ABSTRACT
We have now surveyed a range of common law and civil law jurisdictions and their responses to healthcare issues, concentrating on key areas such as abortion, consent, euthanasia, reproductive medicine and surrogacy in particular, sterilisation of intellectually disabled persons, healthcare and children, human organ transplantation and donation, and the principles relating to medical malpractice or medical negligence. As far as possible, we have concentrated on using English law as the basis for comparison in Part I, before focusing on other common law countries with the English common law heritage, such as the USA and Australia, and also Germany and France as examples of civil law countries, or countries with a Roman law heritage (the ‘civil law’ label deriving from jus civilis or ‘civil law’ that was created and followed in early Roman times). However, where particularly relevant, or of special comparative interest for their sheer uniqueness, we also looked at countries like the Netherlands, now well known for its ‘euthanasia’ laws, countries like Sweden, India, Japan and Turkey for their human organ transplantation laws, China for its new ‘paying for consent’ scheme, and Singapore for its advance directives legislative scheme.
