Rights to safe motherhood and newborn health: Ethical issues

Ethical Issues in Newborn Screening

Newborn screening represents an important preventive public health program. Over the time, there were debates about the criteria for inclusion of some diseases in newborn screening. Discussions on the expansion of newborn screening programs focus on three aspects: informed consent, costs and evidence. The authors present data on the criteria that must meet newborn screening and different ethica...

Ethical Issues in Health

Barriers to Safe Motherhood in Nigeria

HIGHLIGHTS ■ Nigeria has one of the highest maternal mortality ratios in the world: 1,100 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. ■ Although patterns vary by region, high-risk births persist in Nigeria. In both 1990 and 2003, two-thirds of all births were high risk because of the mother's age, parity or spacing of births. ■ More than 40% of women giving birth do not receive prenatal care...

Ethical and Regulatory Issues with Residual Newborn Screening Dried Bloodspots

After newborn screening is completed, most states retain leftover dried bloodspots. These dried bloodspots are stored for varying lengths of time among different state newborn screening programs. Dried bloodspots are a unique and valuable resource for the development of new newborn screening tests, quality assurance and biomedical research. Recent changes to the 2014 Newborn Screening Reauthori...

Newborn screening by tandem mass spectrometry: ethical and social issues.

Emerging technologies like Tandem Mass Spectrometry (TMS) enable multiple tests on a single blood sample and allow the expansion of Newborn Screening (NBS) to include various metabolic diseases. Introducing TMS for NBS raises important social and ethical questions: what are the criteria for adding disorders to screening panels? What evidence justifies expansion of screening? How can equity in N...