That was in 2004. On November 14 last year, her husband, Brooke Hopkins, a retired English professor at the same university, collided with another bicyclist and broke his neck. He is now paralysed from the neck down. It gave his wife a different perspective on end-of-life care. As she told the Salt Lake Tribune, it "has presented me more than an intellectual challenge to the views I've been defending over the years. It is a deeply personal, profoundly self-confronting challenge."

Battin knew that her husband would want to live, even if he were paralyzed, and she respected his choice from the moment of the accident. In fact, he told the Tribune that even in his darkest moments, he had a fierce desire to live, seeing his limitations as an "adventure." Within a few days of the accident her family had created a blog where they pass on news of his progress and reflect upon living with disability.

Battin is still teaching medical students. When one of them said that life with a feeding tube and ventilator was not worthwhile, she reflected that her beloved husband owed his life to them. "Part of me wants to go back and look again at anything I've ever written," she says. "I don't know whether I'd tear it all up. I don't even know how I would make it more nuanced in academic presentation, 'cause there's no way to explain it." ~ Salt Lake Tribune, June 2

The murder of abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas set off kilotonnes of controversy in the media this week. President Obama was outraged: "However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence."

Dr Tiller was one of three American doctors who were willing to do late-term (after 21 weeks) abortions. For years he had been reviled by anti-abortion groups. Over the years his clinic had often been vandalised and in 1993 a woman shot him in both arms. He survived this violence as well as court challenges to his work. In March he was found not guilty of 19 misdemeanour charges after a widely publicised trial. Political commentator Bill O'Reilly used to call him "Tiller the baby killer" on his radio show.

On May 31, during a service at the Reformation Lutheran Church Tiller was shot in the head, allegedly by 51-year-old Scott Philip Roeder, a divorced odd-jobs man with a history of psychiatric illness and association with anti-government militias. Apparently he was not a member of any established anti-abortion group.

Although there are extremists who believe that killing abortion providers is justifiable homicide, they are a tiny fraction of the US anti-abortion movement. The best-known groups all issued statements deploring the murder. A comment from the National Right to Life Committee is representative: "The pro-life movement works to protect the right to life and increase respect for human life. The unlawful use of violence is directly contrary to that goal."

However, supporters of abortion were quick to claim that "the bloody, homicidally drenched terminology" of the anti-abortion movement triggered the assassination; terms like "holocaust" and "genocide" were bound to push unbalanced supporters over the edge. Some taunted pro-lifers by contending that if they really believed that abortion was murder, they are morally obliged to kill abortionists. But since they don't, they are cowardly or insincere.

What happens now? Tiller's murder has been a serious public relations setback for the pro-life movement, but it could be just temporary. After all, the killer has been disowned by everyone in the pro-life moment. A voluntary decline in incendiary language would be one welcome outcome -- imposing limits on abortion rhetoric in the US seems unlikely.

Another advance could be clarification of the terms of the debate between the two "irreconcilable" sides, in the words of President Obama a few weeks ago in a speech at Notre Dame. In one of the few measured reflections on the murder,Megan McArdle, of Atlantic magazine, argued that it is becoming clear that the abortion debate is about what it means to be a person, not about women's rights.

It seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like "If you think abortions are wrong, don't have one!" If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it...

More controversially, she suggests that the murder may indicate a failure of the political process:

If you interpret this murder as a political act, rather than that of a lone whacko, than this should be a troubling sign that the political system has failed. So why do so many people think that the obvious answer is simply to more firmly entrench laws that are rightly intolerable to someone who thinks that a late term fetus is a person?

Why do doctors need the consent of parents before euthanasing a child? This is the startling question posed in the advance on-line issue of the journal Bioethical Inquiry. Jacob M. Appel, a freelance bioethicist with a liking for radical theories, proposes that "While, in theory, allowing parents to render their own decision as to 'how much suffering is too much suffering' is speciously appealing... caregivers are ultimately less suited to make such determinations than medical experts."

Of course, euthanasia is illegal everywhere in the US, so Appel's idea is largely theoretical. But there are jurisdictions where it is already being applied in a modified form. For instance, the 1999 Texas Advance Directives Act permits doctors to remove "futile" treatment against relatives' wishes. In 2005, in Hudson v Texas Children's Hospital, the courts upheld the right of the hospital to withdraw life support from a seriously ill infant against the mother's wishes.

In the Netherlands, child euthanasia is already permitted under the Groningen Protocol (even though it is, strictly speaking, illegal) if children are suffering unbearably. However, even the protocol stipulates that parents must give their consent. Appel asks, why?

