Libby Frith
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 223977 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Libby Frith |
| PRENOMES | Libby |
| SOBRENOME | Frith |
| ASSINATURA | FRITH L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Liverpool |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8506-0699 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 73 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Normalising transparency
i We adopt the definition used by Nature portfolio journals: 'AI-assisted improvements to human-generated texts for readability and style, and to ensure that the texts are free of errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation and tone.These AI-assisted improvements may include wording and formatting changes to the texts, but do not include generative editorial work and autonomous content creation'. 18 As Hosseini and colleagues 16 note, using the shor…
Medical ethics and categorisation
Journal of Medical Ethics turns 50
The Journal of Medical Ethics celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025. This milestone created the opportunity for reflection on how the journal and, more broadly, the field of medical ethics has changed, and what the future should look like. To do this, we explored the views of attendees at the Institute of Medical Ethics (IME) annual conference in 2025 on the future of medical ethics. Our study aims to shed light on: (1) the aspects of today’s e…
Diversity, polarisation and reason
as editors-in-chief of the JME
The Value of Life and Reproductive and Professional Autonomy
This article considers John Harris’ work on autonomy, specifically reproductive autonomy, outlined in The Value of Life and developed throughout his career. Harris often used the concept of reproductive autonomy to make the case for liberal approaches to developments in reproductive and genetic technologies. Harris argued that reproductive autonomy should be highly valued, and therefore we need compelling arguments to justify limiting it in anywa…
Perennial issues and current controversies
Something old, something new? The Journal of Medical Ethics turns 50
Good bioethics and a good bioethicist
Research Protocol for Forging New Families in Contemporary Contexts
People looking for sperm ('recipients') and people providing sperm ('donors') are increasingly connecting via informal online platforms, such as 'connection websites' and social networking sites. Typically, research has not focused on this route to conception. Little is known about how people involved in online sperm donation initiate, negotiate, sustain or end their relationships with each other, how power or influence operates within this conte…
Relational dynamite
This article investigates how Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing (DTCGT) affects people impacted by donor conception by bringing empirical data on how people in this context respond to a DNA match into conversation with debates on kinship and personal life. Our aim is to conceptually engage with a salient emerging empirical theme, namely that people at the interface of donor conception/DTCGT respond to a (previously unknown) DNA match on a contin…
Exploring the generational ordering of kinship through decisions about DNA testing and gamete donor conception
The development of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT), in conjunction with social media, has had profound consequences for the management of information about donor conception. One outcome is that it is now possible to circumvent formal age-restrictions on accessing information about people related through donor conception. Consequently, many donor conceived people and their parents face questions regarding what is the 'right age' to seek…
Medical ethics, equity and social justice
Developing translational bioethics—Suggestions for ways forward
This paper will take as its starting point the premise that developing translational bioethics is a worthwhile endeavour. I will develop an account of translational bioethics and discuss what implications this would have for the wider discipline of bioethics and argue that this would be a useful development for bioethics. The paper will conduct a form of ‘translational meta‐bioethics analysis’, in the words of Bærøe. I will argue that if we are s…
Delivering compassionate NHS healthcare
A distinction can be drawn between healthcare, where compassion is evident, and the functional delivery of health services. Measures to curb the spread of COVID-19, such as personal protective equipment, telehealth, and visiting restrictions created barriers to service delivery and put pressure on healthcare. Through 37 qualitative interviews with NHS senior managers (n = 11), health professionals (n = 26), and 5 focus group discussions with memb…
Broadening the debate
Bringing context into ethical discussion
‘To me, it's ones and zeros, but in reality that one is death’
BACKGROUND: Big data research requires public support. It has been argued that this can be achieved by public involvement and engagement to ensure that public views are at the centre of research projects. Researchers should aim to include diverse communities, including seldom-heard voices, to ensure that a range of voices are heard and that research is meaningful to them. OBJECTIVE: We explored how researchers involve and engage seldom-heard comm…
The concise argument – choice, choices and the choice agenda
Medical ethics and the climate change emergency
Community engagement in genomic research
Community engagement (CE) contributes to successful research. There is, however, a lack of literature on the effectiveness of different models of CE and, specifically, on CE strategies for the conduct of genomic research in sub‐Saharan Africa. There is also a need for models of CE that transcend the recruitment stage of engaging prospective individuals and communities and embed CE throughout the research process and after the research has conclud…
Public involvement in the governance of population-level biomedical research
Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 exper…
Lockdown, public good and equality during Covid-19
