Legal Grey Area Research Articles

Dealing with the danger signs

While the so-called ‘treatability’ of people with dangerous and severe personality disorders remains a legal grey area, Rampton Hospital has developed a service to meet the needs of men considered to have such disorders, writes Christopher Wood

Murderous medicine: Nazi doctors, human experimentation, and Typhus

In Murderous medicine Naomi Baumslag documents the complicity of Nazi doctors and pharmaceutical companies in murderous medical experiments related to epidemic typhus to further Jewish genocide. On the book’s cover is a picture of the shaved heads of newly dead men, frozen in snow, with snow caps as skull caps, reminiscent of the Jewish yarmulke. Eyes and mouths are closed, forever blinded and silenced about the conditions of their deaths. Perhaps only pictures can capture the essence of Nazi medical atrocities; but pictures also limit these atrocities, which are almost too numerous to catalog.

Privacy in electronic communication: Watch your e-mail: Your boss is snooping!

As use of information technology increases, there has been an upsurge in the way that people can access and deal with personal data, particularly in electronic format and over electronic communications system. A whole world of electronic monitoring continues to grow rapidly with the increasing amounts of technology. In every electronic communication, an Internet user gives away some form of personal information. As individuals engage in routine online transactions, they leave behind a trail of personal details, often without any idea that they are doing so. The Internet is not yet a secure medium over which to communicate personal information without having due consideration of the risks and legal issues involved. The rapid growth and increasing use of the Internet give rise to many and complex privacy issues. Questions arise as to what are employee's privacy rights when using the office e-mail system for personal or non-work related use and the employer's responsibility in ensuring that the company's e-mail system or Internet is not abused. Employees are worried about privacy and the employer's increasing use of software to read, intercept and monitor employee's electronic e-mail or Internet usage. In many cases workplace monitoring can seriously compromise the privacy and dignity of employees. Surveillance techniques can be used to harass, discriminate and to create unhealthy dynamics in the workplace. In general, US courts are not easily persuaded that e-mail snooping by employers constitutes an invasion of the employee's legitimate expectations of privacy in the workplace, given the employer's ownership of the e-mail system. On the other hand, although EU law is clear that e-mail interception is illegal, the law is not totally clear as to whether companies may prohibit employees from sending private e-mails. Corporate IT usage is still a legal grey area.

Consent and the Incapable Adult

Defining incapacity to consent in an adult patient is a complex legal grey area. In her final article M E Rodgers looks at the issues involved.

Puerto Rico: Recent Trends in Fertility and Sterilization

Despite an expanding economy in the postWorld War II period, declining infant mortality and an expressed desire of the population to limit childbearing, levels of fertility in Puerto Rico remained high until the early 1950s. Soon afterward, however, fertility began to decline sharply. Between 1950 and 1977, the total fertility rate fell by 48 percent-from 5.2 to 2.7 children per woman. In the early stages of the decline, most of the reduction in fertility levels was concentrated among women 25-39 years of age; by 1960, the decline had accelerated and spread to include both older and younger women of reproductive age. Much of the decline in fertility between 1950 and 1960 was due to the increasing prevalence of female sterilization-and, in the latter half of the decade, to its earlier timing. By 1965, one-third of ever-married women aged 20-49 had been sterilized, twofifths of them before the age of 25. Such levels are higher than those for other countries for which data are available. Levels of female sterilization in Puerto Rico appear to have peaked in the late 1960s, declining slightly in the early 1970s. In 1968, 35 percent of ever-married women aged 2049 had been sterilized. In 1974, the level among such women was 30 percent. Despite this decline, levels of sterilization in 1974 were almost as high as those in 1965. Between 1965 and 1974, sterilization rates were high among women who had been in their 20s in 1965, and moderate among women who had been in their late 30s. Over the same period, there were substantial declines in the prevalence of sterilization among women with one or two children, and some increases among women with five to seven children ever born. Levels of male sterilization remain low. Several factors other than female sterilization appear to have contributed somewhat to Puerto Rico's fertility decline. There was an increase between 1960 and 1970 in the proportions of single women at all ages. In addition, the proportion of ever-married women using oral contraceptives grew from 11 percent in 1968 to 20 percent in 1974. This increase compensated for small reductions in the prevalence of sterilization; the overall level of contraceptive use remained at almost exactly the same level between 1968 and 1974-about 60 percent. A third factor which may have contributed to the reduction in Puerto Rican fertility since 1950 is abortion. The practice of abortion there remains within a legal gray area, however. Technically, abortion in Puerto Rico has been legal since the U.S. Supreme Court decisions of 1973. However, local laws which forbid abortion except on medical indications are currently being enforced, and abortion is practiced as if it were illegal. For this reason, the prevalence of induced abortion can only be estimated; some observers estimate that there are currently 15,00018,000 abortions performed annually in Puerto Rico.