Révision de la loi bioéthique : les dangers de l’autoconservation des ovocytes pour convenance personnelle

Legalization of self-conservation of ovocytes for personal convenience is considered by the second article of the bioethics legislative proposal, adopted by French National Assembly. This practice is aiming to allow men and women to keep their gametes for the purpose of a subsequent medically assisted procreation. Does this new liberty risks to take away a human's individual liberty and more specifically a women's one? Indeed, to legalize self-conservation of ovocytes for personal convenience means to extend the message whereby a woman could delay her maternity. The result would be an implicit pressure: as it becomes medically possible to privilege first of all a career and then to envisage maternity, woman seeking high performance must necessarily choose it. This technique could therefore hide a clear-cut decline for women's rights, again confronted with a cornelian choice, a family or a career.     

Creative Supervision for Counselors Working in a Hospice Setting

The number of individuals receiving hospice care in the United States is on the rise. Many individuals who suffer from debilitating health issues use the care of helping professionals in a hospice environment. Supervision approaches for counselors who encounter grief, loss, death, and bereavement issues in hospice settings are needed. The authors introduce three creative interventions for use with supervisees in one of the four stages of the integrative developmental model of supervision. One intervention, the “Rock Talk,” is more thoroughly explained and then demonstrated in a case illustration of a supervisee using the intervention to say goodbye to a hospice client.     

The final challenge: ageing, dying, individuation

This paper is about the psychotherapy of a woman who passed from what Waddell (1998) would term 'older age' to 'later life', by which latter I mean the inevitable decline into dying and death. However unwelcome these developments may be to the individual, they are none the less activities of the soma, and therefore activities of the self-deintegrates. Much of the work of the psychotherapy centred around the task of enabling the patient to relate to and accept the bodily and emotional correlates of this process, which she tended to want to disown and deny by means of a split between mind and body along the lines of a long-standing internal depressive relationship. Permitting her contact with herself allowed her a much greater sense of internal company and peace, and arguably facilitated an easier process of dying, involving a self reconciled with itself rather than one at odds. Technically, the approach involved a greater concentration on the intrapsychic relationship rather than on the relationship between patient and analyst, and this is briefly discussed in terms of the work of Armando Ferrari who had himself died, shortly before the paper was first presented, and to whom therefore it is in part a homage.     

Third party assisted conception: an African perspective

The central importance of reproduction in all human cultures has given rise to many methods and techniques of assisting reproduction or overcoming infertility. Such methods and techniques have achieved spectacular successes in the Western world, where processes like in vitro fertilization (IVF) constitute a remarkable breakthrough. In this paper, the author attempts to reflect critically on assisted reproduction technologies (ART) from the background and perspective of African culture, a culture within which human reproduction is given the highest priority but which also exhibits a highly ambivalent attitude to modern technology-assisted methods of reproduction. The author considers the ethical crux of reproductive technologies to be linked to the issue of the moral status of the human embryo and argues that a morally significant line of demarcation cannot be drawn between embryos and other categories of humans.     

ART伦理委员会构建与作用的探讨

辅助生殖技术(Assisted Reproduction Technique,ART)的飞速发展给社会带来了复杂的伦理难题。实践证明,只有发挥伦理委员会作为一个工作机构的职能,在医患人群中加强ART技术基本原理及相关伦理原则的宣传教育,才能促使医患人群都能够自觉遵守优良的医学伦理道德规范,保证人类辅助生殖技术的健康发展。     

Beyond the Biomedical Paradigm: Generating a Spiritual Vision of Ageing

SUMMARY

The time has come to enlarge our understanding of what an ageing older person truly is. What is called for is an approach to ageing and its multiple processes that moves beyond an empirical research model, which is limited to a positivistic focus on the bio-medical and social conditions of ageing. The spiritual dimension of the individual as well as the physical and social need to be acknowledged and valued in any definition of human existence. A segmental approach to the ageing process can only result on a reductionistic, one-dimensional caricature of the older person. There is an imperative need for the inclusion of the spiritual dimension in the study of ageing and its meaning. By issuing a call for a new wholistic paradigm that moves beyond the bio-medical model, and understanding the personhood is affirmed which includes a person's capacity to find meaning in life, indeed, even in ageing, suffering and dying.     

Réflexions sur la fin de vie

The following reflections have to do with the "end of life" and are presented here as a lecture addressed to high school and preparatory school student attending a Parisian institute. They were developed with the aim of finding where a current citizens' debate called for by the executive branch and timeless, age-old questions might overlap. When we begin to ponder ultimates such as birth or death, we owe it to ourselves to take into consideration all the nuances involved; this is the only way to process the complexity of these topics. The goals of this course are, first of all, to situate the current debate within the ethical and juridical history of France, and then proceed towards making necessary conceptual distinctions. Finally, we will consider, as much as possible, what is at stake with the options at hand.