Hello. I'm Colin Gavaghan, and this is my wee acre of cyber-turf.

Since 1998, I've been a lecturer in medical law and ethics at the School of Law, University of Glasgow. In 2005, I graduated with a PhD looking at the law and ethics of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Early in 2007, I published my first book, based largely on the arguments in the thesis; details on right of this page.

Apart from the teaching aspect (and the universally loathed marking) I write a bit and give the odd non-Uni talk. Sometimes very odd indeed.

I grew up and was 'educated' in deepest, darkest Ayrshire. The most interesting snippet about those days? My secondary school is sinking by a few millimetres every year, thereby confirming my lingering suspicion that I did indeed go to school over a Hellmouth.

As well as medical law/bioethics, I am also enthusiastic about a whole load of stuff, in no particular order: politics, food, football, wine, music, history, Football Manager, the former Yugoslavia, anarchism, artificial intelligence, CivIII, films, and science fiction. It is not unlikely that some of these will feature at some point in my Blog.

This web-page has very generously and adroitly been put together for me by my old mate Mr Lusiphur. Although the content is entirely mine, he can take a degree of responsibility for helping shape my views over (literally, and terrifyingly) decades of late-night discussions and (literally, and equally terrifyingly) gallons and gallons of coffee and wine. Respect, mate!
10.09.06 @ 08:09 PM GMT [link]

I have a letter in ...
... of all things, The Telegraph today. Which, given that Carol was interviewed in The Times a few weeks back, may be taken to imply a slight rightwards slippage in the Jess-Gav household! Ahem. Anyway, they edited it slightly, but not too savagely, but here is the full Director's Cut:

The assistant manageress who allegedly ejected a pregnant woman from their premises for drinking alcohol (‘Pregnant woman thrown out of pub for 'sipping beer', Telegraph, 1 April 2009) certainly seems to have acted unprofessionally. More troubling, perhaps, is the backdrop of unjustified official paternalism against which this latest intervention took place. Both the Department of Health and the British Medical Association have advocated total abstention approaches to drinking while pregnant, despite the complete lack of credible evidence that low-to-moderate consumption presents any risk whatever to the developing fetus. (Indeed, a 2008 study from University College London suggested that the children of light-drinking mothers might actually perform better in cognitive and behavioural tests than the children of complete abstainers.)

The rationale offered for such a policy is somewhat perverse: any message that *some* drinking is acceptable will, we are told, be mistaken as a ‘green light’ for wanton overindulgence. This insults the intelligence of the responsible majority of pregnant woman, who can presumably tell the difference between the occasional, harmless glass and a reckless binge. It adds – needlessly – to the worry and guilt of women who may have drunk alcohol before discovering they were pregnant. And, by ‘crying wolf’ in this way, it risks squandering the authority of medical experts, who we should be able to trust for accurate advice about serious risks. All this, presumably, while having no real effect on those pregnant women who ignored the previous advice to drink only in moderation.

Pregnant (and prospectively pregnant) women are likely to have quite enough on their minds without having to contend with officially-sanctioned, but scientifically illiterate, public puritanism.

There is a more detailed version of this argument coming out in the Journal of Medical Ethics later this year. Hope it rocks a few boats!
04.03.09 @ 11:58 AM GMT [link] [1609 Comments]

More reviews
Of DtGS, both pretty favurable. Writing in Bionews, Rachel Dobson says:

the book provides a clear argument in defense of the Genetic Supermarket and the reproductive liberty of its customers. It is an informative and thoughtful approach to the question of legislation surrounding reproductive choices. While it may be normal to be hesitant and precautionary in the face of new technology, Gavaghan convincingly challenges the 'gut feelings' that pervade this debate, examining the consequences of PGD from a philosophical, medical and legal perspective.

Meanwhile, over at Script-ed, Eva Asscher concludes her review with:

Gavaghan’s book is a stimulating read that identifies a much needed ethical middle way between the extreme positions on embryo selection, ranging from calls to banning of these types of selection on one hand, to reproductive beneficence as a moral duty on the other.

Unsurprisingly, both had a few quibbles too, though I think it's safe to say that all criticisms were fairly minor and certainly constructive. :-)


08.27.08 @ 03:55 PM GMT [link]

Response to madness
Here is a letter I sent to the Sunday Herald, in reply to a rather bonkers article by Patrick Reilly last week. Don’t know if they have published it – the letters appear not to be on the online version.

‘As well as projecting an entertainingly histrionic tone – who, in British politics, is really ‘trying to eradicate religion itself’? - Patrick Reilly’s analysis of the shifting relations between Scottish Labour and the Catholic Church (Sunday Herald, 20 July 2008) lacks much by way of historical context. Far from necessitating a ‘seismic’ shift, disagreements between social progressives and religious conservatives have been a periodic feature of the Labour Party almost since its inception. The Party may have famously been thought to ‘owe more to Methodism than to Marxism’, but liberal and radical views on contraception, abortion, gay rights and the role of women were always to be found in disproportionate numbers among its ranks.

