Journal of Medical Ethics (Volume 36, Number 8, August 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles Include:

• “Acceptability of Offering Financial Incentives to Achieve Medication Adherence in Patients with Severe Mental Illness: A Focus Group Study” by Stefan Priebe, Julia Sinclair, Alexandra Burton, Stamatina Marougka, John Larsen, Mike Firn, and Richard Ashcroft
• “End-of-Life Decisions as Bedside Rationing: An Ethical Analysis of Life Support Restrictions in an Indian Neonatal Unit” by I. Miljeteig, K.A. Johansson, S.A. Sayeed, and O.F. Norheim
• “Defending Human Enhancement Technologies:Unveiling Normativity” by Immaculada de Melo-Martin
• “Normative Consent and Presumed Consent for Organ Donation: A Critique” by Michael Potts, Joseph L. Verheijde, Mohamed Y. Rady, and David W. Evans
• “Between the Needy and the Greedy: The Quest for a Just and Fair Ethics of Clinical Research” by Volnei Garrafa, Jan Helge Solbakk, Susana Vidal, and Claudio Lorenzo

A Melbourne couple is suing the Royal Women’s Hospital for damages because doctors failed to diagnose their unborn daughter with Down Syndrome, denying them the choice to have an abortion. (ABC News)

Many worry that screening embryos pre-implantation, during fertility treatments, opens the door to gender selection and designer babies. But a German court on Tuesday decided to allow the practice. Commentators say that the ruling throws up more questions about genetic selection than answers. (SPIEGEL ONLINE)

“BE FRUITFUL and multiply, and fill the Earth.” Taken as an evolutionary imperative, that seems straightforward enough. But in reality, identifying the best way of doing it can be difficult, whether for individuals seeking romance, or scientists studying reproductive behaviour. (The Economist)

Three women in Namibia are suing the state for allegedly being sterilised without their informed consent after being diagnosed as HIV positive. The women say the doctors and nurses should have informed them properly about what was happening. (BBC News)

Project Prevention, founded by Barbara Harris, offers cash to drug addicts prepared to accept sterilisation or long term contraception. (BBC News)

When asked why she and her husband don’t want a second child, Shi Xiaomei smiles at her pudgy 9-year-old son and does a quick tally of the family budget. (MSNBC)

Doctors in southern China are working around the clock to fulfil a government goal to sterilise — by force if necessary — almost 10,000 men and women who have violated birth control policies. Family planning authorities are so determined to stop couples from producing more children than the regulations allow that they are detaining the relatives of those who resist. (Times Online)

In recent weeks, several reports have appeared in the media that Australia’s ban on couples using IVF to choose the sex of their children for social reasons or to balance their families might soon be lifted. (Eureka Street)

Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint the following individuals to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. (Article Ant)

This issue has obvious social and ethical implications and is a good example of how advances in scientific knowledge and technology constantly challenge society to find acceptable outlets for their application. Gender selection is legal in most of the world, but not in Europe. Obviously it is only a matter of time, and probably a short time, before this matter comes knocking on our door. (The Irish Times)

Disability groups are split over a Family Court decision to approve the sterilisation of an 11-year-old girl. Family Court judge Paul Cronin found that the performance of a hysterectomy on the child, identified only as Angela, was “in the child’s best interests”. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Professor Stephen Wilkinson, of the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele University in Staffordshire, argues that unless there is a serious sex imbalance in the population (e.g. many more boys than girls) or the decision is motivated by sexist attitudes or beliefs, parents should be allowed to decide the sex of a future child. (Keele University Press Office)

A “slippery slope” to “a world of eugenics,” as bioethics authorities once worried, or a healthy life for a teenage girl? Once at the center of a science controversy, Molly Nash, 15, represents the human answer to the debate over a genetic screening technique, ” pre-implantation genetic diagnosis,” (PGD) that made headlines a decade ago. (USA TODAY)

Some of the learning difficulties of Down’s syndrome have been reversed by a blood pressure drug in a breakthrough that offers hope to millions. Given in childhood, the drug could improve marks in school. In adulthood, it could prevent or slow the decline towards dementia that often accompanies the genetic condition. (Mail Online)

The number of babies with Down syndrome carried to term in the United States has declined to single digit percentages, officials say. Approximately 92 percent of American women with prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome babies chose abortion, Children’s Hospital Boston pediatric geneticist Dr. Brian Skotko said. (UPI)

Genetic screening of embryos, sperm and eggs has been tied to the worst aspects of eugenics, but a new case study in one of the nation’s leading medical journals shows some benefits may come from genetic analysis of donors. (ABC News)

Genetic testing of embryos combines genetic testing with in vitro fertilization and is widely available in clinical settings. However, words like “eugenics” and the “perfect child” help to polarize the debate and are influencing policies, such as limiting access to the procedure and to research. (CMAJ)

WHAT DO Richard Nixon and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have in common? Not much linked the former president, who died in 1994, and the associate justice now in her 17th year on the Supreme Court. But each was in the news recently with a cringe-inducing comment about abortion. Those comments - one spoken privately long ago, one uttered publicly this month - are a reminder of the ease with which educated elites can decide that some people’s lives have no value. (The Boston Globe)

Swedish health authorities have ruled that under the current law, a woman is allowed to have an abortion, solely for the purpose of ending a pregnancy when the gender of the fetus is not what a woman wants. (ChattahBox)

Both the number of families checking embryos for genetic defects and the number of conditions being tested for are growing rapidly around the world. Last year, the leading U.S. genetic diagnosis clinic—the world’s largest—performed more than 1,800 tests aimed at weeding out embryos that carried worrisome family conditions, from sickle cell anemia to cystic fibrosis. (Chicago Tribune)