Recently added articles from The Hastings Center Report:
Jay Katz, 1922-2008.(field notes)(Obituary)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The obituaries reporting Jay Katz's death on November 17 typically described him as an authority on medical ethics and an advocate for the rights of patients and research subjects. This characterization by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Yale Daily News, and other ...
Natural light.(Editorial)
Jan 01, 2009; ... This issue of the Hastings Center Report features a set of essays that comes out of a Hastings Center research project, "The Ideal of Nature: Appeals to Nature in Debates about Biotechnology and the Environment," for which I was the principal investigator. The project was supported by a ...
Battling a thousand points of might.(another voice)
Jan 01, 2009; ... When placed between disclosure and capacity--its loud and unruly siblings--voluntariness can be seen as the neglected middle-child of informed consent. By my count of articles invoking consent on PubMed, for every one that mentions voluntariness, roughly three mention capacity. This seems ...
Every child is priceless: debating effective newborn screening policy.(letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2009; ... To the Editor: "Ethics, Evidence, and Cost in Newborn Screening," by Mary Ann Baily and Thomas H. Murray, and "Expanding Newborn Screening: Process, Policy and Priorities," by Virginia Moyer, Ned A. Calonge, Steven M. Teutsch, and Jeffrey Botkin (May-June 2008) raise significant questions, ...
Bioethics forum: www.bioethicsforum.org.(REPORT: Online Services)(Brief article)
Jan 01, 2009 ... "Washington's New Suicide Law Reflects Unfair Prejudices" BY BEN MATTLIN The problem with physician-assisted suicide is that it presumes euthanasia is a rational choice for someone in dire straits, based solely on that person's diagnosis. If, on the other hand, a ...
Rebel without a gauze.(in practice)
Jan 01, 2009; ... It had been one of those busy but rewarding mornings where nothing could throw off my groove. I'd reassured one patient about a scary test result, eased another's shoulder pain with a cortisone injection, and provided the open ear that a third needed. So when the first patient of the ...
Thou good and faithful servant.(at law)(Ben Haygood Comprehensive Newborn Screening Act)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Lawmakers are stewards of social resources. A current debate--over screening newborns for genetic disorders--illuminates dilemmas of that stewardship that have particularly plagued bioethics. Recently in the Report, Mary Ann Baily and Thomas Murray told the story of little Ben Haygood. He ...
Chaplains and confidentiality.(case study)
Jan 01, 2009 ... Robert, a board-certified hospital chaplain assigned to the cancer center of a large community hospital in the Midwest, receives a handwritten note from Jennifer, the daughter of a patient, Gloria, who died two years earlier. Jennifer's parents were divorced when she was in her teens. She ...
Children's bodies, parents' choices.(Essays)(cosmetic surgery law)(Report)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Last October, the state of Queensland in Australia made it illegal for teenagers under eighteen to have cosmetic surgery. Other governments may soon follow. Germany is drafting a similar law, and advocates in the Netherlands are calling for one there. The trend reflects the ...
Eyes wide open: surgery to westernize the eyes of an Asian child.(Essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The speaker was a proud father. (1) To illustrate his comments about a piece of art that celebrated the wonders of modern medicine (and which he had just donated to a local hospital), he told a story about his adopted Asian daughter. He described her as a beautiful, happy child in whom he ...
Cosmetic surgery in children with cognitive disabilities: who benefits? Who decides?(Essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Recently, as part of a clinical ethics consult, a clinician told the story of a mother and her teenage son. A couple of years ago, the boy had a skateboarding accident and injured his brain and spine, leaving him quadriplegic, unable to communicate, and in need of mechanical ventilation ....
Respecting children with disabilities--and their parents.(Essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... In 2004, the parents of six-year-old Ashley, who has profound cognitive disabilities, asked Seattle Children's Hospital to provide three unusual procedures that aimed, not at treating an illness, but at improving the child's and her parents' quality of life. The parents argued that by ...
"It's against nature".(Essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... A couple of years ago, a physician involved in the Ashley case launched a presentation about it at a bioethics conference by dismissing one of the stupider objections, as he saw it, to the interventions Ashley's parents had requested. Ashley is a profoundly cognitively disabled child; her ...
Gender identity disorder in childhood: inconclusive advice to parents.(Essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... For purposes of this essay, let's invent a contemporary American child named William Lee. William is five years old and, as far as anyone can tell, his body is that of a typical male. But William has long acted in a fashion more typical of girls: he likes to play with "girl" toys like ...
Voluntariness of consent to research: a conceptual model: a good deal of policy and practice in human subjects research aims to ensure that when subjects consent to research, they do so voluntarily. To date, however, voluntariness and its impairment have been poorly conceptualized and studied. The legal doctrine of informed consent could provide a useful model.
Jan 01, 2009; ... Informed consent to research derives from a legal doctrine that calls for potential research subjects to have meaningful choice. It comprises three elements: relevant information is provided to a person who is competent to make a decision, and who is situated to do so voluntarily. (1) The ...
Medicine's duty to treat pandemic illness: solidarity and vulnerability: most accounts of why physicians have a duty to treat patients during a pandemic look to the special ethical standards of the medical profession. An adequate account must be deeper and broader: it must set the professional duty alongside other individual commitments and broader social values.
Jan 01, 2009; ... In the wake of SARS and with the possibility of bioterror, pandemic avian influenza, and other emerging infections looming, bioethicists are exploring the extent of a health professional's duty to treat the victims of such an infectious outbreak, even at some substantial risk to the ...
A "handbook" for many hands.(The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics. Ed. Bonnie Steinbock. Oxford University Press, 2007. 768 pages. $150.00. Hardcover. If you can call this a "handbook" with a straight face, you are either heavily into Germanic academic tradition, or you have big, strong hands. It's a tome. It's ...
Terribly and punishingly great.(The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review. Ed. Danielle Ofri and the staff of the Bellevue Literary Review. Bellevue Literary Press, 2008. 320 pages. $16.95. Paperback. America as a whole and American medicine in particular seem sold on narrative medicine--the idea that since ...
Helping people out.(perspective)
Jan 01, 2009; ... I recently taught a seminar at the Yale School of Nursing. A bumper sticker on another car in the lot always caught my eye. It read: "Midwives Help People Out." This little slogan came to mind when I started to think about how writing ethics guidelines for professionals who provide ...
Puzzling about Peter Singer.(field notes)
Nov 01, 2008; ... Peter Singer has vastly expanded our moral imaginations with his argument for the moral worth of nonhuman animals. According to part of that argument, a being does not need a human genome to be a person. If beings like gorillas and orangutans have self-awareness--that is, a sense of ...