Abortion Travel

Helsingin Sanomat of Finland reports that Finnish officials are set to crack down on travel by women who are past the 24th week of pregnancy. Late term abortions are illegal in Finland - after the 24th week - unless there is a "serious threat to the mother's health." So, women sometimes seek to travel to other European Union countries where late term abortion is less regulated. Technically, travel in the last few weeks of pregnancy by air, water, and rail is made difficult by transportation rules and by carriers. But Finland has been discussing expanding the authority of the state to keep pregnant women from leaving the country for such services. Aside from the practical complexity of such a rule, the annual national doctor's convention in Helsinki discussed the ethical issues; Ursula Vala (long time bioethics voice in Finland) said that "a doctor who reported such a patient to the authorities would probably be in violation of doctor-patient confidentiality."

Finland is roughly the size of a bar of soap, but it had 800 abortions past the 12th week in 2003, a significant enough number to make this a public health as well as ethical and medical issue.

Islamic Code of Ethics Includes Therapeutic Cloning

SciDev.Net reports on the new Islamic code of medical ethics up for a vote:

Muslim states are being asked to allow the cloning of human embryos for research into possible medical treatments — so-called therapeutic cloning — while maintaining a ban on the reproductive cloning of human beings. Both provisions are included in the draft text of what is being proposed as the first international Islamic code of medical and health ethics, approved during the eighth conference of the Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences (IOMS), held in Cairo last month. The proposed code addresses the relationships between physicians, their patients, and wider society from the perspectives of both Islam and medical ethics. It takes into account Islamic views on new medical techniques such as in vitro fertilisation and gene therapy.

The Voice of Bioethics at Berkeley

This profile of Guy Micco is really touching and gives a sense of what bioethics is like in the San Francisco bay area. Micco is a recently retired internist who for some time chaired the ethics committee at Alta Bates. Today he teaches students in the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program, who take basic science and electives at Berkeley and get clinical practice at UCSF. He heads the UC-B School of Public Health’s Center on Aging and its Center for Medicine, the Humanities, and Law (CMHL). One anecdote from the profile:

A former patient of Micco, Laqueur tells the story of the renowned ethicist Bernard Williams, who often went head to head with Micco, during the years he taught at Berkeley, over philosophical questions. “I can’t bear Micco and all his nonsense!” Williams was known to say of Micco’s belief in the capacity of the arts and humanities to “humanize.” But then Williams got sick, and none of the doctors at Oxford University, where he was then teaching, could diagnose his ailment. He asked to be seen by Micco — “who figured it out in 30 minutes,” Laqueur says. “He’s a brilliant diagnostician.”

And what is he like in his role?

Laqueur views him as an “unsung hero of campus” — a faculty member whose contributions don’t lie in the realm of publication, scholarship, or administrative acumen, but who nonetheless has made an “enormous impact on students and the ethical environment. In another age he would have been a religious leader or one of these doctors who would have had a cultish following.”

In this age, however, in Micco’s more modest estimation, he’s one man doing his bit in the interval between birth and death. “Every so often, when medicine gets too biomedical, too heavy into the technological,” he says, “someone calls for a corrective: ‘we need to turn back to the human element, the doctor-patient relationship.’ That’s happening now around the country, and the humanities play a key role…. I feel I’m a small part of that movement.”