The revisionary approach to semantic paradox is commonly thought to have a somewhat uncomfortable corollary, viz. that, on pain of triviality, we cannot affirm that all valid arguments preserve truth (Beall2007, Beall2009, Field2008, Field2009). We show that the standard arguments for this conclusion all break down once (i) the structural rule of contraction is restricted and (ii) how the premises can be aggregated---so that they can be said to jointly entail a given conclusion---is appropriately understood. In addition, we briefly rehearse (...) some reasons for restricting structural contraction. (shrink)

Bradley offers a quick and convincing argument that no Boolean semantic theory for conditionals can validate a very natural principle concerning the relationship between credences and conditionals. We argue that Bradley’s principle, Preservation, is, in fact, invalid; its appeal arises from the validity of a nearby, but distinct, principle, which we call Local Preservation, and which Boolean semantic theories can non-trivially validate.

The aim of this paper is to show that a comprehensive account of the role of representations in science should reconsider some neglected theses of the classical philosophy of science proposed in the first decades of the 20th century. More precisely, it is argued that the accounts of Helmholtz and Hertz may be taken as prototypes of representational accounts in which structure preservation plays an essential role. Following Reichenbach, structure-preserving representations provide a useful device for formulating an up-to-date version (...) of a (relativized) Kantian a priori. An essential feature of modern scientific representations is their mathematical character. That is, representations can be conceived as (partially) structure-preserving maps or functions. This observation suggests an interesting but neglected perspective on the history and philosophy of this concept, namely, that structure-preserving representations are closely related to a priori elements of scientific knowledge. Reichenbach’s early theory of a relativized constitutive but non-apodictic a priori component of scientific knowledge provides a further elaboration of Kantian aspects of scientific representation. To cope with the dynamic aspects of the evolution of scientific knowledge, Cassirer proposed a re-interpretation of the concept of representation that conceived of a particular representation as only one phase in a continuous process determined by pragmatic considerations. Pragmatic aspects of representations are further elaborated in the classical account of C.I. Lewis and the more modern of Hasok Chang. (shrink)

This is how Montaigne explains the principles which he followed in his role as mayor, a statement whose very expression casts all the light needed on the nature of what has been called Montaigne's conservatism. In Montaigne's political language, to conserve is defined by its opposition to innovate. Conservation receives its lexical “value” from its contrasting relation with innovation and with “novelties.” This semantic pair, common in sixteenth-century French and in most European languages, is profoundly different from the present system. (...) In today's language, the concept of conservatism (itself of recent formation) is defined principally in terms of the notion of progress or (because of the symmetry of the suffixes) of progressionism, in the sense which it had taken on during the 18th century, but the antonym innovation has not ceased contributing to the “value” of conservation. Today's semantic system cannot avoid attributing to “conservatism” an essentially antithetic function in reference to historic “progress,” or to theories of progress in which innovation is generally seen in a favorable light. (shrink)

One goal of this paper is to argue that autobiographical memories are extended and distributed across embodied brains and environmental resources. This is important because such distributed memories play a constitutive role in our narrative identity. So, some of the building blocks of our narrative identity are not brain-bound but extended and distributed. Recognising the distributed nature of memory and narrative identity, invites us to find treatments and strategies focusing on the environment in which dementia patients are situated. A second (...) goal of this paper is to suggest various of such strategies, including lifelogging technologies such as SenseCams, life story books, multimedia biographies, memory boxes, ambient intelligence systems, and virtual reality applications. Such technologies allow dementia patients to remember their personal past in a way that wouldn’t be possible by merely relying on their biological memory, in that way aiding in preserving their narrative identity and positively contributing to their sense of well-being. (shrink)

A popular and plausible response against Laudan's “pessimistic induction” has been what I call “preservative realism,” which argues that there have actually been enough elements of scientific knowledge preserved through major theory‐change processes, and that those elements can be accepted realistically. This paper argues against preservative realism, in particular through a critical review of Psillos's argument concerning the case of the caloric theory of heat. Contrary to his argument, the historical record of the caloric theory reveals that beliefs about the (...) properties of material caloric, rejected by subsequent theories, were indeed central to the successes of the caloric theory. Therefore caloric remains a favorable case for Laudan. Further, I argue that even confirmed cases of preservation do not warrant an inference to truth. (shrink)

