A Right to Life - and Death?

Boyd, Senior lecturer in Medical Ethics at Edinburgh University, provides a lucid and objective discussion of the issues surrounding abortion, fertility treatment, transplantation, decisions about the allocation of health care, and euthanasia. His skill at marshalling an argument, providing apposite examples, and writing with unemotional clarity, make this an excellent introduction to these questions to anyone over the age of fourteen - it made some of them clear to me for the first time. His introduction sets out the problems: of establishing and balancing rights and allocating scarce resources. He writes with economy but takes as long as he needs on each section. His chapter on fertility treatment is fourteen pages and covers everything from in vitro fertilisation to cloning. The following chapter on transplants is but four pages. Nowhere is there any straining for effect or sensationalism and the colour photographs and quotations that surround the text support his approach. The text is interspersed with question and quotation boxes that offer a spectrum of opinion, invite you to put yourself in other people's shoes and to make your own decision. There is a poor index to such a good text and no further reading list, but, for the most important part, I cannot imagine it done any better.