Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
Two highly respected ethicists, Nancy King and Ken Kipnis, have recently published an editorial questioning the ethics of an ongoing trial of the value of synthetic blood-substitute solutions in trauma care. They note certain concerns regarding the role of consent in the trial, but also raise a provocative question about its overall motivation: since most advanced trauma care takes place well within the “Golden Hour” after first injury, in hospital settings where cross-matched blood is readily available, what is the value of testing blood sustitutes over a 12-hour timeframe, as this trial is doing? The rationale is not made clear in the study protocol, but these ethicists suggest a possible answer: the product is really being tested for use on the battlefield by the military, with civilian trauma casualties serving as non-voluntary guinea pigs for war planners, in a study in which the informed consent was “waived”.
There’s some discussion of this decision by the European Court of Human Rights (under the aegis of the European Union), holding that a woman who had eggs fertilized by her then-fiance’s sperm before undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer (which apparently left her with no further usable eggs) cannot now demand that the stored IVF embryos be implanted so she can bear a child from them. British law gives both parties to IVF the right to withdraw permission to use the embryos at any time up until implantation; she and her fiance have since split up, and he no longer wants to be the father of a child with her, and so has refused to allow the embryos to be used. The EU court upheld that law and found for the male partner on those grounds.