Some patients who have been diagnosed as “dead by neurologic criteria” continue to exhibit certain brain functions, most commonly, neuroendocrine functions. This preservation of neurologic function after the diagnosis of “brain death” or “brainstem death” is an ongoing source of controversy and concern in the medical, bioethics, and legal literatures. Most obviously, if some brain function persists, then it is not the case that all functions of the entire brain have ceased and hence, declaring such a patient to be (...) “dead” would be a false positive, in any nation with so-called “whole brain death” laws. Furthermore, and perhaps more concerning, the preservation of any brain function necessarily entails the preservation of some amount of brain perfusion, thereby raising the concern as to whether additional areas of neural tissue may remain viable, including areas in the brainstem. These and other considerations cast significant doubt on the reliability of diagnosing either “brain death” or “brainstem death.”. (shrink)

It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered, making a change in verb tense necessary. A suitable contrapositive for implicative counterfactual conditionals can also usually be found. In some cases, the addition of certain words is necessary to preserve meaning that is present in the original sentence and would be lost or changed (...) in the contrapositive without them. A distinction is made between adding new meaning and adding new words to preserve existing meaning. For concessive conditionals and relevance conditionals, however, no valid contrapositive can be found. They do not belong to the class of contraposable conditionals, which can be independently defined. Difficult cases are also discussed in which the contradictory of the consequent semantically entails the truth of the antecedent. In such cases the content of the antecedent is implicit in the meaning of the consequent. Contraposition becomes possible if what is implicit in the original consequent is made explicit in the contrapositive antecedent. (shrink)

According to an orthodox view, the capacity for conscious experience (sentience) is relevant to the distribution of moral status and value. However, physicalism about consciousness might threaten the normative relevance of sentience. According to the indeterminacy argument, sentience is metaphysically indeterminate while indeterminacy of sentience is incompatible with its normative relevance. According to the introspective argument (by François Kammerer), the unreliability of our conscious introspection undercuts the justification for belief in the normative relevance of consciousness. I defend the normative relevance (...) of sentience against these objections. First, I demonstrate that physicalists only have to concede a limited amount of indeterminacy of sentience. This moderate indeterminacy is in harmony with the role of sentience in determining moral status. Second, I argue that physicalism gives us no reason to expect that introspection is unreliable with respect to the normative relevance of consciousness. (shrink)

In order to prove the validity of logical rules, one has to assume these rules in the metalogic. However, rule-circular ‘justifications’ are demonstrably without epistemic value. Is a non-circular justification of a logical system possible? This question attains particular importance in view of lasting controversies about classical versus non-classical logics. In this paper the question is answered positively, based on meaning-preserving translations between logical systems. It is demonstrated that major systems of non-classical logic, including multi-valued, paraconsistent, intuitionistic and quantum logics, (...) can be translated into classical logic by introducing additional intensional operators into the language. Based on this result it is argued that classical logic is representationally optimal. In sec. 6 it is investigated whether non-classical logics can be likewise representationally optimal. The answer is predominantly negative but partially positive. Nevertheless the situation is not symmetric, because classical logic has important ceteris paribus advantages as a unifying metalogic. (shrink)

With the increasing volume of web services in the cloud environment, Collaborative Filtering- based service recommendation has become one of the most effective techniques to alleviate the heavy burden on the service selection decisions of a target user. However, the service recommendation bases, that is, historical service usage data, are often distributed in different cloud platforms. Two challenges are present in such a cross-cloud service recommendation scenario. First, a cloud platform is often not willing to share its data to other (...) cloud platforms due to privacy concerns, which decreases the feasibility of cross-cloud service recommendation severely. Second, the historical service usage data recorded in each cloud platform may update over time, which reduces the recommendation scalability significantly. In view of these two challenges, a novel privacy-preserving and scalable service recommendation approach based on SimHash, named SerRecSimHash, is proposed in this paper. Finally, through a set of experiments deployed on a real distributed service quality dataset WS-DREAM, we validate the feasibility of our proposal in terms of recommendation accuracy and efficiency while guaranteeing privacy-preservation. (shrink)

