The anencephalic as organ donor: whose baby is it anyway?
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
SEARCH · Search PubMed
Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Drawing on the example of one specific Ethics Committee, the author delineates feminine and masculine styles of ethical decision making and work with the dying as two sides of what it means to be humanistic in patient care. The author draws particularly on the work of Carol Gilligan to differentiate feminine from masculine approaches.
Medical language frequently contains linguistic forms that serve to create a social distance between physicians and patients. This distance develops not only out of poor communication with the patient, but also, and more importantly, arises as the language that a physician uses comes to modulate his or her experience of the patient. It is suggested that some of the problem lies in the very nature of language itself, and that further fault can be found in the particular structures of Western language. Unfortunately, however, medical language has adopted special forms and metaphors which further serve to create distance.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
The link between gynaecology and ethics, one time neglected, turns out to be inevitable. The gynaecologist's work has to be oriented to the highest value on the earth, i.e., to the human person, considered in both its developmental and social dimensions. The task of a doctor (physician) is to further the health of the human person, and the specific task of the gynaecologist and obstetrician is to help professionally in the transmission of human life. To fulfill this task, they have to know the correct answer to the question when human life begins, the answer given by embryology and medical thermodynamics. The human embryo has to be considered and treated as a human person. This includes the exclusion of such acts as direct or indirect abortion, experimental use of embryos, and all kinds of genetic manipulation. The right ways of human fertilization are a consequence of the dignity of the child and of the married couple, as well as of their right to love and to be loved. It excludes the insemination, the homogeneous and heterogeneous fertilization in vitro, and the surrogate motherhood. The gynaecologists, obstetricians and midwives have to refuse to perform the nocive or immoral interventions. They should be ready to do their best in helping people in the right transmission of human life.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Death is a theme of central importance in all cultures, but the manner in which it is interpreted varies from society to society. Even so, traditional cultures, including Christian, Hindu and Jain religious traditions, exhibited a positive attitude to death and did not look upon it in a dualistic framework of good vs bad, or desirable vs undesirable. Nor was pessimism the dominant mood in their thinking about death itself. A fundamental paradigm shift occurred in the West in the eighteenth century when death was desacralized and transformed into a secular event amenable to human manipulation. From those early beginnings, dying and death have been thoroughly medicalized and brought under the purview of high technology in the twentieth century. Once death is seen as a problem for professional management, the hospital displaces the home, and specialists with different kinds and degrees of expertise take over from the family. Everyday speech and the religious idiom yield place to medical jargon. The subject (an ageing, sick or dying person) becomes the object of this make-believe yet real world. As the object of others' professional control, he or she loses the freedom of self-assessment, expression and choice. Or, he or she may be expected to choose when no longer able to do so. Thus, not only freedom but dignity also is lost, and lawyers join doctors in crisis manipulation and perpetuation. Although the modern medical culture has originated in the West, it has gradually spread to all parts of the world, subjugating other kinds of medical knowledge and other attitudes to dying and death.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
This study explored the perceptions of nurses employed in acute care nursing regarding the ethical quandaries in which they find themselves involved on a recurrent basis. Sixty-five female nurses volunteered to participate in the study. Data were collected over a 2-year period at four institutions. Qualitative methods were used to collect and analyze the data. Three categories were derived from the situational conditions described. These were exploitation, ie, nurses' concern with the inhumane treatment of seriously ill patients; exclusion, ie, the lack of attention paid to patient wishes in treatment decisions; and anguish, ie, the powerlessness and frustration felt by nurses involved in ethical situations. It was concluded that in an era of escalating, complex dilemmas, nurses are willing and motivated to engage in ethical decision-making situations, particularly when the comfort or rights of their patients are involved. The environmental barriers to this practice, however, are staggering. The barriers identified included lack of support or poorly defined mechanisms of support, time pressures, personal concerns over security, and hierarchic forces within the institution. Nurses' inability to act on behalf of patients or with regard to their individual conscience may be contributing to high turnover rates and the nursing shortage, particularly in those areas with high use of technology.
The role of the prison has changed, in some ways dramatically, over the last two decades. The prison population has grown and its composition has altered. There has been an increase in the depth and weight of imprisonment, and a hardening of its emotional tone. Prisoners' voices have been silenced, outcomes have deteriorated, and yet public presentation of the prison has improved. Power has shifted upwards, as senior managers have an unprecedented grip on establishments and their 'performance'. There are new fantasies about, and constructions of, the prison's role, with little evidence to support such public and political dreams. Such sleights of hand are only possible without knowledge of the prison's interior life. Punitive prisons which treat prisoners, and possibly prison staff, unfairly and with little or no respect add to human suffering and do not address either the problem of crime or the problem of public fear.
OBJECTIVE: This article proposes ethically justified clinical guidelines for family planning interventions to prevent pregnancy in female patients. STUDY DESIGN: We reviewed literature on family planning and consequences of pregnancy in patients with chronic mental illness and related that literature to ethical principles. RESULTS: Patients with chronic mental illness are ethically unique because they have chronically and variably impaired autonomy. Existing guidelines and proposals for family planning interventions for mentally retarded patients are shown not to apply to such patients. CONCLUSION: Three sets of guidelines for three groups of patients, representing the continuum of chronically and variably impaired autonomy, are proposed: (1) a set of guidelines for patients who can achieve thresholds of autonomy, (2) a set of guidelines for patients irreversibly near thresholds of autonomy, and (3) a set of guidelines for patients irreversibly below thresholds of autonomy. These guidelines should contribute significantly to the quality of obstetric and gynecologic care for female patients with chronic mental illness.