News - Announcements

October 2008

Nuffield Council on Bioethics: New ethics study on technology that is making healthcare more 'personal' (16.10.2008)
Inquiry: Personalised healthcare: ethical issues.

General Assembly ban on all human cloning to be reconsidered by UN ethics panel (13.10.2008)
The permissibility of therapeutic cloning will be the focus of a United Nations ethics panel later this month when it considers whether a non-binding General Assembly declaration calling on Member States to ban all forms of human cloning should be reassessed in light of scientific, ethical, social, political and legal advances.

UK: Fight to use dead husband's sperm (8.10.2008)
A widow is battling to use sperm taken from the body of her dead husband, in a British legal first. The woman, who cannot be named, wants to use sperm taken from her husband after he died unexpectedly during a routine hospital operation last year.

New Zealand: Church opposes baby sex selection (6.10.2008)
A recommendation from a committee of Protestant bioethical experts calling for a ban on sex selection for non-medical reasons was voted in virtually unopposed at the Presbyterians' biannual general assembly. The Bioethics Council, a ministerial advisory committee, recommended in June that the ban on using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to select a baby's sex purely for social reasons be lifted.