AP®︎ European History: Topic 9.12 Flashcards

Antibiotic discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928 and mass-produced during World War II, demonstrating medicine’s new ability to cure previously fatal bacterial infections

Field applying moral reasoning to medicine and the life sciences, especially questions of consent, autonomy, and the acceptable limits of medical intervention

Principle that patients must receive and understand relevant risks and alternatives before voluntarily agreeing to treatment or research

Methods intended to prevent conception, giving people greater control over pregnancy, family size, education, employment, and sexual relationships

Highly effective, woman-controlled contraceptive widely available in the 1960s that separated sex from reproduction more reliably and allowed planned pregnancies

Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical reaffirming the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to artificial contraception

Termination of pregnancy by medical or surgical means; safer methods encouraged legalization debates over bodily autonomy, public health, and fetal life

British law legalizing abortion in specified circumstances in Great Britain under medical supervision

French law of 1975, associated with health minister Simone Veil, that liberalized access to abortion

Vote that removed Ireland’s constitutional prohibition preventing broad legalization of abortion after decades of strong restrictions

Ceaușescu’s 1966 Romanian policy sharply restricting abortion and contraception to raise the birth rate, imposing intrusive state control and contributing to unsafe abortions, maternal deaths, and abandoned children

Medical interventions assisting conception, including fertility drugs, artificial insemination, donated gametes, and in vitro fertilization

Fertilization of an egg outside the body followed by embryo transfer into a uterus; first successfully produced a child, Louise Brown, in England in 1978

Deliberate alteration or technological use of genetic material to produce desired medical or biological results, including medicines and gene therapies

Therapy seeks to prevent or cure disease; enhancement seeks nonessential physical or intellectual traits, though the boundary between them remains disputed

Somatic intervention changes a patient’s cells without intended inheritance; germline intervention changes sperm, eggs, or embryos and may affect future generations

First mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, born at Scotland’s Roslin Institute in 1996 and announced in 1997, prompting debate over human cloning

Testing embryos or fetuses for genetic conditions, potentially preventing inherited disease but also enabling selection against disabilities or unwanted traits

Technologies that sustain biological functions, creating disputes over brain death, withdrawal of treatment, patients’ rights, and assisted dying