In this essay I will examine the changing historical relationship between two fundamentally modern concepts: self-preservation and self-ownership. These two concepts have served a dual function in modernity. On the one hand, they are crucial parts of the theoretical underpinning of liberalism: the natural law of self-preservation is the foundation of the rational inclination to form civil society (e.g., Hobbes); and self-ownership provides the foundation for the liberal (i.e., Lockean) notion of private property. But on the other hand, (...) these two concepts serve much more than a theoretical purpose; they also perform a duty in what I would like to call, borrowing Foucault's phrase, a modern technology of the self. At this level, the concepts of self-ownership and self-preservation shape individuals to follow certain routines in their behavior, to treat their bodies in specific ways, to organize their time in a particular fashion. In performing these routines, individuals participate in the collection and dissemination of that knowledge of individual bodies and groups of bodies which, as Foucault and Arendt in their different ways revealed, is endemic to modernity. (shrink)

Many ecological economists have argued that some natural capital should be preserved for posterity. Yet, among environmental philosophers, the preservation paradox entails that preserving parts of nature, including those denoted by natural capital, is impossible. The paradox claims that nature is a realm of phenomena independent of intentional human agency, that preserving and restoring nature require intentional human agency, and, therefore, no one can preserve or restore nature (without making it artificial). While this article argues that the preservation (...) paradox is more difficult to resolve than ordinarily recognized, it also concludes by sketching a positive way to understand what it means to preserve natural capital during the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Preservation and interpolation results are obtained for L ∞ω and sublogics $\mathscr{L} \subseteq L_{\infty\omega}$ such that equivalence in L can be characterized by suitable back-and-forth conditions on sets of partial isomorphisms.

This article offers a novel, conservative account of material constitution, one that incorporates sortal essentialism and features a theory of dominant sortals. It avoids coinciding objects, temporal parts, relativizations of identity, mereological essentialism, anti-essentialism, denials of the reality of the objects of our ordinary ontology, and other departures from the metaphysic implicit in ordinary ways of thinking. Defenses of the account against important objections are found in Burke 1997, 2003, and 2004, as well as in the often neglected six paragraphs (...) that conclude section V of this article. (shrink)

We define notions of homomorphism, submodel, and sandwich of Kripke models, and we define two syntactic operators analogous to universal and existential closure. Then we prove an intuitionistic analogue of the generalized (dual of the) Lyndon-Łoś-Tarski Theorem, which characterizes the sentences preserved under inverse images of homomorphisms of Kripke models, an intuitionistic analogue of the generalized Łoś-Tarski Theorem, which characterizes the sentences preserved under submodels of Kripke models, and an intuitionistic analogue of the generalized Keisler Sandwich Theorem, which characterizes the (...) sentences preserved under sandwiches of Kripke models. We also define several intuitionistic formula hierarchies analogous to the classical formula hierarchies $\forall_n (= \Pi^0_n)$ and $\exists_n (=\Sigma^0_n)$ , and we show how our generalized syntactic preservation theorems specialize to these hierarchies. Each of these theorems implies the corresponding classical theorem in the case where the Kripke models force classical logic. (shrink)

We show that the existential preservation theorem fails for two-variable first-order logic FO2. It is known that for all k ≥ 3, FOk does not have an existential preservation theorem, so this settles the last open case, answering a question of Andreka, van Benthem, and Németi. In contrast, we prove that the homomorphism preservation theorem holds for FO2.

We prove the preservation theorems for NATP; many of them extend the previously established preservation results for other model-theoretic tree properties. Using them, we also furnish proper examples of NATP theories which are simultaneously TP2 and SOP. First, we show that NATP is preserved by the parametrization and sum of the theories of Fraïssé limits of Fraïssé classes satisfying strong amalgamation property. Second, the preservation of NATP for two kinds of dense/co-dense expansions, i.e. the theories of lovely (...) pairs and of [Formula: see text]-structures for geometric theories, and dense/co-dense expansion on vector spaces is proved. Next, we prove the preservation of NATP for the generic predicate expansion and the pair of an algebraically closed field and its distinguished subfield; for the latter, not only NATP, but also the preservation of NTP1 and NTP2 is considered. Finally, we present some proper examples of NATP theories using the results proved in this paper, including the parametrization of DLO and the expansion of an algebraically closed field by adding a generic linear order. In particular, we show that the model companion of the theory of algebraically closed fields with circular orders (ACFO) is NATP. (shrink)

