Cancer Treatment Centers of America: Hope, But Don’t Hope

I often see these commercials for the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and I find them misleading and unethical. I can’t seem to embed the video, but it can be found at this link. Most of their commercials are all about giving the patient “hope” where there was no hope before. But each commercial also carries [...]

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The Founding Fathers’ Individual Mandate for Health Insurance

Yesterday in the USA, Federal Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the individual mandate was unconstitutional (the whole opinion is here), and so ruled the entire health care law is void: Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and [...]

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Autonomy and Pregnancy

Often when people think about issues of autonomy (the right to make decisions for one’s self) for pregnant women, they think about access to abortion. Other than having the decision to keep or terminate a pregnancy constrained by lack of abortion access, there are other ways that pregnant women lose decision-making rights. In most of [...]

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Abortion Access in Canada

I recently found the article, “Who Decides?” by Scott Lemieux via a post on Figleaf’s blog (I left a comment there and this post is a modified version of that comment). Lemieux muses about abortion access in Canada: In Canada, late-term abortions are not legally restricted, and Canada also doesn’t have the other kinds of [...]

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“What Counts as a Benefit?” Personal Choices in Political Contexts: Labiaplasty and FGC

About ten years ago I was at a meeting and we were discussing what the policy on female genital cutting (FGC, female genital mutilation (FGM), or female circumcision) should be in the hospitals of the Canadian city where I was living at the time. The woman who was giving the presentation about the facts of [...]

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