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Background: This study examined attitudes towards and knowledge about abortion among undergraduate students doing eleven different subjects. The differences in attitudes and knowledge about abortion according to gender, religious and political affiliation, religiosity, sexual orientation, number of sex partners and previous sexual experience were also considered., Method: 1,025 undergraduate students (58.34% women and 41.66% men; mean age 20.18) completed the following instruments: an adaptation of the Abortion Attitudes Scale by Hill, and an adaptation of Abortion Knowledge Test by Esposito and Basow., Results: With attitudes ranging from 0 to 100, medicine, psychology and nursing students were in the anti-abortion range (55.93, 54.19 and 53.62, respectively) while history, philology and physics students were in the pro-abortion rights range (48.44, 48.49 and 50.12, respectively). Law, medicine and nursing students showed greater theoretical knowledge about abortion, while physics, engineering and philology students proved to be the least knowledgeable., Conclusions: Differences were found in students’ attitudes towards abortion and in knowledge about abortion depending on their degree subject. As in previous reports, differences were found in students´ attitudes towards abortion which reflected differences in religious affiliation, religiosity, political affiliation, and previous sexual experience.

The absence of agreement on the ethical legitimacy of abortion does not entail the impossibility of finding a consensus on the best policy on abortion. This consensus is affordable because nobody doubts that, regarding the methods of birth control, contraception is better than abortion, abortion is better than infanticide and abortion is worse the later and the less safe it is performed. Because the complete elimination of abortion is not possible, the most relevant realistic political objectives that can be proposed are reducing the abortion rate, reducing the gestational age of abortions and making the remaining abortions safer. Restrictive policies do not contribute to lowering the abortion rate while are associated with unsafe abortions and higher women's morbidity and mortality. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., (Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

This paper analyzes the transformation from the human zygote to the implanted embryo under the prism of substantial change. After a brief introduction, it vindicates the Aristotelian ideas of substance and accident, and those of substantial and accidental change. It then claims that the transformation from the multicelled zygote to the implanted embryo amounts to a substantial change. Pushing further, it contends that this substantial change cannot be explained following patterns of genetic reductionism, emergence, and self-organization, and proposes Gustavo Bueno's idea of anamorphosis as a means to encapsulate criticism against such positions., (© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Employing the tenets of philosophical materialism, this paper discusses the ethical debate surrounding assisted suicide for persons suffering end-stage Alzheimer's. It first presents a classification of the dissociative situations between "human individual" and "human person". It then moves on to discuss challenges to diagnosed persons and their caregivers in relation to the cardinal virtues of Spinozistic ethics--strength of character (fortitudo), firmness (animositas) and generosity (generositas). Finally, a number of ideas attached to the debate--"right of choice", "death with dignity", "quality of life" and "compassion in dying"--are discussed in order to clarify their foundations., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)