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Abortion conscience clause? To revoke it would be unconstitutional
Whilst Senator Laurence Rossignol calls for suppression of the conscience clause claimed by health professionals refusing to carry out abortions (see Laurence Rossignol in favour of revoking conscience clause for abortion), Jérôme Roux, Associate Professor of Law and...
Divorced father says that his son is “missing a mother”
Jérôme, 46, is divorced and father to seven-year-old Arsène. He has "tried to be both mother and father to his son" but "at times he feels that his child is 'missing a mother'" and he doesn't know how to resolve the problem". Arsène has hardly seen his mother...
€900 compensation for purely unselfish egg donation?
Egg donors are paid too much in the Netherlands with up to €900 compensation per "donation". Ethicists at University Medical Centre Utrecht are afraid that women are being forced "to donate their eggs for financial reasons". However, in their report[1], they deem it...
Belgian MPs remove abortion from the penal code
In Belgium, following months of debate both in Parliament and civil society, a decision was taken yesterday to revise the 1990 Lallemand-Michielsens abortion law by 84 votes to 39 with five abstentions. The bill removes abortion from the penal code but penal...
Barcelona: adoption of abandoned embryos
In Spain, when parents who have had access to medically assisted reproduction do not use their embryos, the law authorises reproduction centres to use them for research purposes, destroy them or to donate them to other couples. In Barcelona, Institut Marquès, which...
Faster access to abortion in Ireland
Last week, the Irish President enacted the law on the legalisation of abortion in Ireland following the referendum (see: Ireland: legalisation of abortion enacted). Abortion units should become operational in January 2019. Meanwhile, Minister Simon Harris intends to...
United States: paraplegic walks a few metres with electric stimulation
Having been paralysed in the legs from the age of four, a young man in the United States has just taken a few steps thanks to electrical stimulation. Following a snowmobile accident affecting his spinal cord, he lost the use of his legs and could no longer feel them....
United States: paraplegic walks a few metres with electric stimulation
Having been paralysed in the legs from the age of four, a young man in the United States has just taken a few steps thanks to electrical stimulation. Following a snowmobile accident affecting his spinal cord, he lost the use of his legs and could no longer feel them....
United States: aborted foetuses used to create chimeric mice
During the summer, the US prolife network revealed an FDA contract[1] in the United States to purchase tissue from aborted human foetuses to create "chimeric mice", i.e. with a human immune system, for research purposes. In response, the Ministry of Health issued a...
Emmanuel Sapin: “Let’s stay true to the perspective of the treated human. Ignore the concept of the augmented human”
On the occasion of the publication of Decision 129 by the French National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE), Professor Emmanuel Sapin, Head of the Department of Paediatric Surgery at Dijon Children's Hospital, laments the fact that "changes in society" are...
India: child trafficking following theft of sperm and egg samples
In Delhi, a child-trafficking gang linked to a surrogacy centre stole sperm and egg samples from an IFV centre. This centre then sold the samples on to childless couples either for pregnancy when the woman is able to conceive or via a surrogate mother. In this second...
Uterus transplants pose the same ethical problems as surrogacy
A researcher at Linköping University in Sweden[1] has studied the ethical aspects of uterine transplantation, and concludes that this procedure is not necessarily less complex than surrogacy from an ethical perspective. A certain number of teams around the...