Research indicates the essentiality of dignity as a vital component for quality of life, reconfirming the emphasis on dignity preservation in the international code of nursing ethics. Applying Noblit and Hare’s meta-ethnography, the aim of the study was to develop a theory model by synthesizing 10 qualitative articles from various cultural contexts, exploring nurse and allied healthcare professional perception/practice concerning dignity-preserving dementia care. “Advocating the person’s autonomy and integrity,” which involves “having compassion for the person,” “confirming the person’s worthiness (...) and sense of self,” and “creating a humane and purposeful environment,” was identified as a primary foundation for dignity-preserving dementia care. “Balancing individual choices among persons no longer able to make sound decisions, against the duty of making choices on behalf of the person,” which involves “persuasion” and/or “mild restraint,” was considered a crucial aspect in certain situations. “Sheltering human worth—remembering those who forget” was identified as a comprehensive motive and core value within dignity-preserving dementia care. (shrink)

In a current clinical trial for Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation, Dr. Samuel Tisherman of the University of Maryland aims to induce therapeutic hypothermia in order to ‘buy time’ for operating on victims of severe exsanguination. While recent publicity has framed this controversial procedure as ‘killing a patient to save his life’, the US Army and Acute Care Research appear to support the study on the grounds that such patients already face low chances of survival. Given that enrollment in the (...) trial must be non-voluntary, the study has received an exemption from federal standards for obtaining informed consent. How exactly, if at all, is non-voluntary enrollment morally justifiable? In this essay, I appeal to the notable work of Hans Jonas in an effort to defend the EPR trial's use of non-voluntary enrollment. It is often thought and, as I show, it may appear that Jonas has called for the end of experimental medical practice. Still, I derive from Jonas a principle of double-effect upon which physicians may be seen as morally permitted to pursue innovations in emergency medicine but only as a byproduct of pursuing therapeutic success. With this position, I argue that the EPR trial can be granted a stronger philosophical justification than simply waiving the requirement of obtaining informed consent. The double-effect justification would obtain, perhaps regardless of the success of such innovative procedures as therapeutic hypothermia. (shrink)

Preservation and interpolation results are obtained for L ∞ω and sublogics $\mathscr{L} \subseteq L_{\infty\omega}$ such that equivalence in L can be characterized by suitable back-and-forth conditions on sets of partial isomorphisms.

The sources, extent and margins of parental obligations in taking decisions regarding their children’s medical care are subjects of ongoing debates. Balancing children’s immediate welfare with keeping their future open is a delicate task. In this paper, we briefly present two examples of situations in which parents may be confronted with the choice of whether to authorise or demand non-therapeutic interventions on their children for the purpose of fertility preservation. The first example is that of children facing cancer treatment, (...) and the second of children with Klinefelter syndrome. We argue that, whereas decisions of whether to preserve fertility may be prima facie within the limits of parental discretion, the right to an open future does not straightforwardly put parents under an obligation to take actions that would detect or relieve future infertility in their children—and indeed in some cases taking such actions is problematic. (shrink)

A truth-preservation fallacy is using the concept of truth-preservation where some other concept is needed. For example, in certain contexts saying that consequences can be deduced from premises using truth-preserving deduction rules is a fallacy if it suggests that all truth-preserving rules are consequence-preserving. The arithmetic additive-associativity rule that yields 6 = (3 + (2 + 1)) from 6 = ((3 + 2) + 1) is truth-preserving but not consequence-preserving. As noted in James Gasser’s dissertation, Leibniz has been (...) criticized for using that rule in attempting to show that arithmetic equations are consequences of definitions. -/- A system of deductions is truth-preserving if each of its deductions having true premises has a true conclusion—and consequence-preserving if, for any given set of sentences, each deduction having premises that are consequences of that set has a conclusion that is a consequence of that set. Consequence-preserving amounts to: in each of its deductions the conclusion is a consequence of the premises. The same definitions apply to deduction rules considered as systems of deductions. Every consequence-preserving system is truth-preserving. It is not as well-known that the converse fails: not every truth-preserving system is consequence-preserving. Likewise for rules: not every truth-preserving rule is consequence-preserving. There are many famous examples. In ordinary first-order Peano-Arithmetic, the induction rule yields the conclusion ‘every number x is such that: x is zero or x is a successor’—which is not a consequence of the null set—from two tautological premises, which are consequences of the null set, of course. The arithmetic induction rule is truth-preserving but not consequence-preserving. Truth-preserving rules that are not consequence-preserving are non-logical or extra-logical rules. Such rules are unacceptable to persons espousing traditional truth-and-consequence conceptions of demonstration: a demonstration shows its conclusion is true by showing that its conclusion is a consequence of premises already known to be true. The 1965 Preface in Benson Mates (1972, vii) contains the first occurrence of truth-preservation fallacies in the book. (shrink)

