Forced hysterectomy or societal surrogacy – an ethical solution for falling birth rates?
Falling birth rates are forcing politicians to confront the consequences of education and immigration policies over recent decades...
Professor Anna Smajdor
Practical Philosophy at the University of Oslo
Professor Anna Smajdor was previously an Adviser to the Progress Educational Trust (PET) and is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oslo. Previously, she was a Lecturer in Ethics at the University of East Anglia. She has a longstanding interest in the ethical and regulatory aspects of science, medicine and technology. She has written and spoken widely in connection with this research, as well as on broader philosophical and ethical questions. She is coauthor (with Baroness Ruth Deech) of 'From IVF to Immortality: Controversy in the Era of Reproductive Technology' (buy this book from Amazon UK), and of 'The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethics and Law' (with Professor Jonathan Herring and Robert Wheeler buy this book from Amazon UK).
BioNews Articles by Professor Anna Smajdor
Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts equipment used for embryo biopsy.
Reconfiguring reproduction
The concept of fatherhood and reproduction are more spectral and multifactorial than we expect, reveals Professor Anna Smajdor…
My sibling, my child
Professor Anna Smajdor looks at the ethical arguments thrown up by a TikTok star's desire to use her parent's embryos to have her own children...
Beyond the sound and fury: Whole body gestational donation
Dr Anna Smajdor explains the background to her recent paper which explored the ethics of using brain-dead women as gestational surrogates...
Plus ça change... The arguments for embryo research need to move on
Dr Anna Smajdor responds to Dr John Appleby's argument for extending the 14-day limit, suggesting that not as much has changed in recent decades as he has assumed...
Pigs: a new breed of organ donors
In January 2022, a heart transplant patient named David Bennett became world famous when it was reported that the 'donor' of the heart that had saved his life was – a pig...
Image by Bill Sanderson via the Wellcome Collection, © Wellcome Trust Ltd 1990. Depicts Laocoön and his family (from Greek and Roman mythology) entwined in coils of DNA.
Sorry mate, you're a monkey…
Many of our legal and moral frameworks are based on natural distinctions...
Selfish and septuagenarian: when do reproductive rights end?
A woman in India has given birth to twins. In itself, nothing particularly worth reporting there. Women give birth to babies all the time...
It's a bumper harvest — but what about consent?
In the wake of a recent Mail on Sunday article, one might wonder if there are grounds for moving from a small-scale subsistence-type approach to the harvest, to a more industrial approach. No, we are not talking about vegetables here, but… sperm...
The silent seed
A person's death need no longer spell the end of his or her future reproductive possibilities. A dead or dying person can have their reproductive tissue removed to enable someone else to have a child...