Press Releases

One year after publishing its Opinion on the anonymous relinquishment of infants, the German Ethics Council has held a discussion with representatives from practice, the media and politics on what developments have occurred since then.

The German Ethics Council has today released its third Opinion, Utility and Costs in Healthcare: The Normative Function of Their Analysis.

The German Ethics Council is currently working on an Opinion on preimplantation diagnosis (PGD), which it intends to issue at the beginning of March 2011. To this end the Council held a public hearing on 16 December 2010 to learn about the regulation and practice of PGD in Belgium, the United Kingdom and France and about recent developments in the genetic screening of embryos.

Yesterday (Wednesday) over three hundred members of the public came to the Hamburg Chamber of Trades for the German Ethics Council’s meeting on “Dementia – the end of self-determination?”

As a part of its Bioethics Forum series, the German Ethics Council yesterday (Wednesday) debated the issue of whether the state can require everyone to make a decision about organ donation.

In the context of its consideration of reproductive medicine the German Ethics Council is to prepare an Opinion on the subject of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which is expected to be issued by the summer of 2011. This was decided at the Plenary Meeting held in Berlin yesterday (Thursday).