Biomedical Ethics and the Law, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1976

In the past few years an increasing number of colleges and universities have added courses in biomedical ethics to their curricula. To some extent, these additions serve to satisfy student demands for "relevance. " But it is also true that such changes reflect a deepening desire on the part of the academic community to deal effectively with a host of problems which must be solved if we are to have a health-care delivery system which is efficient, humane, and just. To a large degree, these problems are the unique result of both rapidly changing moral values and dramatic advances in biomedical technology. The past decade has witnessed sudden and conspicuous controversy over the morality and legality of new practices relating to abortion, therapy for the mentally ill, experimentation using human subjects, forms of genetic interven­ tion, suicide, and euthanasia. Malpractice suits abound and astronomical fees for malpractice insurance threaten the very possibility of medical and health-care practice. Without the backing of a clear moral consensus, the law is frequently forced into resolving these conflicts only to see the moral issues involved still hotly debated and the validity of existing law further questioned. In the case of abortion, for example, the laws have changed radically, and the widely pub­ licized recent conviction of Dr. Edelin in Boston has done little to foster a moral consensus or even render the exact status of the law beyond reasonable question.

Bioethics as a Discipline.- I: Abortion.- Roe v. Wade.- Abortion and the Law.- A Defense of Abortion.- The Morality of Abortion.- Abortion: The Avoidable Moral Dilemma.- II: Mental Illness.- Psychiatric Intervention.- The Myth of Mental Illness.- Mental Health and Mental Illness: Some Problems of Definition and Concept Formation.- Involuntary Mental Hospitalization: A Crime Against Humanity.- Psychiatrists and the Adversary Process.- III: Human Experimentation.- Ethics and Clinical Research.- Scientific Investigations on Man: A Medical Research Worker’s Viewpoint.- Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects.- The Moral Justification for Research Using Human Subjects.- Realities of Patient Consent to Medical Research.- NIH Guidelines on Research with Human Subjects.- IV: Human Genetics.- Ethical Issues Arising from the Possible Uses of Genetic Knowledge.- Implications of Prenatal Diagnosis for the Human Right to Life.- Implications of Prenatal Diagnosis for the Quality of, and Right to, Human Life: Society as a Standard.- Practical and Ethical Problems in Human Genetics.- Reproductive Rights and Genetic Disease.- On Justifications for Coercive Genetic Control.- Legal Rights and Moral Rights.- Privacy and Genetic Information.- V: Dying.- The Problems in Prolongation of Life.- The Allocation of Exotic Medical Lifesaving Therapy.- Life and the Right to Life.- Dying.- A Statutory Definition of the Standards for Determining Human Death: An Appraisal and a Proposal.- Death: Process or Event?.