Question

Need help with writing a defensive bioethics essay. Please do not write about these topics of death ! abortion! euthanasia or doctor assist in death .. The current recent bioethics article or topic of your choice...
For example do doctors have a right to prescribe opiods ( like morphine or fentanyl) to patients with or without there informed consent.... Please give 3 or 4 arguments/ principals with evidence citation

Answer 1

Stem Cell Research

Ethical issues
1. Human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research is ethically and politically controversial because it involves the destruction of human embryo. To retrieve the blastocyst cells from the embryo, the embryo should be removed and thus destroyed.

2. Embryos have the potential to become human beings; if implanted into a woman’s uterus at the appropriate hormonal phase; an embryo could implant, develop into a fetus, and become a liveborn child. Therefore, it is believed that an embryo is a person with the same moral status as an adult or a live-born child. Hence, it is weighed in the same way as abortion of foetus and seen as murder by many.

Legal issues
1. The woman or couple, donating the embryo, should be informed for consent for the research.

2. Consent should be obtained from the gamete donors.

3. The donating information should be maintained confidentially to maintain the privacy of the donors.

4. Copyrights of skill set is required, which is highly complex process. The technology can be vulnerable to piracy and subsequent collateral damage.

Social issues
1. The medical risks of oocyte retrieval include ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome, bleeding, infection, and complications of anesthesia.

2. If women in infertility treatment share oocytes with researchers, their prospect of reproductive success may be compromised because fewer oocytes are available for reproductive purposes.

3. The risks of innovative stem cell-based interventions include “tumor formation, immunological reactions, unexpected behavior of the cells, and unknown long-term health effects”. Evidence of safety and proof of principle should be established.

4. With this research, some unexpected gene transfer should be disallowed to prohibit creation of such organism, which can lead to some problems for the environment.