Assisted reproductive technology (ART) has become an important biomedical response to infertility, yet its social acceptance and ethical legitimacy vary across cultural contexts. In Nigeria, where reproduction is deeply embedded in religious, cultural, and familial expectations, ART occupies a contested space extending beyond medicine. This article examines ART as both an adaptive response to infertility and a transformative intervention that reshapes the moral, cultural, and institutional foundations of reproduction. Using a theoretical and interpretive approach, the article develops an integrated framework combining evolutionary theory, functionalism, social constructionism, medicalization theory, feminist theory, political economy, and cultural lag. The analysis shows that ART simultaneously supports reproductive continuity and generates social transformation by reshaping kinship, parenthood, gender relations, and reproductive responsibility. Persistent infertility stigma, unequal access to fertility services, weak regulatory oversight, and religious ambivalence demonstrate that technological innovation alone cannot resolve the structural and normative challenges surrounding reproduction. The article therefore conceptualizes ART not as a value-neutral biomedical technology but as a contested social institution situated at the intersection of science, culture, religion, morality, and political economy. It argues that ethically sustainable and socially equitable ART governance in Nigeria requires policies that integrate biomedical innovation with socio-cultural realities. The article contributes to bioethical scholarship by demonstrating the value of theoretically integrated approaches to reproductive technologies in Global South contexts.
In silico methods, artificial intelligence and network pharmacology increasingly translate traditional medicine knowledge into machine-readable evidence about molecular targets, phytochemical interactions and possible therapeutic mechanisms. These approaches can improve hypothesis generation, reduce unnecessary experimentation and clarify complex polyherbal mechanisms. They also create an under-examined bioethics problem: biological data and associated knowledge can become data assets whose provenance, community context and benefit-sharing implications are difficult to trace. This perspective defines digital biopiracy narrowly and distinguishes it from lawful open-data reuse, intellectual property infringement, data misappropriation, knowledge appropriation, provenance loss and ethical under-attribution. Legal permission to access an open repository is treated as a baseline rather than a complete ethical assessment; additional duties arise when candidate selection, novelty claims or downstream value materially depend on identifiable traditional knowledge or place-based biological context. The analysis is grounded in epistemic, relational and distributive justice, together with research integrity, and applies these principles to Asian settings including Indian systems, Chinese medicine, Japanese Kampo, Korean medicine, Indonesian jamu, Thai traditional medicine and community-governed knowledge in Southeast Asia. An illustrative PubMed/MEDLINE signal scan contextualises the visibility of computational traditional medicine research but is not presented as a systematic or scoping review. The paper proposes a minimum disclosure checklist and a phased, risk-proportionate editorial model. Ethical publication practice should report traditional knowledge sources, biological and database provenance, provenance uncertainty, model limitations, patent or commercial intent and benefit-sharing considerations without discouraging responsible open science.
Infectious diseases such as cholera remain pressing global health challenges that are deeply entangled with poverty, increasing climate change, and fragile health infrastructures. While their epidemiology and treatment are well studied, less attention has been paid to the ethical-legal questions that arise when novel medical technologies are introduced in low-resource settings. This article uses a case study on the use of water testing technologies in Nigeria to demonstrate how such gaps generate not only individual but also collective risks, including effects of stigmatisation, ambiguity of responsibility and dynamics of technological dependency. Considering these critical issues, a new regulatory framework is needed to overcome the limitations of conventional regulatory approaches. It proposes a decolonial approach that integrates international standards, human rights and a greater focus on power dynamics and meaningful and locally grounded participatory approaches in the democratisation of medical technologies.
The ethical justification of emerging reproductive technologies requires attention not only to their immediate medical objectives but also to their foreseeable social consequences. Uterus transplantation (UTx) provides a particularly illuminating case within contemporary Sunni bioethics because it extends the permissive principle established through IVF while raising questions about the limits of third-party reproductive involvement. This article reconstructs an influential contemporary Sunni framework for justifying UTx and critically examines its conceptual coherence, particularly its account of legally relevant third-party involvement and necessity. These difficulties provide the basis for the article’s central normative argument: that the justification of emerging biomedical interventions must extend beyond their immediate medical objectives to include their foreseeable interaction with existing social structures. To develop this argument, the article introduces the concept of structural risk and uses it to identify when foreseeable social consequences should become part of the justificatory assessment itself. It further argues that this proposal does not introduce an external normative standard into Sunni jurisprudence but develops an interpretive approach grounded in the doctrine of maṣlaḥa mursala, which already authorizes jurists to consider public welfare where the revealed sources provide no explicit ruling. Although developed through the case of UTx, the proposed framework applies more generally to the ethical justification of emerging interventions introduced into socially constraining environments.
