Bioethics and Medical Ethics Commons^™

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Fall 2010

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Brave New Eugenics: Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technologies In The Name Of Better Babies, Kerry L. Macintosh

Faculty Publications

Infertile men and women have been using assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to conceive children since the first "test-tube baby" was born in 1978. During the past decade, however, the federal government has begun to clamp down on ART, asserting safety concerns as grounds forbanning novel technologies such as cloning, nuclear transfer, and ooplasm transfer.

Some scholars and policymakers now want to extend governmental regulation to include conventional ART such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). They claim children conceived through ART face an increased risk of birth defects and other health problems.

This Article examines the …

A Parent's Choice V. Governmental Regulations: A Bioethical Analysis In An Era Of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, Michael Gortakowski

Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Summer 2010

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Winter 2010

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Can There Be A Progressive Bioethics?, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Progressive bioethics-the words are not an oxymoron. Far from it; they are more redundant than oppositional. Yet they leave me almost as uneasy, as if they were contradictory. My unease exists because bioethics should be neither progressive nor regressive, neither right wing nor left wing, neither liberal nor conservative. It should be just good, sound ethics applied to the often difficult moral problems posed by present-day medicine and the genomic revolution.

I do not mean to suggest by this that all bioethicists need agree. Respectable ethicists using established modes of ethical analysis have long disagreed on and argued for different …

From A Constitutional Right To A Policy Of Exceptions: Abigail Alliance And The Future Of Access To Experimental Therapy, Patricia J. Zettler, Seema K. Shah

Faculty Publications By Year

Although there has been considerable attention to the plight of terminally ill patients with highly sympathetic constitutional and contractual claims that they should be permitted access to unapproved drugs, courts have been appropriately reluctant to grant such claims. Congress and administrative agencies have the requisite institutional competence to decide complex policy issues related to science and health care such as those involved in establishing an expanded access program. Congress and FDA should allow only limited access to unapproved therapies because there are significant concerns about the safety and efficacy of unapproved drugs. Moreover, many of the proposals to widen access …

Price And Pretense In The Baby Market, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

Throughout the world, baby selling is formally prohibited. And throughout the world babies are bought and sold each day. As demonstrated in this Essay, the legal baby trade is a global market in which prospective parents pay, scores of intermediaries profit, and the demand for children is clearly differentiated by age, race, special needs, and other consumer preferences, with prices ranging from zero to over one hundred thousand dollars. Yet legal regimes and policymakers around the world pretend that the baby market does not exist, most notably through prohibitions against “baby selling” – typically defined as a prohibition against the …

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Fall 2009

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Spring 2009

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Prosecuting Doctors For Trusting Patients, Deborah Hellman

Faculty Scholarship

In an escalating phase of our country’s war on drugs, doctors treating patients in pain are being prosecuted for drug trafficking under the Controlled Substances Act. While doctors surely can be guilty of drug trafficking when they sell drugs for money, lately some doctors have been prosecuted for violations of a statute that requires knowingly distributing or dispensing controlled substances in an unauthorized manner for simply being willfully blind to the fact that their patients were reselling the drugs. While willful blindness may be an apt substitute for knowledge in the traditional drug courier scenario, doctors in these cases are …

Physicians Who Break The Law, Diane E. Hoffmann

Faculty Scholarship

This paper takes as its starting point a recent article by Prof. Sandra Johnson, Regulating Physician Behavior: Taking Doctors “Bad Law” Claims Seriously. In the article, Johnson focuses on doctors who comply with the law despite their belief that the law is “bad”, i.e., causes them to behave in ways that are harmful to their patients. In Physicians Who Break the Law, I explore cases where physicians break the law claiming that it is “bad”. In this exploration, I focus on two areas of physicians’ lawbreaking: (1) violations of business-related laws, in particular, insurance fraud; and (2) violations of laws …

The Ethical Foundations Of Consumer-Driven Health Care, Marshall B. Kapp

Journal of Health Care Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

The Implications Of Post-Phase 1 And "Off-Label" Treatment Use Of Experimental Drugs: How Expansive Should Expanded Access Be?, Patricia J. Zettler

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Neuroscience And Health Law: An Integrative Approach?, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

Clinicians and scientists use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map sensory, motor, and cognitive function and to study the neural correlates of a range of physical and mental conditions, behaviors, characteristics, and preferences. Due to its move outside the clinical and research contexts, fMRI raises a number of ethical, legal, and social issues that are being examined within the overlapping fields of neuroethics and neurolaw. The early neuroethics and neurolaw scholarship focused heavily on the implications of fMRI for evidence law, criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. Little attention has been paid, however, to the implications of advances …

