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bioethics

Practical ethics and prenatal screening

Scientific and medical developments often raise important ethical questions. Professor of bioethics Rebecca Bennett explores what is meant by ethics and provides a practical way of evaluating ethical issues you might encounter both within and outside your studies

Blood test in pregnancy — part of the screening for Down’s syndrome

Ask people ‘what is ethics?’ and you are likely to get several different replies. Most agree that ethics has to do with the question of how we should behave, and what choices we should make about how we live our lives. However, how individuals answer the question ‘how should we behave?’ differs greatly and may include reference to religions, intuitive feelings, professional codes of practice, laws and policy, and cultural norms.

Consider the following question: ‘Is it ethically acceptable to allow hearing-impaired parents undergoing fertility treatment to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis to choose to implant an embryo that will also be hearing-impaired?’ You might find it useful to look at the news article in Further reading on page 10 to help you to think about this.

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Allergy explosion: why our immune systems react to harmless substances

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Success with succession

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