Thursday, February 11, 2016

Hiatus - Apologies

I have been unusually slow in terms of up-dating this blog. It's not for lack of content to write about. The CMA is embarrassing itself currently on the issue of conscientious objection and assisted dying, behaving like a true trade union would, without much concern for patient access to such services that its members will likely be monopoly providers of. The reason why I have not been able to actually blog about this is that I am swamped with publication deadlines. Editorials for both Bioethics and Developing World Bioethics had to be written, I was also briefly a Visiting Professor at St George's this January where I managed to catch up with colleagues like Cheryl Cox and Matthew Wynia, and I had to travel to Belgium as part of consultancy work I did for MSF/Doctors without Borders in 2015. - I have been travelling way too much. I also gave talks during events organised in November by the FDA/CDC and NIH in Bethesda as well as one organised a week or two later by the German National Ethics Council and the country's national science academy in Berlin. Then there were various paper deadlines, one of which I met, the other is one that I am working frantically toward meeting.  One of these papers is on conscientious objection, and I have finally managed to submit it for consideration to guest editors of a bioethics journal, then there is a response I need to write to someone who responded to an Editorial I had in Bioethics (ya, a reply to a reply, very academic), as well as another article I need to produce on the issue of catastrophically ill patients' moral entitlement to access unregistered medical interventions. I have written about this before, but this paper will add new arguments to what I have said in the past on this topic. Yes well, then there are departmental obligations. I must produce our departmental newsletter, and I'm looking forward to doing just that. I'm also busy preparing for a bunch of lectures that I'm giving in various countries during the next few months.

The long and short of it is that I didn't have time to blog as frequently as I would have liked to. I'll try to do better.

Ethical Progress on the Abortion Care Frontiers on the African Continent

The Supreme Court of the United States of America has overridden 50 years of legal precedent and reversed constitutional protections [i] fo...