As early as 1927, the Party Conference saw a schism over the prospect of state-funded contraception, and witnessed the now familiar sight of dire forecasts of Catholics defecting from the Party. Similar scuffles between progress and reaction have been a regular feature in the relations between Church and Party ever since. One of the more recent involved an attempt in 1996 by the late Cardinal Thomas Winning to make Tony Blair’s personal views on abortion an election issue. Throughout all of this, Scotland’s Catholic voters remained resolutely Labour, unswayed by the thinly disguised campaigning from the pulpit.

If a new schism has opened between the Party and the Church in recent times, it has opened on other ground. The traditional shared concern with poverty and equality has been strained to breaking point by New Labour’s apparent indifference or impotence in the face of the widening gap between the chronically poor and obscenely rich. But the Church leadership’s on-going obsession with sexual and reproductive morality, over all other moral concerns, has added to the strain. ( I might add that an organisation that would deny contraception to even the most overburdened and hard-pressed of families has always had, at best, a mixed record on helping the poor.)

Labour lost Glasgow East almost certainly because Labour was seen as having no answers to the problems of chronic poor health and a desperate life expectancy, of rising utility bills and rents, and about personal safety. It did not lose a referendum on Gordon Brown’s views about cytoplasmic hybrids or same-sex civil partnerships, however much it may suit the agenda of conservative religious leaders and their supporters to portray things this way.’

07.27.08 @ 10:23 AM GMT [link]

The truth about privacy
The Max Mosley privacy decision is one to be celebrated, not just as a kick in the teeth for Murdoch’s empire of hypocrites, but for anyone concerned that what consenting adults do in their bedrooms are not the proper business of the gutter press.

The only down side of the verdict has been having to read the usual trash from Colin Myler, blaming it all on crafty europeans sneaking in privacy laws ‘by the back door.’ Here’s a more accurate picture.
In 1997, the family of Gordon Kaye - a British actor famous for a corny sitcom called ‘Allo ‘Allo - tried to sue The Sunday Sport. Kaye had been involved in a serious accident that had left him in a coma. A photographer working for the Sport found his way into Kaye’s hospital room and photographed him in his unconscious state, being artifically fed, for the titillation of the people who read that most trashy of rags.

The judge in that case had to tell the family, with great regret, that they couldn’t win because there was no such thing as a right to privacy in English law. Come 1998, the Labour government chose to fulfil their election pledge by introducing the Human Rights Act. Contra the repeated f*cking lies of the f*cking scumbag liars at the NotW, this was not a question of a ‘‘creeping back-door privacy law … emanating from Europe’, but of a law applied by British courts after being introduced by a democratically elected British government. The Act mostly regulates relations between citizens and the state, but it also has a degree of ‘horizontal application’. Specifically in this case, it allowed (or maybe obliged) judges to recognise a right of privacy, not just against snooping state agencies, but against other individuals.

Obviousy, the gutter press hate this, because it means they can no longer sneak into the hospital rooms of comatose, critically ill people and splash their pictures all over their papers. Most decent human beings, it may be assumed, are quite pleased about this state of affairs.
So well done Max Mosley, well done Justice Eady, well done the ‘professionals’ who had the guts to testify, and well done Labour for introducing the HRA (and god knows I get little enough opportunity to say the last in recent times!). When the parasitic pond-slime of our gutter press are so p*ssed off about something, it’s a pretty good bet the rest of us should be cheering about it.

07.27.08 @ 10:18 AM GMT [link]

Deafness debate
On 9th April I took part in a debate on the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. This was organised by the Progress Educational Trust, and took place at Techniquest in Cardiff. It was a lively event, and I met some very interesting people (Anna Middleton, Sandy Starr and Ailsa Taylor in particular). Despite my best efforts stamping around outside the concert hall, though, I just could not find that hidden entrance to the Torchwood Institute.

Aaanyway, a transcript of the talks is available here. There are a few parts that got lost in transcription - I really didn't claim I could speak slowly in six or seven languages, but that I understood the imperative 'speak slowly'. Which is just about true. Generally, though, it's pretty faithful to what I remember saying.

The same morning, Anna and I gave an interview to Radio Wales, a transcript of which is available here. Safe to say, first thing in the morning is not my natural habitat, but I seem to have at least bordered on coherence.




04.24.08 @ 01:32 PM GMT [link] [945 Comments]

Review: other side of the coin
My turn to be on the other side of the review fence this time; my review of McLachlan and Swales' From the womb to the tomb has just been published in Variant mag (pdf).

03.06.08 @ 02:28 PM GMT [link] [1486 Comments]