Occasional Tales

And the excuses. The excuse which the nurse peddles for using Toni as a life support machine is pregnancy, which would require her to support another life just as she’s supporting the other patient. But Toni would seem to view pregnancy, whether it was planned or not, as a natural phenomenon against which this contrasts as something unnatural. Anyway, at this point, they start questioning her mental state, recalling a blow to the head and how her relatives thought she’d be in favour of the doctors’ actions. they sedate her and leave her in a coma-like state for the remaining five weeks. But when they revive Toni, she’s ashamed of her refusal to play her part and thanks the staff for all their help. She even gives the biotechnologist a big bunch of flowers. (In a moment of extreme irony, which I’m adding for my own amusement, the man reacts badly to the pollen and dies.) Did the doctors do the right thing after all? Their excuse for sedating Toni sounds a little specious, but perhaps we...

It’s like The Matrix. Toni Chestnut gets knocked down by a car and eventually comes to in hospital where, she’s told, she’ll be for six weeks. But she soon realises that she’s actually all right. When she starts trying to disconnect herself from the machines, the doctors stop her because her kidneys are actually being used to help another patient. They weren’t able to ask her for her permission because she was unconscious when the decision needed to be made. Toni wants her body back, but the doctors explain that the man she’s helping is a biotechnologist who has developed strains of rice that help millions. And he has a girlfriend and three small children. Toni is unmoved and wants the machine to be disconnected from her. Should she be disconnected from the machine even if the other patient dies? On the one hand, the doctors needed someone to keep the other patient alive and Toni happened to be unable to give her consent; on the other, once she’s conscious shouldn’t the doctors acquies...

Who tends to get overheated. I thought it was about time I updated the old laptop. I don’t really use the machine any longer except when there’s something on it which I don’t have on the new one, and normally I don’t go online from it. Anyway, since I’m here, it’s time for another ethical dilemma. The question is, “Would it be unethical of me to throw the more annoying pupils in my classes out of the window to confirm that there really is gravity because any means by which we reconfirm some evident truth is acceptable?” [Due to certain typographical errors, the ethical dilemma outlined above superficially seems to be of a rather different nature to the ethical dilemma actually under discussion. This has now been corrected. –ed.] The 29th dilemma is another about babies in Diktatia. Like the previous dilemma, there are still designer babies, but the basic job of combining eggs and sperm is done in the lab before the embryo is implanted. Other businesses offer surrogate mothers to bear t...