It is argued that the preservation of truth by an inference relation is of little interest when premiss sets are contradictory. The notion of a level of coherence is introduced and the utility of modal logics in the semantic representation of sets of higher coherence levels is noted. It is shown that this representative role cannot be transferred to first order logic via frame theory since the modal formulae expressing coherence level restrictions are not first order definable. Finally, an (...) inference relation, calledyielding, is introduced which is intermediate between the coherence preservingforcing relation introduced elsewhere by the authors and the coherence destroying, inference relation of classical logic. (shrink)

We present the design of a secure and privacy preserving e-petition system that we have implemented as a proof-of-concept demonstrator. We use the Belgian e-ID card as source of authentication, and then proceed to issue an anonymous credential that is used to sign petitions. Our system ensures that duplicate signatures are detectable, while preserving the anonymity of petition signers. We analyze the privacy and security requirements of our application, present an overview of its architecture, and discuss the applicability of data (...) protection legislation to our system. (shrink)

In a recent pair of publications, Richard Bradley has offered two novel no-go theorems involving the principle of Preservation for conditionals, which guarantees that one’s prior conditional beliefs will exhibit a certain degree of inertia in the face of a change in one’s non-conditional beliefs. We first note that Bradley’s original discussions of these results—in which he finds motivation for rejecting Preservation, first in a principle of Commutativity, then in a doxastic analogue of the rule of modus ponens (...) —are problematic in a significant number of respects. We then turn to a recent U-turn on his part, in which he winds up rescinding his commitment to modus ponens, on the grounds of a tension with the rule of Import-Export for conditionals. Here we offer an important positive contribution to the literature, settling the following crucial question that Bradley leaves unanswered: assuming that one gives up on full-blown modus ponens on the grounds of its incompatibility with Import-Export, what weakened version of the principle should one be settling for instead? Our discussion of the issue turns out to unearth an interesting connection between epistemic undermining and the apparent failures of modus ponens in McGee’s famous counterexamples. (shrink)

Observer memories involve a representation of the self in the memory image, which is presented from a detached or external point of view. That such an image is an obvious departure from how one initially experienced the event seems relatively straightforward. However, in my book on this type of imagery, I suggested that such memories can in fact, at least in some cases, accurately represent one’s past experience of an event. During these past events there is a sense in which (...) we adopt an external perspective on ourselves. In the present paper, I respond to a critical notice of my book by Marina Trakas. Trakas argues that my account of observer memory unfolded against the background of a problematic preservationist account of episodic memory, and that I failed to adequately account for the presence of self in observer memory. I respond these worries here, and I try to clarify key points that were underdeveloped in the book. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 46, Issue 4, Page 363-383, Fall 2018.

The paper introduces a concept of logic applied to a formalization of the so-called inferences preserving degrees of truth. Semantical and syntactical characterizations of three kinds of logics preserving degrees of truth are provided. The other approach than in [3] and [9] to the problem of expressing that a sentence is less true than a sentence is presented.

We report on the case of a 2-year-old female, the youngest person ever to undergo ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC). This patient was diagnosed with a rare form of sickle cell disease, which required a bone-marrow transplant, and late effects included high risk of future infertility or complete sterility. Ethical concerns are raised, as the patient's mother made the decision for OTC on the patient's behalf with the intention that this would secure the option of biological childbearing in the future. Based (...) on Beauchamp and Childress's principlism approach of respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice, pursing OTC was ethically justified. (shrink)

