Early life

The commodification of the human body has been drawn into sharp focus over the last several years as issues such as human trafficking for organs and sexual servitude have gained international attention. Unfortunately, another form of trafficking has evaded the same level of attention and outrage of the international community: surrogacy motherhood. Surrogacy motherhood is a commodification of the human person: the child becomes the mere object of a convention, while the surrogate mother is...

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1.           Both the Netherlands' Hoge Raad ("HR") and Germany's Bundesverfassungsgericht ("BVerfG") (Erster Senat) rendered in 1997 judgments concerning "wrongful birth" claims. In the Dutch case, a physician, at the occasion of a surgery, had removed a contraceptive implant and, without advising his patient, had not replaced it.  In the first case before the BVerfG, a failed sterilization procedure carried out by a medical doctor who had been family planning counselor to the husband of plai...

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Whether and when a child was conceived was largely a matter of chance (one could eliminate chance, of course, by not engaging in sexual intercourse, or reduce it by much less effective contraception than is available today). Where it was conceived was always in a woman's body. How life was transmitted to the child was through sexual reproduction. What genetic heritage the child received was determined by the natural recombination of the genes carried in the female parent's ovum and the male...

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In fact, we must ask ourselves what gives us the right to plunge an embryonic child into a ‘cold prison?' In 1987 Donum vitae addressed the issue as follows: “The freezing of embryos, even when carried out in order to preserve the life of an embryo—cryopreservation—constitutes an offence against the respect due to human beings by exposing them to grave risks of death or harm to their physical integrity and depriving them, at least temporarily, of maternal shelter and gestation, thus placing th...

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The changing of moral focus of newborn screening An Ethical Analysis by The President's Council on Bioethics, USA Nearly four million newborns undergo genetic screening every year in the United States. Yet, the process of genetic screening and its ethical implications are not well understood by their parents. Public discussion and education about recent changes in public policy and screening techniques is insufficient for parents to make informed choices. One aim of this white paper is to...

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Professor in the Faculty of Medicine Founding Director of the Faculty of Law's Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University Children's Human Rights  to Natural Human Origin Some old and new phenomena – adoption is old, new reproductive and genetic technologies and same-sex marriage are new – have recently thrown the issue of children's rights with respect to their biological origins and biological families into the public policy spotlight and public square debate.   Adoption ha...

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