On 22nd September 2020 the UK Government announced new lockdown restrictions to supress the COVID-19 virus, with some areas of England having more restrictive lockdown guidance. Students in a number of cities have been confined to their halls of residences after outbreaks of COVID-19 and in Manchester security guards were preventing students leaving the buildings. The scientific community are, unsurprisingly, divided over the question of how far …
Covid-19 and beyond
Covid-19 continues to dominate 2020 and is likely to be a feature of our lives for some time to come. Given this, how should health systems respond ethically to the persistent challenges of responding to the ongoing impact of the pandemic? Relatedly, what ethical values should underpin the resetting of health services after the initial wave, knowing that local spikes and further waves now seem inevitable? In this editorial we outline some of the …
Pandemic medical ethics
The COVID-19 pandemic will generate vexing ethical issues for the foreseeable future and many journals will be open to content that is relevant to our collective effort to meet this challenge. While the pandemic is clearly the critical issue of the moment, it’s important that other issues in medical ethics continue to be addressed as well. As can be seen in this issue, the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) will uphold its commitment to publishing h…
The concise argument
This issue of the Journal of Medical covers a range of ethical issues and care settings making the task of beginning to summarise these papers challenging. They reflect the diversity of our field, representing different branches of bioethics focussing on specific areas or topics using a variety of methodologies: but how do we categorise these branches of bioethics? What demarks one branch from another? And what function do such categorisations fu…
The Role of Birth Certificates in Relation to Access to Biographical and Genetic History in Donor Conception
In 1984, among its recommendations for the regulation of assisted conception services in the UK, the Warnock Committee proposed that the birth certificate of a donor-conceived person should record the fact of donor conception. While this proposal was never implemented, over twenty years later, a Joint Committee of the House of Lords and House of Commons recommended the use of birth certificates as a means of enabling donor–conceived persons to le…
Mediated research encounters
Given increasing globalisation, the continuing prevalence of emergencies, and the importance of rigorous research to ensure the mental health needs of populations exposed to emergencies are effectively met, cross-language research will continue to arise. Drawing upon the lead author's experience of conducting a cross-language qualitative study in three post-conflict settings in South Asia, this article discusses methodological considerations rais…
Donor-Conceived People's Access to Genetic and Biographical History
Donor conception has been practised for many years, initially as a means of bypassing male fertility problems through the use of donated semen. More recently, semen donation has provided a means by which a single woman and women in same sex relationships may build a family without engaging in penetrative heterosexual intercourse, while embryo and egg donation have provided new family-building opportunities for other groups, such as post-menopausa…
Secrets and disclosure in donor conception
This article considers the disclosure, sharing and exchange of information on being donor conceived within families, drawing on data from a study undertaken with donor-conceived adults registered withUKDonor Link (a voluntaryDNA-linking register). This paper considers the narratives of how respondents found out they were donor-conceived and what events triggered disclosure of this information. This paper then goes on to examine the role secrecy p…
Ethical boundary-work in the infertility clinic
Infertility practice and reproductive technologies are generally seen as 'controversial' areas of scientific inquiry that raise many complex ethical issues. This paper presents a qualitative study that considered how clinicians constructed the role of the 'ethical' in their everyday practice. We use the concept of ethical boundary-work to develop a theory of 'settled' and 'controversial' morality to illuminate how infertility clinicians drew boun…
Embryo Relinquishment for Family Building
This article discusses two competing conceptualisations of the relinquishment of unused cryopreserved embryos for family building, as either ‘embryo donation’ or ‘embryo adoption’. The evidence on how embryo relinquishment is conceptualised, and the views, experiences, and perceptions of fertility patients with unused cryopreserved embryos, are examined by reviewing 41 English-language research papers published between 1995 and 2010 located by me…
Writing to template
Proposing a sociology of donation
This article advances the case for a ‘sociology of donation’. We aim to establish that there is a need for such a sociology, to bring together the many, often disparate, elements that make up the theorizing, practice and experience of donation. We argue that bringing together different forms of donation illuminates the distinctive place both in social meaning and regulation that the body and its products hold. In developing this, we are primarily…
The Intersections of Gender and Power in Women Veterans' Experiences of Substance Use and Va Care
In this article, we show that the Veterans Health Administration (VA), similar to military organizations, is a gendered organization where women Veterans' experiences are embedded in and shaped by gender inequalities and structures of power. Based on an in-depth analysis of women Veterans' substance use histories and VA treatment seeking experiences, we illustrate how gender power dynamics are (re)produced and maintained through everyday social i…
The UK's gamete donor `crisis' - a critical analysis
Since April 2005, individuals donating sperm, eggs or embryos for the treatment of others in the UK have been required to agree to the disclosure of their identity to any child conceived as a result of their donation on reaching the age of 18. The main arguments advanced against the removal of donor anonymity are: first, it is responsible for a dramatic decline in the number of donors; second, it causes particular problems for donors in egg shari…
Research Protocol for Forging New Families in Contemporary Contexts
