This website is intended for healthcare professionals
This website is intended for healthcare professionals
Freelance writer; Fellow of the Institute of Biomedical Science
The vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which previously banned abortion, righted a long-standing wrong The vote also vindicated the principles of autonomy and justice,...
First coined by the French philosopher Antoine Cournot, ‘the end of history’ is a phrase that was later popularised in the 1990s by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama
The acronym KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is attributed to the American aeronautical engineer Kelly Johnson
Describing her reaction to a film on childbirth that was shown at her school, Dame Helen Mirren once commented: ‘I swear it traumatised me to this day I haven't had children and now I can't look at...
The first report of a prenatal intervention was made in 1963, when a life-saving intrauterine blood transfusion was undertaken on a fetus with severe haemolytic disease at 32 weeks gestation (Liley,...
According to Laux et al (2016: 395), ‘many individuals receive their first tattoo at age 16–20 years […] with up to 36% of people younger than 40 years having at least one tattoo’ Midwives often care...
In 2010, a national newspaper reported that the National Patient Safety Agency database recorded three women who lost their babies following surgery, saying that,
Germaine Greer wrote that ‘[c]hildbirth has been transformed from an awesome personal and social event into a medical phenomenon’ (Greer, 1984: 19) But given that around 830 women die every day from...
In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), ectogenesis—growing embryos in artificial environments—thrives at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre Here, ‘standardised’ individuals are...
In the late 1970s, while working in a hospital virus lab, I once took receipt of a donated human placenta and umbilical cord It was to enable me to harvest cells capable of supporting the growth of...
In May 2016, a team of UK researchers described how they ‘show human embryos develop in medium supplemented with KnockOut Serum Replacement up to day 13 The experiment was stopped at this point...
In December 2016, a BBC News item (Briggs, 2016) summarised an academic article by a team of Austrian theoretical biologists with the headline: ‘Caesarean births “affecting human evolution”’
In 1967's The Graduate, Mr McGuire advises Dustin Hoffman's character Benjamin on career prospects: ‘I just want to say one word to you Just one word… Plastics’ McGuire was right; Wilcox et al (2015)...
According to the UK charity Bliss (2014: 4): ‘There are 78 000 babies born too soon, too small or too sick in Britain each year’ Apart from the parental fear and anxiety accompanying a premature...
In September 2016, Samantha Jefferies, the 42-year-old widow of a Falklands war veteran, won a High Court case enabling her to keep frozen embryos that she and her husband had created (BBC News, 2016)...
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