A recent Texas Supreme Court decision with implications for post-Dobbs jurisprudence on abortion seems to have been a victory for those who oppose the practice. It was widely read as upholding Texas’s very strict anti-abortion legislation. I suggest another possible reading of that decision.

The California legislature appears to have caved to pressure from opponents of a Covid vaccine mandate for schoolkids. I’d prefer to think of it as a wise and strategic retreat from a battle that mandate advocates could not win.

Children have suffered both physical and mental illness during the pandemic. Nearly 200 children in the United States have died. Acute mental health crises increased during the pandemic. Getting children immunized is the best way to get back to normal. We suggest an option that would permit children under 5 to be vaccinated without waiting until traditional prospective randomized trials can be completed.

Several years ago, one of us decided to donate a kidney to someone who needed one. She didn’t anticipate the difficulties that would arise from the process by which donors are evaluated.

What is a "reasonable medical judgement" that a patient would be harmed before an abortion is permissible?

Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Clinical Trials Clinical trials are specifically designed to test the safety and efficacy of interventions in humans and are preceded by laboratory...

I am currently writing up the results of a retrospective chart review of patients’ consent or refusal for medical students to perform pelvic exams on them when they’re under anesthesia and sedated. I asked ChatGPT to summarize the ethical issues and tell me what sources it used to generate its response.

“Bioethics” has been defined in several different ways. Most broadly, it is the interdisciplinary study of ethical, legal, and social issues arising in the life sciences and health care. Though...

Josephine Johnston is an expert on the ethical, legal, and policy implications of biomedical technologies, particularly as used in human reproduction, psychiatry, genetics, and neuroscience. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, her commentaries...