Bioethics
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Clinical ethics committees have recently been established in nearly all Norwegian hospital trusts. One important task for these committees is clinical ethics consultations. This qualitative study explores significant barriers confronting the ethics committees in providing such consultation services. ⋯ Sometimes even the committees comply with some of these tendencies. The committees agree that there is a need to improve their routines and procedures, clarify the committees' profile and field of responsibility, to make the committees well-known, to secure adequate operating conditions, and to develop organizational integration and support. Various strategies to meet these challenges on a local, regional or national level are also explored in this paper.
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The paper explores the ethical aspects of introducing cultural circumcision of children into the EU public health system. We reject commonplace arguments against circumcision: considerations of good medical practice, justice, bodily integrity, autonomy and the analogy from female genital mutilation. ⋯ However, we support a utilitarian argument that finds hospital based circumcision safer than non-medicalized alternatives. The argument concerning medicalization and the utilitarian argument both rely on preliminary empirical data, which depend on future validation