In a host surrogate motherhood arrangement, the surrogate agrees to be implanted with, and carry to term, an embryo created from the commissioning couple9s gametes. When the surrogate child is born, it is the surrogate mother who, according to UK law, holds the legal status of mother. By contrast, the commissioning mother possesses no maternal status and she can only attain it once the surrogate agrees to the completion of the arrangement. One consequence of this is that, in the event (...) that a host arrangement fails, the commissioning mother is left without maternal status. In this paper, I argue that this denial of maternal status misrepresents the commissioning mother9s role in the host arrangement and her relationship with the surrogate child. Consequently, I suggest that commissioning mothers participating in host surrogacy arrangements ought to be granted the status of mother in the event that the arrangement fails. (shrink)

In the wake of the Corrupted Blood incident, which afflicted the massively multiplayer online computer role-playing game World of Warcraft in 2005, it has been suggested that both, the incident itself and massively multiplayer online computer role-playing games in general, can be utilised to inform and assist real-world epidemic and public health research. In this paper, I engage critically with these claims.

In this article I review the principal arguments in favour of and against the UK government’s recent proposals to allow access to NHS patient records to life sciences companies as part of the NHS–Life Sciences partnership scheme.

In debates about human cloning, a distinction is frequently drawn between therapeutic and reproductive uses of the technology. Naturally enough, this distinction influences the way that the law is framed. The general consensus is that therapeutic cloning is less morally problematic than reproductive cloning — one can hold this position while holding that both are morally unacceptable — and the law frequently leaves the way open for some cloning for the sake of research into new therapeutic techniques while banning it (...) for reproductive purposes. We claim that the position adopted by the law has things the wrong way around: if we accept a moral distinction between therapeutic and reproductive cloning, there are actually more reasons to be morally worried about therapeutic cloning than about reproductive cloning. If cloning is the proper object of legal scrutiny, then, we ought to make sure that we are scrutinising the right kind of clone. (shrink)