By holding workshops, engaging with a wide range of organisations and individuals, and by monitoring literature and news, across a wide geographical area and different fields of interest and expertise; the Council identified a wide range of developments that could be on the horizon for bioethics.
These include:
Assisted Dying
In the UK, assisting or encouraging another person to commit suicide is a criminal offence. There have been several attempts to liberalise the law to align with some European countries and states in the USA, but this has been met with resistance particularly from the medical profession. However, in 2019, the Royal College of Physicians adopted a neutral stance on assisted dying, having previously opposed it. MPs rejected an Assisted Dying Bill in 2015, but the issue is likely to return to Parliament in future.
Decision Making in Pediatric Care
There have been several recent high-profile court cases where healthcare teams and parents disagreed about the care of a critically ill child. Wider changes in society, such as increases in social media use and medical tourism, and advances in medicine, might be contributing to the way in which disagreements develop. Are there ways in which disagreements such as these can be avoided, or resolved more quickly?
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