On April 19-21, 2012 the International (Third All-Ukrainian) Congress on Medical and Pharmaceutical Law, Bioethics and Social Policy was held in Kyiv.
The meeting was organized by Academy of Advocacy of Ukraine, Bioethics Committee at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Information Centre on Bioethics, Ukrainian Doctors’ Association, Ukrainian Medical and Legal Association and supported by World Association for Medical Law, UNESCO Chair on Bioethics, National Association for Medical Law of Russian federation and a number of other international organizations, higher educational and scientific institutions, public and private companies and non-governmental organizations.
About 250 lawyers, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, health care managers, scientists, scholars, representatives of business entities, as well as persons who are interested in contributing to resolving the outstanding issues in bioethics, legal medicine and medical law participated in the Congress. Among them were guests from the USA, UK, France, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Russian Federation, Georgia, Belarus and other countries.
The work of the Congress was organized in plenary and parallel sessions, round tables, symposia, workshops, and seminars focusing on different aspects of medical law and bioethics such as global and national health governance; developing conceptual grounds of bioethics and law; legal and risk assessment of innovative biomedical technologies; trends, challenges and improvements of medical malpractice liability and raising of professional qualification in medical law. In particular, a specialized symposium on legal and ethical issues of the Assisted Reproductive Technology took place on April 20, 2012 in the Congress Hall of the Scholar’s Palace. Brilliant presentations of international and Ukrainian experts held at this symposium provided different views on the use of ART.
The report of Professor Anne-Marie Duguet, INSERM Paul Sabatier University (France), highlighted the limitations set up by French legislation to procreative medicine techniques in France and inequality of access to ART in the European context.
Marianna Chaves, Brazilian Institute of Family Law (Brazil), provided a brief, but efficient overview of surrogate motherhood regulation in Brazil. She offered a sort of practical manual of the current status of surrogacy in Brazil that shows exact sense of certain law provisions, advantages and dangers of Brazilian legislation in reproductive medicine.
Peculiarities of legal protection within Assisted Reproductive Technology programs in Ukraine were reported by Sergey Antonov, Centre of Medical Law, and Lyudmila Smagina, “IRTSA” company (Ukraine).
Ethical dilemmas while using assisted reproduction in a Christian clinician’s view were expressed in the lecture of Father A. Akhaladze (Georgia). Father Igor Boyko, Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv, Ukraine), also pointed out ethical problems of human life manipulation and surrogate motherhood.