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Fall 2008

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Summer 2008

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Spring 2008

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

The Role And Legal Status Of Health Care Ethics Committees In The United States, Diane E. Hoffmann, Anita J. Tarzian

Faculty Scholarship

Over a quarter of a century has passed since health care ethics committees (HCECs) in the United States received legal recognition as alternatives to the courts in resolving conflicts related to patient end-of-life care. By the mid to late 1980s HCECs had been established in over half of U.S. hospitals and had received a certain legitimacy in the health care system. Given their age and growth one could characterize them developmentally as emerging from adolescence and establishing themselves in young adult-hood. As a result, we might expect that they would have resolved the identify crisis characterizing the adolescent years. Yet, …

Social Justice And Health Care Management: An Elusive Quest?, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

Contemporary debate on health care resource management is tied to a central moral issue: namely, how to achieve an optimum level of reasonable or appropriate treatment based on the medical condition of each patient. Failing to tackle and resolve this issue in a confident and forthright manner assures the present approach to health care decision making to continue in a state of indecisiveness if, indeed, not lethargy.

Undergirding this moral issue is the foundational economic dilemma of controlling costs while limiting access to health care resources. Finding a just solution to an equitable distribution of finite health care resources is …

Neuroimaging Research Into Disorders Of Consciousness: Moral Imperative Or Ethical And Legal Failure, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

In this article I explore the ethical and legal implications of enrolling individuals with disorders of consciousness (DOC) in neuroimaging research studies. Many scientists have strongly emphasized the need for additional neuroimaging research into DOC, characterizing the conduct of such studies as morally imperative. On the other hand, institutional review boards (IRBs) charged with approving research protocols, scientific journals deciding whether to publish study results, and federal agencies that disburse grant money have limited the conduct, publication, and funding of consciousness investigations based on ethical and legal concerns. Following a detailed examination of the risks and benefits of neuroimaging research …

Review Of Jonathan Baron, Against Bioethics, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

This is a short review of a recent book by Jonathan Baron, entitled "Against Bioethics."

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Fall 2007

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Spring 2007

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Imaging Body Structure And Mapping Brain Function: A Historical Approach, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

Now in its second decade, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) localizes changes in blood oxygenation that occur in the brain when an individual performs a mental task. Physicians and scientists use fMRI not only to map sensory, motor, and cognitive functions, but also to study the neural correlates of a range of sensitive and potentially stigmatizing conditions, behaviors, and characteristics. Poised to move outside the traditional clinical and research contexts, fMRI raises a number of ethical, legal, and social issues that are being explored within a burgeoning neuroethics literature. In this Article, I place these issues in their proper historical …

Functional Neuroimaging And The Law: Trends And Directions For Future Scholarship, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

Under the umbrella of the burgeoning neurotransdisciplines, scholars are using the principles and research methodologies of their primary and secondary fields to examine developments in neuroimaging, neuromodulation, and psychopharmacology. The path for advanced scholarship at the intersection of law and neuroscience may clear if work across the disciplines is collected and reviewed and outstanding and debated issues are identified and clarified. In this article, I organize, examine and refine a narrow class of burgeoning neurotransdiscipline scholarship; that is, scholarship at the interface of law and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Book Review: Social Justice: The Moral Foundations Of Public Health And Health Policy, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is a review of Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy by Madison Powers & Ruth Faden (2006).

In this pathbreaking book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden confront foundational issues about health and justice. How much inequality in health can a just society tolerate? In a world filled with inequalities in health and well-being, which inequalities matter most and are the most morally urgent to address? In order to answer these questions, Powers and Faden develop a unique theory of social justice that, while developed for the specific contexts of public health and health …

Stealing What's Free: Exploring Compensation To Body Parts Sources For Their Contribution To Profitable Biomedical Research, Jo-Anne Yau

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “At first blush, donating body parts in the name of science appears to be a beautiful solution to the problem of scarce body parts for research advancements. But a closer investigation reveals an ugly fact: the philanthropic donors—referred to as “Sources” in this article—are subjected to physical and financial exploitation.

Sources play a crucial and indispensable role in biotechnology. Without human body parts, most medical discoveries would not have been possible. Handsome profits can be derived from successful discoveries. But currently in the United States, when a Source provides body parts for research purposes, the researcher, research foundation, and …

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Fall 2006-Winter 2007

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Who Decides Whether A Patient Lives Or Dies?, Diane E. Hoffmann, Jack Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.