Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson signed into law a bill on Friday that protects healthcare providers from discrimination if they refuse to provide medical services for religious or moral reasons. The bill, known as the Medical Ethics and Diversity Act, states that doctors and other healthcare workers have the right not to participate in a healthcare…
Despite international pressure, the Dominican Republic wants to remain a pro-life country and last week the Chamber of Deputies of the Caribbean country presented the bill to reform the Penal Code. In it the legislators have not contemplated the decriminalization of abortion under three possible assumptions as demanded by abortion groups supported by international lobbies.…
The House of Representatives ground to the project that sought to regulate euthanasia for adults in Colombia and settled the debate by denying the final report of the presentation. The initiative of the liberal representative Juan Fernando Reyes Kuri achieved its first triumph in Congress on the night of April 7. The promoters of euthanasia…
By Nicolás Jouve, Emeritus Professor of Genetics. President of CiViCa, member of the Bioethics Committee of Spain. (Cover image: A monkey-human blastocyst, an early stage of embryonic development Weizhi Ji, Kunming University of Science and Technology). A work has just been published in the journal Cell [1] in which the group led by the Spanish…
In addition to producing human-animal organs, these experiences seek to study the first stages of embryonic development, and even be used to deepen the knowledge of some diseases and their treatment. An article in the journal Cell (April 15, 2021), was the first work describing the chimera production human-ape (read HERE). The authors said that Monkey (Macaca fascicularis)…
Only five years after the Claeys-Leonetti law of February 2, 2016, the debate on the end of life is relaunched in France with a pro-euthanasia offensive consisting of four bills. In the Senate, that “aimed at establishing the right to die with dignity” (n ° 131) carried by Senator Marie-Pierre de la Gontrie (PS) was…
It is argued that the “slippery slope” that could be created after the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide could open the door to euthanasia practices that go beyond those permitted by law. In this respect, we address three specific circumstances in which we believe this could occur: 1) euthanasia techniques could be applied in…
In some countries, particularly Spain, one of the arguments used to justify the legalization of euthanasia is that there is a strong social demand for it. To try to ascertain the truth of this statement, we review different surveys of physicians and the general public, to determine their opinion on whether or not to legalize…
The Latvian public broadcaster LSM.LV reported that, after a long debate, the Latvian Saeima rejected a citizens initiative to legalize euthanasia by a vote of 49 to 38 with 2 abstentions. A citizens initiative collected 10,000 signatures which required the Saeima to debate the issue. LSM reported that Saeima representatives saw the euthanasia debate as opening the…
This is the question the European Court of Human Rights has agreed to decide. Seized by a prisoner who complains of having had his pornographic magazines confiscated, the court must decide whether prisons can legitimately prohibit the possession and use of such documents. The facts of this case can be very succinctly summarized: the applicant…