is Not New and Shows That Studying History is...
by Craig Klugman, Ph.D. In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that Carrie Buck and her baby could be sterilized because of a perception that they were “mental defectives.” In the...
View ArticleEugenic immigration policies revisited
Many people, when they think of the history of eugenics, think of Nazi Germany. However, eugenics was widely accepted and implemented as policy in America long before the Nazis rose to power. At the...
View ArticleAn Ambitious Vision for Bioethics – Some Reflections on Professor Jing-Bao...
Written by Ben Davies Many readers of the Practical Ethics blog will remember the astounding announcement last November by Chinese researcher He Jiankui that he had used CRISPR-cas9 technology to edit...
View Article“Belly of the Beast”
For those who are aware of the dreadful 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v Bell, the subject of the forced sterilizations of ‘undesirable’ people is not new. In a blog written over three years ago...
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