People looking for sperm ('recipients') and people providing sperm ('donors') are increasingly connecting via informal online platforms, such as 'connection websites' and social networking sites. Typically, research has not focused on this route to conception. Little is known about how people involved in online sperm donation initiate, negotiate, sustain or end their relationships with each other, how power or influence operates within this conte…
Relational dynamite
This article investigates how Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing (DTCGT) affects people impacted by donor conception by bringing empirical data on how people in this context respond to a DNA match into conversation with debates on kinship and personal life. Our aim is to conceptually engage with a salient emerging empirical theme, namely that people at the interface of donor conception/DTCGT respond to a (previously unknown) DNA match on a contin…
Genomic Literacy and Awareness of Ethical Guidance for Genomic Research in Sub-Saharan Africa
Achieving the objectives of rolling out genomic research programs in sub-Saharan Africa depends on how prepared indigenous biomedical researchers are for this type of research. We explored the level of preparedness of biomedical researchers in a sub-Saharan African country using in-depth interviews to obtain data on their understanding of genomics and genomic research and assess their awareness of the scope of the country's code of health researc…
Relationships and boundaries between provider and recipient families following embryo adoption
This article reports on a study of individuals and couples who provided or received embryos under the Snowflakes® embryo adoption programme in the US and had established contact with each other. This mixed-methods study comprised two phases: an online survey, followed by email interviews. It explores participants’ initial experiences of establishing contact after embryo adoption and the birth of a child; how they developed and negotiated boundari…
Gamete Donation, Identity, and the Offspring's Right to Know
A resident in obstetrics and gynecology introduces a Virtual Mentor issue devoted to the ethical dilemmas physicians face in balancing the dual interests embodied by pregnant patients and in other circumstances of parental-fetal conflict. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association
The UK's gamete donor `crisis' - a critical analysis
Since April 2005, individuals donating sperm, eggs or embryos for the treatment of others in the UK have been required to agree to the disclosure of their identity to any child conceived as a result of their donation on reaching the age of 18. The main arguments advanced against the removal of donor anonymity are: first, it is responsible for a dramatic decline in the number of donors; second, it causes particular problems for donors in egg shari…
Donor-Conceived People's Access to Genetic and Biographical History
Donor conception has been practised for many years, initially as a means of bypassing male fertility problems through the use of donated semen. More recently, semen donation has provided a means by which a single woman and women in same sex relationships may build a family without engaging in penetrative heterosexual intercourse, while embryo and egg donation have provided new family-building opportunities for other groups, such as post-menopausa…
The Role of Birth Certificates in Relation to Access to Biographical and Genetic History in Donor Conception
In 1984, among its recommendations for the regulation of assisted conception services in the UK, the Warnock Committee proposed that the birth certificate of a donor-conceived person should record the fact of donor conception. While this proposal was never implemented, over twenty years later, a Joint Committee of the House of Lords and House of Commons recommended the use of birth certificates as a means of enabling donor–conceived persons to le…
Embryo Relinquishment for Family Building
This article discusses two competing conceptualisations of the relinquishment of unused cryopreserved embryos for family building, as either ‘embryo donation’ or ‘embryo adoption’. The evidence on how embryo relinquishment is conceptualised, and the views, experiences, and perceptions of fertility patients with unused cryopreserved embryos, are examined by reviewing 41 English-language research papers published between 1995 and 2010 located by me…
Ethical boundary-work in the infertility clinic
Infertility practice and reproductive technologies are generally seen as 'controversial' areas of scientific inquiry that raise many complex ethical issues. This paper presents a qualitative study that considered how clinicians constructed the role of the 'ethical' in their everyday practice. We use the concept of ethical boundary-work to develop a theory of 'settled' and 'controversial' morality to illuminate how infertility clinicians drew boun…
The Intersections of Gender and Power in Women Veterans' Experiences of Substance Use and Va Care
In this article, we show that the Veterans Health Administration (VA), similar to military organizations, is a gendered organization where women Veterans' experiences are embedded in and shaped by gender inequalities and structures of power. Based on an in-depth analysis of women Veterans' substance use histories and VA treatment seeking experiences, we illustrate how gender power dynamics are (re)produced and maintained through everyday social i…
The dragon and the snake
OBJECTIVES: This paper explores how ethnicity has been represented in research on the health practices of Chinese populations in the UK and suggests ways in which such research might be enriched by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. DESIGN: A systematic literature review of studies was conducted on research with 'Chinese' in the UK. RESULTS: The review highlighted that research with Chinese populations is frequently grounded in assumptions a…
Managing Ethical Challenges to Mental Health Research in Post‐Conflict Settings
Recently the World Health Organization ( WHO ) has highlighted the need to strengthen mental health systems following emergencies, including natural and manmade disasters. Mental health services need to be informed by culturally attuned evidence that is developed through research. Therefore, there is an urgent need to establish rigorous ethical research practice to underpin the evidence‐base for mental health services delivered during and followi…
