domingo, 20 de mayo de 2018

BioEdge: Guernsey rejects assisted suicide

BioEdge: Guernsey rejects assisted suicide

Bioedge

Guernsey rejects assisted suicide
     
A back door to assisted suicide and euthanasia in the United Kingdom has been closed. After a three-day debate, the Parliament of Guernsey, a British Crown dependency in the English Channel, has voted 24-14 to reject an Oregon-style bill for assisted suicide.

The proposal was a private member’s bill proposed by Guernsey’s chief minister, Gavin St Pier. He released a statement expressing his regret that the measure had not passed:

"We believe that a majority of the population do support a change in the law. However, we live in a representative democracy and our parliamentary assembly, the States of Deliberation, has by majority, made a democratic decision which settles the matter in Guernsey."
“We, of course, accept that decision. We remain of the view that this is an inevitable change which in the fullness of time Guernsey will one day adopt. However, that is matter for our parliamentary successors, not us."
The proposal was modelled on the law in the US state of Oregon, meaning that applicants for assisted suicide should have a diagnosis of terminal illness with less than six months to live and full mental capacity. People from other parts of the United Kingdom would not be able to travel to Guernsey for “suicide tourism”.
Bioedge

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Shusaku Endo may be the greatest Japanese novelist who didn’t win the Nobel Prize. He is best known in the West for his novel Silence, about Christianity in 17th Century Japan, which was recently made into a film by Martin Scorsese. But one of his early novels touches upon the ethics of clinical research. Based upon a historical incident which took place just weeks before the end of World War II, The Sea and Poison relates the moral corruption of doctors who vivisected several American prisoners of war.

It’s hard to get, but well worth reading, as it exemplifies the hazards of research on prisoners. Almost no population is more vulnerable to exploitation by clinical researchers than prisoners. Even if they benefit from the research in some tangential way, a more powerful motivation may be their desire to please prison authorities.

Many bioethicists have written about this difficult ethical issue, but this doesn’t make it any easier to make a decision in practice. Below is an article about proposed clinical trial conducted in prisons to determine whether low-salt diets are healthier. What do you think?

 
Michael Cook
Editor
BioEdge
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