In Islamic law, Bulūgh (puberty) separates childhood from adulthood, yet English-language scholarship on it is sparse and fragmented. We reviewed primary juristic compendia of the four canonical schools of Islamic jurisprudence (Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfi'ī, Ḥanbalī), synthesized biomedical literature on pubertal markers, and analyzed bioethical implications through case studies. All four schools accept iḥtilām (ejaculation) in males and ḥayḍ (menstruation) or ḥaml (pregnancy) in females as definitive; inbāt (pubic hair) and breast development are conditional in some schools. Absent physical signs, bulūgh defaults to an upper age of 15-19 lunar years, with 15 the majority position for both sexes; minimum thresholds of 9-12 years vary by school and sex. These criteria can conflict with prevalent legal and bioethical norms, creating dilemmas for Muslim patients. Integrating them into clinical policy would support patient autonomy, legal clarity, and culturally competent care. Interdisciplinary dialogue between jurists, clinicians, and ethicists is urgently needed.
This article reexamines ethical and scientific objections to psychotherapeutic interventions that alter clients' unwanted sexual attractions. While major mental-health organizations label such interventions as controversial, ineffective, and ethically problematic, recent studies demonstrate that some interventions can lead to changes in individuals' sexual attractions. These interventions significantly differ from the therapies criticized by these organizations. This article examines these criticisms and responds to them, identifies neuroscientific mechanisms that appear to be responsible for sexual attraction changes, and proposes a framework for ethically implementing evidence-based, client-led interventions that influence sexual attraction.
Bioconservatism rose to prominence in bioethics at the turn of the millennium but has since declined in influence, particularly in Anglo-American academic and policy contexts. Critics argue that it relies excessively on intuition, emotion, and vague concepts such as dignity, and therefore lacks rational justification for opposing novel biotechnologies. This paper reassesses that critique. While some forms of bioconservatism remain vulnerable to these objections, it argues that an under-examined 'social' strand is methodologically robust and theoretically grounded. This strand situates emerging biotechnologies within broader social forces, especially commercialisation. Drawing on classical social theory, particularly Karl Marx and Max Weber, the paper shows that concerns about dehumanization, homogenization, and the erosion of human values reflect a tradition of macro-level social critique rather than mere emotive reaction. Reconstructed in this way, bioconservatism offers a socially attuned, secular critique relevant to contemporary debates on genome editing and emerging biotechnologies.
Background Cross-sex hormones and transition surgery are widely utilized interventions for people experiencing gender dysphoria. However, there is surprisingly little clarity around the evidence for the efficacy of these therapies.Methods A systematic search of PubMed, PsycINFO and Cochrane Library was carried out. Inclusion criteria targeted peer-reviewed studies that assessed the effect of cross-sex hormones or transition surgery on gender dysphoria.Results Five studies met the inclusion criteria (N = 857). All five indicated association between medical or surgical intervention and reduction in gender dysphoria. However, there was a noticeable shortage of randomized controlled trials, control groups and extended follow-up periods. There was also a high degree of ambiguity around the clinical applicability of the results.Conclusion At present there is a paucity of high-quality evidence for the efficacy of cross-sex hormones and transition surgery for reducing gender dysphoria. More research is needed in this area before efficacy can be established.
Surrogacy involves the practice of a woman carrying and giving birth to a child on behalf of another individual or couple, referred to as the commissioning or intended parents. However, the surrogacy process has been challenging for everyone involved from an ethical and legal perspective. This article outlines surrogacy's history and contemporary legal advances in surrogacy-related law in India, and also covers the global perspective on surrogacy. The issue of cross-border surrogacy has always been complex, with various ramifications regarding citizenship, nationality, parenthood, and the rights of the child born through such surrogacy. Present regulations in India banned commercial surrogacy and restricted non-national couples from utilizing surrogacy facilities, allowing it only for couples with verified medical conditions necessitating gestational surrogacy, thus eliminating the formerly unregulated surrogacy practices. However, a few ethical, legal, and financial conundrums need to be addressed, as highlighted in the article.
Slater, J. (2025. The Overgeneralization of the Future Like Ours Argument. The New Bioethics, 31 (1), 1-12. doi:10.1080/20502877.2025.2483588) argues that Don Marquis's Future-Like-Ours (FLO) account overgeneralizes by producing conclusions about cognitively enhanced animals and alien 'seeds'. This article defends FLO by showing that Slater's reductios depend on a permissive conception of present potential, according to which any externally producible valuable future confers moral status. I instead propose an intrinsic-nature account grounded in the distinction between active and passive potentiality. A being possesses potential for a valuable future only where that future would develop from its own first-order nature under supportive conditions, rather than being externally installed. This account defeats the enhanced-dog case and either resolves the alien-seed case or recasts it as an objection about positive duties. It also avoids disputed empirical claims about contraception and clarifies FLO's metaphysical commitments without abandoning its central deprivation-based account of killing.