Voluntary DNA-based information exchange and contact services following donor conception
Medical science has enabled the creation of families through the use of donor conception but some lifelong policy and practice implications are only recently being recognized. Research and practice have shown that donor conception can, for some, carry substantial long-term consequences. In this paper we present findings from a questionnaire-based study that sought to shed light on donor-conceived adults’ and gamete donors’ views on service and su…
Ethical standards for mental health and psychosocial support research in emergencies
BACKGROUND: Research in emergencies is needed to understand the prevalence of mental health and psychosocial problems and strengthen the evidence base for interventions. All research - including operational needs assessments, programme monitoring and evaluation, and formal academic research - must be conducted ethically. While there is broad consensus on fundamental principles codified in research ethics guidelines, these do not address the ethic…
Relationships and boundaries between provider and recipient families following embryo adoption
This article reports on a study of individuals and couples who provided or received embryos under the Snowflakes® embryo adoption programme in the US and had established contact with each other. This mixed-methods study comprised two phases: an online survey, followed by email interviews. It explores participants’ initial experiences of establishing contact after embryo adoption and the birth of a child; how they developed and negotiated boundari…
Searching for ‘relations’ using a DNA linking register by adults conceived following sperm donation
Genomic Literacy and Awareness of Ethical Guidance for Genomic Research in Sub-Saharan Africa
Achieving the objectives of rolling out genomic research programs in sub-Saharan Africa depends on how prepared indigenous biomedical researchers are for this type of research. We explored the level of preparedness of biomedical researchers in a sub-Saharan African country using in-depth interviews to obtain data on their understanding of genomics and genomic research and assess their awareness of the scope of the country's code of health researc…
Mediated research encounters
Given increasing globalisation, the continuing prevalence of emergencies, and the importance of rigorous research to ensure the mental health needs of populations exposed to emergencies are effectively met, cross-language research will continue to arise. Drawing upon the lead author's experience of conducting a cross-language qualitative study in three post-conflict settings in South Asia, this article discusses methodological considerations rais…
Secrets and disclosure in donor conception
This article considers the disclosure, sharing and exchange of information on being donor conceived within families, drawing on data from a study undertaken with donor-conceived adults registered withUKDonor Link (a voluntaryDNA-linking register). This paper considers the narratives of how respondents found out they were donor-conceived and what events triggered disclosure of this information. This paper then goes on to examine the role secrecy p…
Lockdown, public good and equality during Covid-19
On 22nd September 2020 the UK Government announced new lockdown restrictions to supress the COVID-19 virus, with some areas of England having more restrictive lockdown guidance. Students in a number of cities have been confined to their halls of residences after outbreaks of COVID-19 and in Manchester security guards were preventing students leaving the buildings. The scientific community are, unsurprisingly, divided over the question of how far …
Covid-19 and beyond
Covid-19 continues to dominate 2020 and is likely to be a feature of our lives for some time to come. Given this, how should health systems respond ethically to the persistent challenges of responding to the ongoing impact of the pandemic? Relatedly, what ethical values should underpin the resetting of health services after the initial wave, knowing that local spikes and further waves now seem inevitable? In this editorial we outline some of the …
Pandemic medical ethics
The COVID-19 pandemic will generate vexing ethical issues for the foreseeable future and many journals will be open to content that is relevant to our collective effort to meet this challenge. While the pandemic is clearly the critical issue of the moment, it’s important that other issues in medical ethics continue to be addressed as well. As can be seen in this issue, the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) will uphold its commitment to publishing h…
The concise argument
This issue of the Journal of Medical covers a range of ethical issues and care settings making the task of beginning to summarise these papers challenging. They reflect the diversity of our field, representing different branches of bioethics focussing on specific areas or topics using a variety of methodologies: but how do we categorise these branches of bioethics? What demarks one branch from another? And what function do such categorisations fu…
Proposing a sociology of donation
This article advances the case for a ‘sociology of donation’. We aim to establish that there is a need for such a sociology, to bring together the many, often disparate, elements that make up the theorizing, practice and experience of donation. We argue that bringing together different forms of donation illuminates the distinctive place both in social meaning and regulation that the body and its products hold. In developing this, we are primarily…
Writing to template
Public involvement in the governance of population-level biomedical research
Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 exper…
The concise argument – choice, choices and the choice agenda
Medical ethics and the climate change emergency
Political science (27 obras) · Sociology (26 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Psychology (19 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Medicine (15 obras) · Reproductive Health and Technologies (14 obras) · Engineering ethics (12 obras) · Ethics in medical practice (12 obras) · Engineering (10 obras)