New Harvest includes contributions from specialists in medical, philosophical, psychological, religious, and legal fields. These essays are not simply a collection, but were developed from a single conception of the four ethical concerns of trans plan tation described in the first chapter. The indi vid ual chapters are all parts of a structure unified by the search for ethical foundations basic to the four concerns. Transplantation is surrounded by a great deal of under- standable emotional sensitivi ty. The authors trust that words like "procurement," "harvest," and possibly other...

The Direction of Medical Ethics The direction bioethics, and specifically medical ethics, will take in the next few years will be crucial. It is an emerging specialty that has attempted a great deal, that has many differing agendas, and that has its own identity crisis. Is it a subspecialty of clinical medicine? Is it a medical reform movement? Is it a consumer pro tection movement? Is it a branch of professional ethics? Is it a ra tionale for legal decisions and agency regulations? Is it something physicians and ethical theorists do constructively together? Or is it a morally concentrated...

Many of the demands being voiced for a "humanizing" of health care center on the public's concern that they have some say In determining what happens to the individual in health care institutions. The essays in this volume address fundamental questions of conflicts of rights and autonomy as they affect four selected, controversial areas in health care ethics: the Limits of Professional Autonomy, Refusing Withdrawing from Treatment, Electing "Heroic" Measures, and Advancing Reproductive Technology. Each of the topics is addressed in such a way that it includes an examination of the locus of...

Not long ago, a colleague chided me for using the term "the biological revolution. " Like many others, I have employed it as an umbrella term to refer to the seemingly vast, rapidly-moving, and fre quently bewildering developments of contemporary biomedicine: psy chosurgery, genetic counseling and engineering, artificial heart-lung machines, organ transplants-and on and on. The real "biological revo lution," he pointed out, began back in the nineteenth century in Europe. For it was then that death rates and infant mortality began to decline, the germ theory of disease was firmly established,...

In April 1982, an infant boy was born in Bloomington, Indiana, with Down syndrome and a defective, but surgically correctable, esophagus. His parents refused to consent to surgery or intravenous feeding. The hospital unsuccessfully sought a court order to force treatment, and appeals to higher courts also failed. The child, identified as Baby Doe by the news media, subsequently died. The events in Bloomington became the catalyst for action by the Reagan administration, the courts, and Congress that culminated in a federal policy that makes failure to treat newborns with disabilities a form of...

There is the world of ideas and the world of practice; the French are often for sup pressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed. -Matthew Arnold The Function of Criticism at the Present Time From its inception, bioethics has confronted the need to reconcile theory and practice. At first the confrontation was purely intellectual, as writers on ethical theory (within phi losophy, theology, or other humanistic disciplines) turned their attention to topics from the world of medical practice. Recently the confrontation has grown more intense. The ap pointment of...

The idea for an anthology on personhood grew out of two things, viz., the work I did with Martin Benjamin during the Summer of 1982 at Michigan State University on the question, What is a person?, and the amount of time, effort, and expense required for serious research on the topic itself. The former experience taught me the importance of, among other things, attempting to get clear about what we are to mean by 'person, ' while the latter experience suggested a possible course of action whereby getting clear might be made more manage able simply by having relatively convenient access to some...

The fate of seriously ill newborns has captured the atten tion of the public, of national and state legislators, and of powerful interest groups. For the most part, the debate has been cast in the narrowest possible terms: "discrimination against the handicapped"; "physician authority"; "family autonomy." We believe that something much more profound is happening: the debate over the care of sick and dying babies appears to be both a manifestation of great changes in our feelings about infants, children, and families, and a reflection of deep and abiding attitudes toward the newborn, the handi...

The roles of both the consumer and the health advocate professional have become increasingly significant in to day's climate of "rationed" health care. It seems clear that the timely exchange of ideas among seasoned health care advocates is necessary if we are to deal with the complex problems of a technologically advanced so ciety seeking to ration its heath care in a truly humane way. Toward such a timely exchange, the first Confer ence on Advocacy in Health Care was organized by the Health Advocacy Program of Sarah Lawrence College and recently held. Advocacy in Health Care: The Power of a...

The place of drugs in American society is a problem more apt to evoke diatribe than dialog. With the support of the Na tional Science Foundation's program on Ethics and Values in Science and Technology, and the National Endowment for the Humanities' program on Science, Technology, and Human Values, * The Hastings Center was able to sponsor such dialog as part of a major research into the ethics of drug use that spanned two years. We assembled a Research Group from leaders in the scientific, medical, legal, and policy com munities, leavened with experts in applied ethics, and brought them...