Empirical bioethics addresses bio-ethical issues through field studies using a variety of research approaches that are not always well known, or well understood, by health professionals, including some bioethicists, particularly non-empiricist bioethicists, clinical ethicists and/or bioethics students, who may nevertheless be involved in such studies as investigators. Consequently, we decided to develop a simplified typology of empirical bioethics approaches to make them easier to understand and use. This work is based solely on scientific literature. Ultimately, we identified eight main research approaches (n = 8), which may be combined sequentially in various ways: (1) 'quantitative approaches', (2) 'qualitative approaches', (3) the 'descriptive approach', (4) the 'normative approach', (5) 'dialogical approaches', (6) 'consultative approaches', (7) the 'macro-bio-ethical approach', and (8) the 'micro-bio-ethical approach'.
This primarily normative article draws on three ideas - exclusivism, (transformative) inclusivism and incompleteness/conviviality - grounded in Afro-communitarian thinking - to argue that isolation/alienation, minimization, and essentialism are three distinct forms of harm that analytic technique bias (that results from training data and human actions) may generate. Since the healthcare context will be a leading consumer of these new techniques, this study recommends that future studies focus on outlining how various traditions or moral frameworks can increase our understanding of the ways analytic techniques can give rise to what forms of harm and how harms related to analytic techniques bias may be prevented.
This article critically examines Japa Pallikkathayil's claim that pre-viability abortion prohibitions violate democratic and legal equality. Pallikkathayil grounds this view in analogies to compelled bodily donation, arguing that inalienable bodily rights, understood chiefly as bodily integrity, protect gestational autonomy. The article challenges that analogy through four arguments. First, human procreation has a morally distinctive character, generating duties from unchosen but special parental relationships, as family law recognizes, which qualifies appeals to bodily inalienability. Second, typical abortion methods are not accurately described as passive bodily withdrawal, since they involve interventions directed at ending fetal life. Third, bodily donation cases fail to capture the distinctive moral and legal stakes of pregnancy. Fourth, alternative feminist critiques suggest that bodily autonomy may not exhaust democratic equality for women, especially where institutional accommodation of pregnancy is concerned. The article therefore reframes the debate around parental responsibility, action, analogy, and equality.
Hoping for physical and spiritual healing, pilgrims have journeyed to a holy shrine to touch the relics of a saint. Along the way, pilgrims experienced togetherness with their sojourners and care from mere strangers, without whom the pilgrimage would not work. When thinking about modern healthcare, Joshua Hordern advocates for considering biomedical care as a pilgrimage. There is much to commend in Hordern's approach; however, we would like to raise a caution. The confidence that an ongoing Christian consciousness exists within healthcare too easily overlooks its embedded practice in a modern biomedical model that has become enchanted not by the body on pilgrimage, but by Mammon, which views the body fundamentally in terms of a calculative quantification. If we do not offer an alternative political and economic structure for the practice of healthcare, then the fruitful image of the pilgrimage will be overpowered by the body as a commodity.
New York's Reproductive Health Act 2019 (RHA) reshaped the legal treatment of pregnancy-loss violence by confining homicide to the death of a "person" and removing earlier provisions that integrated certain late-term abortion and abortive offences into the homicide framework. This article traces New York's statutory development from the 1965 Penal Law to the RHA and uses the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act 2004 (UVVA) as a comparator. It argues that the apparent tension between abortion permissibility and fetal-protection liability is better explained by jurisdictional triggers and consent-based gating than by fetal personhood. After the RHA, New York generally channels pregnancy-loss harm through offences against the mother. In contrast, the UVVA can create a consent-gated two-victim structure for specified federal crimes while exempting consensual abortion and medical treatment. Bioethically, these victim categories function as governance tools protecting women's decisional authority without resolving fetal moral status.
This article considers rival views of flourishing and their significance for healthcare, compassion and professional practice. It argues that 'making a success of life' is ultimately not in our hands and so criticises quasi-Aristotelian interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount that call for an intentional formation and achievement of virtuous character as a condition of flourishing. Close attention is paid to the moral concepts and instruction arising from the Psalms and the beatitudes of Matthew's gospel. Civic, economic and biotechnological dimensions of healthcare are explored through study of the beatitudes, guided by William Tyndale, John Wesley, Martin Luther King Jr and Rebekah Eklund, and against the background of divine providential and eschatological agency. What making a success of life means for healthcare is identified by attention to covetousness, arrogance, distinguishing good and evil, discerning the presence of God among healthcare staff and patients, contending with societal violence and whistleblowing.
