Money matters: a critique of 'informed financial consent'.

In recent years, concerns about the financial burdens of health care and growing recognition of the relevance of cost to decision making and patient experience have increasingly focused attention on financial 'transparency' and disclosure of costs to patients. In some jurisdictions, there have been calls not only for timely disclosure of costs information, but also for 'informed financial consent'. However, simply putting the 'financial' into 'informed consent' and invoking an informed consent standard for cost information encounters several ethical, legal, and practical difficulties.

The Challenge of Bioinequality: Addressing the Health Impact of Unequal Treatment Through Law.

Global social movements for justice have called for better legal responses to the harms of inequality. These inequalities have traditionally been dealt with in the political sphere and legal measures to address them have taken little account of emerging knowledge about the biological impact of unequal treatment. We use the concept 'bioinequalities' to foreground the relationship increasingly articulated in studies that show that social stress and trauma associated with unequal treatment have a significant epigenetic and intergenerational impact on the body.

Reimagining disability: the screening of donor gametes and embryos in IVF.

In this article, we examine how disability is figured in the imaginaries that are given shape by the reproductive projects and parental desires facilitated by the bio-medical techniques and practices of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) that involve selection and screening for disability. We investigate how some users of ARTs understand and deploy these imaginaries in ways that are both concordant with and resistant to the understanding of disability embedded within the broader sociotechnical and social imaginaries. It is through users' deliberations, choices, responses, and expectations that we come to understand how these imaginaries are perpetuated and resisted, and how maintaining them is also dependent upon the individual actions and actors who have internalized them.

How are complementary health professions regulated in Australia? An examination of complementary health professions in the national registration and accreditation scheme.

Objectives: This study aims to provide an empirical examination of how complementary medicine practice in Australia is actually regulated under the current national registration model.

Methods: Data was obtained from Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) Annual Reports for the years 2011/12-2014/15 and supplemented by the Chinese Medical Registration Board of Victoria (CMRBV) Annual Reports in 2011/12 for Chinese Medicine complaints. The data analysed includes complaint statistics, stage of closure of complaints and the outcome of complaints concerning Chinese medicine, chiropractic and osteopathy under the National Law.

Learning from Cross-Border Reproduction.

Drawing upon the preliminary findings of an Australian empirical project on cross-border reproduction (CBR), this article argues that regulators and policymakers could learn from the experiences of those who travel overseas in order to access fertility treatment and surrogacy. It makes four principal observations. First, the distinction between so-called 'altruistic' and 'commercial' gamete donation and surrogacy is increasingly unsustainable and is not experienced as meaningful by many participants in CBR.

Embryo donation and understanding of kinship: the impact of law and policy.

Study Question: What is the impact of law and policy upon the experience of embryo donation for reproductive use?

Summary Answer: Access to, and experience of, embryo donation are influenced by a number of external factors including laws that impose embryo storage limits, those that frame counselling and approval requirements and allow for, or mandate, donor identity disclosure.

What Is Known Already: To date only three qualitative studies in Australia and New Zealand have been completed on the experience of embryo donation for reproductive purposes, each with a small cohort of interviewees and divergent findings.

Study Design, Size, Duration: Embryo donors, recipients, and would-be donors were interviewed between July 2010 and July 2012, with three additional interviews between September 2015 and September 2016, on their experiences of embryo donation.

The meaning of "serious disability" in the legal regulation of prenatal and neonatal decision-making.

The concept of "serious disability" appears to play a significant role in circumscribing treatment-limiting decisions in neonatal care, prenatal counselling, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and abortion following prenatal diagnosis. However, there is no legal definition for this concept and its meaning varies among members of the community and the medical profession. Legal and policy responses to "serious disability" consist of an assortment of ethical guidelines, specific legislative frameworks and longstanding provisions of the criminal law, some of which were neither enacted nor developed with modern medical practices and dilemmas in mind.

Choosing disability: preimplantation genetic diagnosis and negative enhancement.

This article examines the unusual circumstance of what the author has tentatively termed "negative enhancement". This term is used to describe those instances where individuals seek to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to achieve outcomes that, commonly, are socially not preferred. In a recent survey by the Genetics and Public Policy Centre, it was found that 3% of IVF-PGD clinics in the United States reported having provided PGD to couples who seek to select an embryo for the presence of a particular disease or disability, such as deafness, in order that the child share the characteristic with the parents.

Genetic technologies and the regulation of reproductive decision-making in Australia.

This article provides a critical analysis of the current Australian regulatory landscape at the interface between genetics and reproductive decision-making. The authors argue that a comparative analysis with other countries and international law and a contextual examination of the way law regulates concepts such as disease and health, abnormality and normality is necessary before we can develop appropriate policy and legislative responses in this area. Specific genetic testing technologies are considered including prenatal genetic testing, preimplantation genetic diagnosis and inheritable genetic modification.