Long-Term Care: Policy,Ethics, and Advocacy

Book reviewed in this article: Long Term Care: Principles, Programs and Policies . By Rosalie A. Kane and Robert L. Kane. Long Term Health Care: providing a Spectrum of Services to the Aged . By Philip W. Brickner, Anthony J. Lechich, Roberta Lipsman, and Linda K. scharer.     

AIDS,Social Science,Ethics, and Public Policy

Book reviewed in this article: The Social Dimensions of AIDS: Method and Theory . By Douglas A. Feldman & Thomas M. Johnson AIDS: Ethics and Public Policy . By Christine Pierce and Donald VanDeVeer     

The Ethics of ALTRUISM in Clinical Research

If people sometimes participate in research because of altruism—because they want to help in the search for treatments—should we revise our views about what kinds of experiments are ethical? If participants act out of altruism, we might let them accept greater risks than we would if they are motivated only by a desire for personal gain. But how can we know when participants are genuinely altruistic?     

Hans Jonas and the Ethics of Human Subjects Research

In the 1960s, human experimentation and public funding of research increased significantly, and with the rise of the modern teaching hospital, the distinction between clinical care and experimentation became more and more blurred. Yet little in the way of meaningful government regulation existed in the United States prior to 1970. In 1966, Paul Freund, the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, appointed an interdisciplinary working group to consult on the issues being raised by human experimentation. Contributions from the group were published in a 1969 issue of Daedalus titled Ethical Aspects of Experimentation with Human Subjects. In the lead essay, Hans Jonas challenged then-conventional understandings of the moral problems posed by research involving humans and argued for an alternative moral framework. To Jonas, it mattered whether the physician was trying to make the patient well rather than trying to find out how to improve the health of future patients.     

Task Force Report: Ethics and American Population Policy

This is the first of a series of reports on the research groups of the institute: Death and Dying, Behavior Control, Genetic Engineering/Genetic Counseling, the Teaching of Medical Ethics, and the subject of this report, Population Control.     

Medicine and Public Health,Ethics and Human Rights

There is more to modern health than new scientific discoveries, the development of new technologies, or emerging or re-emerging diseases. World events and experiences, such as the AIDS epidemic and the humanitarian emergencies in Bosnia and Rwanda, have made this evident by creating new relationships among medicine, public health, ethics, and human rights. Each domain has seeped into the other, making allies of public health and human rights, pressing the need for an ethics of public health, and revealing the rights-related responsibilities of physicians and other health care workers.     

Human Selves,Chronic Illness,and the Ethics of Medicine

Bioethical principles and theories rest on fundamental philosophic conceptions of the human self that usually go unexamined. Reconsideration of our philosophic understanding of a human self requires that health practitioners broaden their ethical concern for patients decidedly beyond respect for decision-making autonomy and gaining informed consent for medical procedures.     

Military Genitourinary Trauma: Policies,Implications, and Ethics

The men and women who serve in the armed forces, in the words of Major General Joseph Caravalho, “sign a blank check, co‐signed by their families, payable to the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines, up to and including their lives.” It is human nature to consider such a pact in polarized terms; the pact concludes in either a celebratory homecoming or funereal mourning. But in reality, surviving catastrophic injury may incur the greatest debt. The small but real possibility of losing the ability to bear biological children due to genitourinary combat injury has been a topic of discussion in hushed tones, behind closed doors. But as policy changes move the conversation into the open, we must be fully aware of the far‐reaching and long‐term impacts of decisions on those who have sustained genitourinary injury. In January 2016, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter outlined a set of reforms that would improve the quality of life for military families by recognizing the importance of maintaining fertility, even in the face of severe injury. This first promising step could build a solid foundation of insuring fertility preservation for wounded service members with genitourinary injury, and it could set a precedent beyond the military for insuring treatment for people who have lost their reproductive capacity. Thus, the ethical challenges raised by the new policy require careful analysis.     

Medical Ethics in Ireland: A Decade of Change

As the ethical framework of the Catholic Church becomes incapable of accommodating the cultural diversity in Ireland, the search for a new moral discourse takes on a greater urgency. In its absence, litigation in Ireland is on the increase.     

Assisted Reproduction: Politics,Ethics and Anthropological Futures

ABSTRACT

Anthropological literature on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has burgeoned in the forty years since IVF emerged as a potential solution to childlessness. A lexicon has consolidated, and key sets of debates have been identified. Chief among these are questions of kinship, the intersection of technologies and local moral worlds, and the circulation of gametes and technological know-how. The recent publication of five books in the Berghahn series on Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality offers an opportunity to think about new affordances and futures for research. We review the texts and suggest several strands for research, concluding that anthropological objects do not become saturated by our knowledge of them and that ARTs will remain fertile ground for thought.     

Ethics, evidence, and cost in newborn screening

When deciding what disorders to screen newborns for, we should be guided by evidence of real effectiveness, take opportunity cost into account, distribute costs and benefits fairly, and respect human rights. Current newborn screening policy does not meet these requirements.     

Ethics, medicine, and health in South Africa

Health care issues such as the availability of medical services, access to health care according to ability to pay, geography, and racial discrimination, segregation of public hospitals, allocation of resources and facilities, occupational health care, and the physician patient relationship are discussed within the context of the political, economic, and psychosocial forces of South Africa.     

Ethics in Social Science: A Long Way to Go

Book reviewed in this article: Ethics in Social and Behavioral Research . By Edward Diener and Rick Crandall The Ethics of Social Intervention . Gordon Bermant, Herbert C. Kelman, Donald P. Warwick     

“Ethics and Clinical Research” Revisited: A Tribute to Henry K. Beecher

The doctrine of informed consent, borrowed from the law of torts, cannot be readily transplanted into therapeutic settings. The broader, as yet unrealized, idea of informed consent, which suggests that parties must make decisions jointly, should guide interactions between physicians and patients or investigators and subjects.