Many people think that producing online pornography, such as creating sexual content at OnlyFans, is permissible. Many of the same people also think that creating deepfake pornography without or against the consent of the person is wrong. I argue that accepting online sex work is inconsistent with judging pornographic deepfakes as worse than non-pornographic deepfakes. This claim resembles similarity with a broader problem in sexual ethics raised by David Benatar. I apply Benatar's argument in the context of online sexual activities to highlight the ethical issues recent technological developments raise. I do this neither as a case against the permissibility of online sex work nor as a defense of pornographic deep fakes. The purpose is to point out the inconsistency. One could avoid the problem by extending or limiting the range of permissible sexual practices online. But if I am right, we cannot both accept OnlyFans and condemn non-consensual pornographic deep fakes.
The tyranny of compassion is a consequence of defaulting to the model of patient as citizen. Borrowed from Rawls's liberalism, this is the notion that everyone should be free and equal. Hordern's attempt to recover compassion is an attempt to recover a fuller account of the political person - the citizen - as more, not less, than free and equal. The physician enters into a covenantal relationship of reciprocity with the patient, enabling persuasion beyond just shared decision making. This sort of relationship has implications not only for the clinic, but also as a potential source of repair in the broader political sphere.
Any programme that runs the risk of mistreating already-marginalized persons deserves significant moral scrutiny. So, when a proposal was put forth in the Massachusetts state legislature that would incentivise organ donations from prisoners, it was quite reasonable for the initial reaction to be against the proposal. However, does this initial reaction survive moral analysis? In this paper, I argue that it can be morally permissible to implement programmes that incentivise organ donations from prisoners. I reach this conclusion by considering eight objections against this proposal, offering three reasons in favour of it, and then giving three guidelines for the permissible implementation of these programmes. Still, I conclude that the permissible implementation of these programmes would need to also include the input of many others, including prisoners and those who advocate for them.
Alison Gemmill et al. claim that infant mortality in Texas increased following its 2021 abortion restrictions, and several sources reported that abortion restrictions harm infants. This is misleading. Gemmill et al.'s findings show that infant deaths increased primarily because abortion for "congenital anomalies" decreased, and a subset of those subjects died in infancy. In other words, infant mortality rose because fetal mortality fell. By analogy, one can reduce teenage deaths by causing deaths before age thirteen, but this does not save lives. Likewise, abortion restrictions may lead to more infants dying (since fewer subjects are aborted), but this does not imply that abortion restrictions harm infants. The opposite seems true. We argue that it is reasonable to regard Texas's abortion restrictions as a net benefit for infants. We also highlight ableist assumptions surrounding Gemmill et al.'s study and call for bipartisan efforts to support people with disabilities and their families.
Bioethics has long been concerned with human flourishing. With advances in healthcare, science, and technology, different accounts of flourishing have been proposed. Furthermore, societal changes and organizational statements have led to the overemphasis of health in human flourishing and patient autonomy, which have resulted in consumeristic medicine. Some have noted that health may be the ultimate good of the patient, while this manuscript argues that there is a need for a return to a philosophy of healthcare grounded in a teleology of humanity seen in philosophical and religious accounts of human flourishing and health. This manuscript discusses the concepts of human flourishing and health to propose a return to a religious philosophy of healthcare found in Christian Hippocratism. It then briefly applies this framework to abortion and physician-assisted suicide to inform its readers of the implications for those who adhere to particular philosophical or Christian theological convictions.
This article offers a sustained philosophical and legal critique of Giubilini and Minerva's controversial thesis in 'After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?' The authors argue that newborns, like foetuses, lack full moral status and that infanticide may be ethically permissible in circumstances analogous to abortion. This response challenges that view on three grounds: (1) conceptually, the claim that birth is morally irrelevant is inconsistent with established theories of moral worth rooted in potentiality and the value of a future-like-ours; (2) legally, neonates acquire personhood at birth in both domestic and international legal systems, making their killing unlawful; and (3) ethically, societal practices and intuitions clearly ascribe value and rights to newborns, regardless of developmental stage. The article concludes that the thesis of after-birth abortion is ethically indefensible and legally untenable.
Understanding medical ethics is essential for healthcare professionals to practise medicine in a culturally sensitive and appropriate manner. We undertook a scoping review of the English literature from PubMed and JSTOR after 1980, to compare the application of the four principles: autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence and justice in Islamic and Western medical ethics (Beauchamp and Childress' model, the most widely used). 34 out of 135 articles met the inclusion criteria (Analysing a principle of stated ethical framework rather than simply mentioning it). Our review demonstrated that there are more similarities in both frameworks than differences, with the key distinction being the perception of autonomy in a familial and societal context in Islam. There is an objectively right medical choice for patients in Islam, which brings one closer to Shari'ah. Beneficence and nonmaleficence are mostly concordant in both schools, and justice in all its forms is espoused in both, with some differences.
