Bioequity – Property and the Human Body

Bioequity – Property and the Human Body PDF

Author: Nils Hoppe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1317174259

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Recent scandals involving the use of human body parts have highlighted the need for legal clarification surrounding property law and the use of human tissue. This book advances the notion that the legal basis for dealing with this is already available in the law but has thus far neither been used nor discussed. Proposing an alternative approach to constructing entitlements in human tissue and resolving resulting property conflicts, a new methodology is also advanced for abstracting different concepts within the debate which enables comparison and distinction between different cases of entitlement and retention.

Our Bodies, Whose Property?

Our Bodies, Whose Property? PDF

Author: Anne Phillips

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-07-21

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1400846366

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An argument against treating our bodies as commodities No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, Our Bodies, Whose Property? challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies and argues against the normalization of markets in bodily services and parts. Anne Phillips explores the risks associated with metaphors of property and the reasons why the commodification of the body remains problematic. What, she asks, is wrong with thinking of oneself as the owner of one's body? What is wrong with making our bodies available for rent or sale? What, if anything, is the difference between markets in sex, reproduction, or human body parts, and the other markets we commonly applaud? Phillips contends that body markets occupy the outer edges of a continuum that is, in some way, a feature of all labor markets. But she also emphasizes that we all have bodies, and considers the implications of this otherwise banal fact for equality. Bodies remind us of shared vulnerability, alerting us to the common experience of living as embodied beings in the same world. Examining the complex issue of body exceptionalism, Our Bodies, Whose Property? demonstrates that treating the body as property makes human equality harder to comprehend.

Me Medicine vs. We Medicine

Me Medicine vs. We Medicine PDF

Author: Donna Dickenson

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0231159749

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Technologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, pharmacogenetically developed therapies in cancer care, private umbilical cord blood banking, and neurocognitive enhancement claim to cater to an individual's specific biological character, and, in some cases, these technologies have shown powerful potential. Yet in others they have produced negligible or even negative results. Donna Dickenson examines the economic and political factors fueling the Me Medicine phenomenon and explores how, over time, this paradigm shift in how we approach our health might damage our individual and collective well-being. Drawing on the latest findings from leading scientists, social scientists, and political analysts, she critically examines four possible hypotheses driving the Me Medicine moment: a growing sense of threat; a wave of patient narcissism; corporate interests driving new niche markets; and the dominance of personal choice as a cultural value. She concludes with insights from political theory that emphasize a conception of the commons and the steps we can take to restore its value to modern biotechnology.

Medical Law and Medical Ethics

Medical Law and Medical Ethics PDF

Author: Nils Hoppe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-04-03

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1139916025

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A focus on the interplay between medical law and medical ethics makes this refreshing new textbook the most balanced approach available to students of law and medicine. By offering a unique chapter structure which gives equal weight to both the legal and ethical issues it allows for an appreciation of all factors at play in the field of medical law. In addition, its student-friendly writing style combined with critical analysis gives students the tools to engage with key issues and form their own understanding. Accompanying online case studies convey the law in practice, and encourage students to consider their own views and arguments in terms of legal analysis and ethical consideration. Coverage of recent judicial cases and statutes, with a good balance of factual detail and critical analysis, allows students to engage with this evolving discipline.

Clinical Labor

Clinical Labor PDF

Author: Melinda Cooper

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2014-01-22

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0822377004

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Forms of embodied labor, such as surrogacy and participation in clinical trials, are central to biomedical innovation, but they are rarely considered as labor. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby take on that project, analyzing what they call "clinical labor," and asking what such an analysis might indicate about the organization of the bioeconomy and the broader organization of labor and value today. At the same time, they reflect on the challenges that clinical labor might pose to some of the founding assumptions of classical, Marxist, and post-Fordist theories of labor. Cooper and Waldby examine the rapidly expanding transnational labor markets surrounding assisted reproduction and experimental drug trials. As they discuss, the pharmaceutical industry demands ever greater numbers of trial subjects to meet its innovation imperatives. The assisted reproductive market grows as more and more households look to third-party providers for fertility services and sectors of the biomedical industry seek reproductive tissues rich in stem cells. Cooper and Waldby trace the historical conditions, political economy, and contemporary trajectory of clinical labor. Ultimately, they reveal clinical labor to be emblematic of labor in twenty-first-century neoliberal economies.

Persons, Parts and Property

Persons, Parts and Property PDF

Author: Imogen Goold

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 178225479X

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The debate over whether human bodies and their parts should be governed by the laws of property has accelerated with the pace of technological change. Having long held that a corpse could not be property, the common law first recognised that there could be a property interest in human tissue in some circumstances in the early 1900s, but it was not until a string of judicial decisions and statutory regulation in the 1990s and early 2000s that the place of this 'exception' was cemented. The 2009 decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in Yearworth & Ors v North Bristol NHS Trust added a new dimension to the debate by supporting a move towards a broader, more principled basis for finding (or rejecting) property rights in human tissue. However, the law relating to property rights in human bodies and their parts remains highly contested. The contributions in this volume represent a collation of the broad spectrum of analyses on offer, and provide a detailed exploration of the salient legal and theoretical puzzles arising out of the body-as-property question.

Good Science

Good Science PDF

Author: Charis Thompson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-12-20

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0262026996

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An examination of a decade and a half of political controversy, ethical debate, and scientific progress in stem cell research. After a decade and a half, human pluripotent stem cell research has been normalized. There may be no consensus on the status of the embryo—only a tacit agreement to disagree—but the debate now takes place in a context in which human stem cell research and related technologies already exist. In this book, Charis Thompson investigates the evolution of the controversy over human pluripotent stem cell research in the United States and proposes a new ethical approach for “good science.” Thompson traces political, ethical, and scientific developments that came together in what she characterizes as a “procurial” framing of innovation, based on concern with procurement of pluripotent cells and cell lines, a pro-cures mandate, and a proliferation of bio-curatorial practices. Thompson describes what she calls the “ethical choreography” that allowed research to go on as the controversy continued. The intense ethical attention led to some important discoveries as scientists attempted to “invent around” ethical roadblocks. Some ethical concerns were highly legible; but others were hard to raise in the dominant procurial framing that allowed government funding for the practice of stem cell research to proceed despite controversy. Thompson broadens the debate to include such related topics as animal and human research subjecthood and altruism. Looking at fifteen years of stem cell debate and discoveries, Thompson argues that good science and good ethics are mutually reinforcing, rather than antithetical, in contemporary biomedicine.