The American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the March of Dimes are pleased to announce the creation of an annual Young Scholars Award in Perinatal Bioethics. To be eligible for this award, applicants must be early in their career development, including those who are actively enrolled in graduate school, post-doctoral programs or no higher in their career achievement than the assistant professorship level.

Applicants are invited to submit proposals on the topic of perinatal ethics in any of the submission categories offered in the ASBH Call for Proposals. Proposals about pregnancy, birth, lactation, prenatal causes of disability, neonatal decision-making, and other perinatal issues will be considered. Submit an abstract to the ASBH Call for Proposals on the ASBH Web site no later than March 2, 2009. From those submitted abstracts, a select group of applicants will then be invited to submit a full paper for review by the March of Dimes/ASBH review committee.

The award will be presented at the ASBH Annual Meeting in October to the applicant whose paper was selected to be of the highest quality and intellectual rigor among the submitted papers. The award winner will be receive an honorarium of $1,000 and will be invited to present his/her paper at a plenary session at the ASBH Annual Meeting, which will feature an invited lecture by a distinguished scholar from the field of perinatal ethics.

For further information concerning this award, please contact Alison Saylor of ASBH or Ann Umemoto of the March of Dimes.

Don’t delay, young scholars of bioethics! A plenary session at ASBH and $1000 is well worth putting down one’s fingers to the keyboard and writing a stellar proposal. Do not procrastinate. Uncle Sam is pointing his finger at you. But please, don’t write about octuplets. Please. Haven’t we all heard enough about that for TWO lifetimes?

Summer Johnson, PhD