African Perspectives on Some Contemporary Bioethics Problems

This collection of essays addresses an important cross-section of issues in contemporary bioethics.

It represents an essential contribution to global bioethics anchored and grounded on a continent most remarkable for its biological, cultural and linguistic diversity.

It is a fitting beginning to addressing the observable absence of African voices in the rather lively global discourses of bioethics.

The issues treated here include a discussion of the fundamental principles of bioethics; the place of African thought in medical research ethics, traditional medicine, and assisted conception; the moral status of embryonic stem cells; research with vulnerable human beings; and sexual and reproductive health in Africa.

It explores a paradigm of how the universal and the particular may be blended, how global bioethics can remain firmly anchored and committed locally, regionally, continentally.