His observation is that US law is steadily moving towards a model which requires not parental consent, but parental permission. This elevates the child's welfare (as determined by doctors) over the opinion of parents. In some situations, such as blood transfusions for Jehovah Witness children, this seems understandable. But Appel asks, if it is allowable in life-sustaining situations, why not in life-terminating ones?

In another thought-provoking twist, Appel points out that non-traditional families are hard-wired for conflict and that doctors need to take charge.

To allow adversarial parents to litigate over whether to euthanize a terminally-ill infant -- while that infant suffers in the interim--seems a highly-inflammatory approach to settling an already distressing situation. If we are to allow neonatal euthanasia at all, shifting the ultimate choice from relatives to medical experts should occur before an intra-familial battle royal arises, such as the case of Terri Schiavo.

~ Bioethical Inquiry, May 5

If a child does not exist, what meaning can its "welfare" have? This is the unsettling question posed by the Norwegian writer B. Solberg in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The immediate application is to children born from IVF. Legislation governing IVF often stipulates that the welfare of the child is paramount. But this, in Solberg's view, is nonsense if the child does not even exist. Certainly children born in the traditional way may have "interests", but not ones whom we create. "Potential children seem to be outside morality," he says.

The really important people in such situations are the progenitors. "Assisted reproduction is primarily about us, actual people in an actual society, and how potential children may affect us," he contends. So the proposed criteria is "whether a certain parental project is meaningful and doable or whether it is futile". IVF children for drug addicts is out, but in for gay couples, saviour siblings, sex selection and so on. The focus should be on whether creating a child will result in a "functional family".

What about the morality of cloned or genetically-enhanced children? The principal argument against cloning for many bioethicists is that it has not been perfected yet and will result in defective children. Solberg brushes this issue aside. Cloning would not make parenthood dysfunctional, and thus it would not be unethical. The main thing, however, is to jettison the illogical notion of the welfare of the child and to "focus on what really matters -- our intentions to become functional parents and the meaning of the parental project." ~ Journal of Medical Ethics, June

After doctors and teachers, scientists belong to the most trusted profession in the US. So the results of a meta-analysis of their honesty is more than a little jarring. In an article in the journal PLoS One, Daniele Fanelli, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh found that about 2% of researchers had "fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once" and that up to 34% had admitted other questionable research practices. "Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct," he writes.

Even more unsettling for those interested in bioethics, it appears that medical and pharmacological researchers are the worst offenders. This supports growing fears that financial incentives are corrupting biomedical science.

Some peculiar findings emerged from the study. Over the years, more scientists say that they have observed colleagues cheating -- but fewer say that they cheat themselves. How could this be? Dr Fanelli says that there has been much more insistence upon professional integrity in recent years. However," he says wryly, "there is little evidence that researchers trained in recognizing and dealing with scientific misconduct have a lower propensity to commit it." So much for moral progress! ~PLoS One, May

The number of official requests for euthanasia in the Netherlands increased by 10% in 2008 over the previous year, to 2,331, according to the latest government statistics. A total of 2,146 people were euthanased and 152 died in assisted suicides, while in 33 cases there was a combination of the two practices. Most people were suffering from cancer and most died at home. The figures come from an annual report published by five regional euthanasia monitoring committees.

Ten cases have been referred to the public prosecution department and health inspectorate for comment, because the official guidelines had not been followed. A 2002 Dutch law stipulated several criteria, including suffering unbearable pain, informed consent, and opinion of a second doctor. The doctor has to report his activities to a euthanasia vetting committee -- a lawyer, a doctor and an ethicist -- in his region, and they determine whether he or she acted within the law.

The committees acknowledge in their report that the rise in reported euthanasia is a puzzle. It speculates that the definition of euthanasia has become clearer in recent times, which encourages doctors to be more open about what they do. But it may also be possible that doctors are using terminal sedation more and not reporting it as euthanasia. ~ Radio Netherlands, May 29

A Dutch court has jailed the chairman of an assisted suicide lobby group for 10 months, 8 of them suspended, after he helped an 80-year-old woman to kill herself. The woman died in November 2007 after taking pentobarbital, which prosecutors said was supplied to her children by the lobbyist after doctors refused to help her.

Her children helped to administer the drug, but they were not charged. The lobbyist, who was not named in court documents, had contravened the letter of the Dutch law which only allows doctors to perform acts of euthanasia. Expatica, May 30