Fertility preservation has become more common for various populations, including oncology patients, transgender individuals, and women who are concerned about age-related infertility. Little attention has been paid to fertility preservation for patients with differences/disorders of sex development (DSD). Our goal in this article is to address specific ethical considerations that are unique to this patient population. To this end, we present a hypothetical DSD case. We then explore ethical considerations related to patient’s age, risk of cancer, concern about (...) genetic transmission of a DSD condition to children, co-occurring gender dysphoria, and access to experimental fertility preservation procedures. Given the limitations of current technologies, we recommend offering fertility preservation to individuals living with DSD using an informed decision-making approach that instills realistic expectations and minimizes the potential for false hope. Finally, we conclude with practical recommendations for this case based on the ethical considerations. (shrink)

In a current clinical trial for Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation, Dr. Samuel Tisherman of the University of Maryland aims to induce therapeutic hypothermia in order to ‘buy time’ for operating on victims of severe exsanguination. While recent publicity has framed this controversial procedure as ‘killing a patient to save his life’, the US Army and Acute Care Research appear to support the study on the grounds that such patients already face low chances of survival. Given that enrollment in the (...) trial must be non-voluntary, the study has received an exemption from federal standards for obtaining informed consent. How exactly, if at all, is non-voluntary enrollment morally justifiable? In this essay, I appeal to the notable work of Hans Jonas in an effort to defend the EPR trial's use of non-voluntary enrollment. It is often thought and, as I show, it may appear that Jonas has called for the end of experimental medical practice. Still, I derive from Jonas a principle of double-effect upon which physicians may be seen as morally permitted to pursue innovations in emergency medicine but only as a byproduct of pursuing therapeutic success. With this position, I argue that the EPR trial can be granted a stronger philosophical justification than simply waiving the requirement of obtaining informed consent. The double-effect justification would obtain, perhaps regardless of the success of such innovative procedures as therapeutic hypothermia. (shrink)

Abstract:Environmental ethics and policy have been largely developed around the concept of nature as a dynamic collection of living beings in direct interaction with humans. However, when we consider the Moon, Mars, and other worlds we encounter profoundly static and lifeless nature with essentially no history of human interaction. On what basis do we make decisions on the preservation or utilization of such lifeless landscapes? Here I suggest that static lifeless landscapes on other worlds have some parallels on Earth (...) in the upper elevations of the Antarctic Dry Valleys and the central depression of the Atacama Desert in Chile and Peru. In the soil of both locations life is absent or cannot grow and the timescales of landscape evolution vastly exceed human timescales. For all intents and purposes, these are static and lifeless landscapes. Today, human activities in Antarctica are carefully regulated with a view toward preservation while in the Atacama Desert resource mining has extensively altered the landscape. Thus, these two sites provide alternate possible futures for the Moon and Mars. Preservation of static lifeless landscapes could be based on two attributes. First, they provide a way to further define and understand the Earth and the limits of life—which is the current scientific motivation for biological and geological research activities there. Second, both on Earth and particularly on other worlds, lifeless landscapes may express states that are new to human experience akin to new forms of art or new branches of science. We don't understand these environments, their nature, or their relationship to us. In the case of Mars there may come to be a tension between preserving a lifeless landscape and introducing or enhancing life on that planet. (shrink)

On July 2021, the UK High Court of Justice heard the Case CO/2066/2020 on the application of Heidi Crowter who lives with Down’s syndrome, and Máire Lea-Wilson whose son Aidan has Down’s syndrome. Crowter and Lea-Wilson, with the support of the disability rights campaign, ‘Don’t Screen Us Out’, have been taking legal action against the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (the UK Government) for a review of the 1967 Abortion Act: the removal of section 1(1)(d) making termination (...) of pregnancy lawful for ‘severe’ fetal indications detected after 24 weeks' gestation. On 23 September 2021, the High Court dismissed the claim. This action came at a time when non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) was introduced into the NHS England Fetal Anomaly Screening Programme for the trisomies 21, 13 and 18. The implementation of NIPT has been heavily criticised, in particular by ‘Don’t Screen Us Out’ campaigners, for increasing fetal selection and discrimination of people living with disabilities. The case of Crowter and Lea-Wilson echoes debates in other European countries such as in France and Germany, where the introduction of NIPT in the public healthcare system has provoked equally vehement public reactions and discussions. The comparison between these three countries allows contextualising the public discourses around NIPT and the ground for termination of pregnancy in relation to different socio-cultural and political contexts. We examine how each country, and particularly England, deals with the conflict between the principles of promoting the rights of people living with disabilities and preserving women’s reproductive autonomy. (shrink)