Insofar as bioethics is concerned with human bodily health, it has an interest in the way health is influenced by and contributes to

sexual functioning. There is a sense, then, in which bioethics includes sexual ethics, or at least some of the key questions of
sexual ethics, such as the meaning of human sexuality and the causes and effects of sexual attitudes, orientations, and activities.
Concepts of the human person—of desire and obligation, disease and dysfunction, even of justice and purity—can be found
overlapping in various bioethical and sexual ethical theories. Like bioethics generally, sexual ethics considers standards for
intervention in physical processes, rights of individuals to self-determination, ideals for human flourishing, and the importance of
social context for the interpretation and regulation of sexual behavior. Bioethics specifically incorporates issues surrounding
contraception and abortion, artificial reproduction, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual paraphilias, gendered roles and sexual
conduct of the medical professionals, and sex research, counseling, and therapy. All of these issues are importantly shaped by
moral traditions, so that health professionals frequently find themselves called upon to deal with questions of sexual ethics.

Historically, medicine has interacted with philosophy and religion in shaping and rationalizing the sexual ethical norms of a
given culture. Medical opinion often simply reflects and conserves the accepted beliefs and mores of a society, but sometimes it
is also a force for change. In either case, its influence can be powerful. For example, from the Hippocratic corpus in ancient
Greece to the writings of the physician Galen in the second century c.e., medical recommendations regarding sexual discipline
echoed and reinforced the ambivalence of Greek and Roman philosophers regarding human sexual activity. Galen's theories
retained considerable power all the way into the European Renaissance. The interpretation of syphilis as a disease rather than a
divine punishment came in the fifteenth century as the result of medical writings in response to a high incidence of the disease
among the socially powerful. In nineteenth century western Europe and North America, medical writers were enormously
influential in shaping norms regarding such matters as masturbation (physicians believed it would lead to insanity),
homosexuality (newly identified with perversions that medicine must diagnose and treat), contraception (considered unhealthy
because it fostered sexual excess and loss of physical power), and gender roles (promoted on the basis of medical assessments of
women's capacity for sexual desire). Today sex counseling and therapy communicate, however implicitly, normative ethical
assumptions. Indeed, so great has been the influence of the medical profession on moral attitudes toward sexual options that
critics warn of the "tyranny of experts," referring not to moral philosophers or religious teachers but to scientists and physicians.

Christian Traditions
Like other religious and cultural traditions, the teachings of Christianity regarding sex are complex and subject to multiple
influences, and they have changed and developed through succeeding generations. Christianity does not begin with a systematic
code of ethics. The teachings of Jesus and his followers, as recorded in the New Testament, provide a central focus for the moral
life of Christians in the command to love God and neighbor. Beyond that, the New Testament offers grounds for a sexual ethic
that (1) values marriage and procreation on the one hand, and singleness and celibacy on the other; (2) gives as much or more
importance to internal attitudes and thoughts as to external actions; and (3) affirms a sacred symbolic meaning for sexual
intercourse, yet both subordinates it to other human values and finds in it a possibility for evil. As for unanimity on more specific
sexual rules, this is difficult to find in the beginnings of a religion whose founder taught as an itinerant prophet and whose sacred
texts were formulated in "the more tense world" of particular disciples, a group of wandering preachers (Brown, pp. 42–43).

SCIENCE, SOCIAL SCIENCE, AND MEDICINE. Freud was not the only force in nineteenth-and twentieth-century
scientific and social thought that shaped changes in Western sexual mores. Biological studies of the human reproductive process
offered new perspectives on male and female roles in sex and procreation. Animal research showed that higher forms of animals
masturbate, perform sexual acts with members of the same sex, and generally engage in many sexual behaviors that were
previously assumed to be unnatural for humans because they were unnatural for animals. Anthropologists found significant
variations in the sexual behavior of human cultural groups, so that traditional notions of human nature seemed even more
questionable. Surveys of sexual activities in Western society revealed massive discrepancies between accepted sexual norms and
actual behavior, undercutting consequential arguments for some of the norms (e.g., the fact that 95% of the male population in
the United States engaged in autoerotic acts made it difficult to support a prohibition against masturbation on grounds that it leads
to insanity).

Modern sexology, then, has incorporated the work not only of sexual psychology but also of biology, anthropology, ethnology,
and sociology—the research and the theories of individuals like Richard von KrafftEbing, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfield,
Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Mead, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson. The results have not all been toward greater liberty in
sexual behavior, but they have shared a tendency to secularize and medicalize human sexuality. In theory, sex has become less an
ethical or even an aesthetic problem than a health problem. In practice, experts of all kinds—physicians, counselors, psychiatrists,
social workers, teachers—provide guidance; and the guidance can at least appear to carry moral weight. An example of the
intertwining of science, the medical professions, and morality is clear in the long efforts to define and identify sexual deviance or
perversion—from Krafft-Ebing in the nineteenth century to the debates in the American Psychiatric Association in the 1970s and
1980s over the classification of homosexuality as a disease.
Reproductive Ethics
Reproductive ethics is concerned with the ethics surrounding human reproduction and
beginning-of-life issues such as contraception, assisted reproductive technologies (e.g., in
vitro fertilization, zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT), intracytoplasmic sperm injection
(ISCI), etc.), surrogacy, and preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Ethical issues specific to this
field include among other concerns the introduction of technology into the reproductive
process, distinctions between reproduction and procreation, the potential for abortifacient
effects through the use of certain contraceptives, embryo & oocyte cryopreservation,
embryo adoption & donation, uterus transplants, mitochondrial replacement/donation
interventions; synthetic gametes, the exploitation and commodification of women for
reproductive services (i.e., egg donation and surrogacy), and sex selection of embryos or
fetuses.

https://www.gfmer.ch/Medical_education_En/Cameroon_2007/pdf/Ethics_reproduction_Kaptue
_Yaounde_2007.pdf