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Justina Pelletier’s Less-Than-Sweet 16
by Theresa Spranger, Bioethics Program Alumna (MSBioethics 2012) Justina Pelletier turned 16 over Memorial Day weekend. She was only 14 when the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (MA...
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Justina Pelletier’s Less-Than-Sweet 16
by Theresa Spranger, Bioethics Program Alumna (MSBioethics 2012) Justina Pelletier turned 16 over Memorial Day weekend. She was only 14 when the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (MA...
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The Early Bird Get the Ethics?
by Karen Solomon, Bioethics Program Student Does early to bed and early to rise, make a man healthy, wealthy and more ethical? Earlier research suggested a “morning morality effect”: that people are...
View ArticleLimning Autonomy in Surgery
Several years ago while still a surgery resident I was stuck with a needle while operating on a patient with hepatitis C and HIV. The infectious disease team at that institution started me immediately...
View ArticleLimning the Limits
Shortly after I submitted my last post “Limning Autonomy in Surgery” I was contacted by the blog editor letting me know that I had made a typo in my title and that he would go ahead and correct it for...
View ArticleEpistemological Uncertainty & Autonomy
In the September 17, 2014 issue of JAMA Scott Stonington, MD, PhD wrote a remarkable piece entitled “Whose Autonomy?” This short piece should be required reading for everyone in medicine. Stonington...
View ArticleThe Scylla and Charybdis of Medical Ethics: Not Enough Medicine, Not Enough...
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 19.0400009155273px;"><span style="line-height: 22.3999996185303px;">I was at a conference last week in medical ethics, and I was surprised by, or...
View ArticleThe New Abortion Issue: The Moral Status of Women
<p style="line-height: 19.0400009155273px;"><span style="line-height: 19.0400009155273px;">Let me emphatically state at the outset of this short blog: I have always thought the elective...
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Striking the Balance Between Population Guidelines and Patient Primacy
by Susan Mathews, Bioethics Program Alumna (2014) Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among North American women. Although routine mammography decreases the risk of death by about...
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The Case of Cassandra C: Finding Clarity and Responsibility as a Mom and a...
by Amy Bloom, Bioethics Program faculty I have been reading the latest news regarding Cassandra C., the teen with Hodgkin’s lymphoma who refused treatment but was forced into receiving it by a...
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Can Safety, Freedom And Rationing Co-Exist For The Elderly?
by Susan Mathews, Bioethics Program Alumna (2014) In a recent op-ed article, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, former Special Advisor for Health Policy to the Obama Administration, stated that he did not want to...
View ArticleStill Alice: A Portrait of Familial Alzheimer’s Disease
by Craig M. Klugman, Ph.D. This past weekend I spent a cold, snowy day in the theater watching the movie Still Alice. Julianne Moore plays Alice Howland, a renowned neurolinguistics professor at...
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V-Ticket to Ride
by Sean Philpott-Jones, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Clinical Leadership I haven’t been to Disneyland since my senior year in high school, and I’ve actually never visited one of the Disney...
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How to Die in Canada
by Sean Philpott-Jones, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Clinical Leadership Last week, our neighbors to the north took a huge step towards legalizing physician aid-in-dying. On Friday, the...
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The Importance of History for Bioethics: It is What it Was
by Barry Shuster, Bioethics Program Alum (2013) At a holiday social gathering last year, I sat with a former colleague, a physician, who inquired about my progress in bioethics. While he finds...
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The Carter v. Canada Conundrum: Next Steps for Implementing Physician...
by Sally Bean and Maxwell Smith (Bioethics Program Alum, 2010) We applaud the February 6, 2015 Supreme Court of Canada’s (SCC) unanimous ruling in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5. The...
View ArticleSpeaking about dignity
Several years ago, while on the verge of delivering the baby of a seventeen year old, I was taken aback by the number of friends that she had asked to accompany her at the event…an event formerly...
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The Man Who Mistook His Life For A Hat
by Jacob Dahlke, Bioethics Program Alum (MSBioethics 2012) Our society tends to put on pedestals the celebrities among us, particular upon their deaths. For author Oliver Sacks, it is no different...
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Understanding the Latino Patient with Cancer
by Beatriz Lorena Hurtado, Bioethics Program Alumna (MSBioethics 2014) As a Latina working in healthcare I have always felt the responsibility to provide education about my culture, and to clarify...
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Will Ariadne Lead Us Through the Maze of End-of-Life Healthcare?
Note: The Bioethics Program blog will be moving to its new home on April 1, 2015. Be sure to change your bookmarks to http://bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/blog/ by Richard Koo, Bioethics Program...
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How to Get A Head in Life
Note: The Bioethics Program blog will be moving to its new home on April 1, 2015. Be sure to change your bookmarks to http://bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/blog/ by Bonnie Steinbock, Bioethics...
View ArticleActions vs. Words: What counts most in understanding patient preferences?
<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 11.1999998092651px; line-height: 19.0400009155273px;"><span style="font-size: 11.1999998092651px; line-height: 19.0400009155273px;">Clinicians...
View ArticleTruth Telling In Medicine: Problems Old and New
<p style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 19.04px;">The issue of truth telling in medicine was a lively concern in the early days of modern medical ethics during the 1970’s. A new moral awareness...
View ArticleOB Potpourri
This month’s issue of the medical journal Obstetrics & Gynecology (O&G) has a review of the four best ethics articles that appeared in their journal in the last year. Here are my comments (in...
View ArticleMy Child, Your Womb
Gestational surrogacy contracts have been in the news again recently as a gestational surrogate reports that the intended father, having discovered that she is expecting triplets, is demanding that she...
View ArticlePain Relief is an Ethical Issue
When patients lack capacity, physicians look to family and friends to step in and provide consent for treatment on behalf of the patient. These surrogates, whether they were appointed by the patient...
View ArticleA Few Thoughts On Abortion and Valuing Human Life
Who could be against life? Ancient natural law theory in the Catholic tradition tells us that human beings desire to live, and that life is good, therefore humans have an obligation to live and not...
View ArticleBioethicsTV: Paternalism (again) on Chicago Med
by Craig Klugman, Ph.D. Our favorite television dramas this week were light on bioethics issues with the exception of Chicago Med (season 1; episode 17 “Withdrawal”) that continues to explore...
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TEDxFordhamUniversity: Lesson in Bioethics Given by Golden Girls | Dr....
As one of the most groundbreaking sitcoms of all time, The Golden Girls introduced a range of bioethical issues on the show regarding medicine, the human body and women’s health. In this TEDx Talk, Dr....
View ArticleThe Gift of Finitude
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about finitude. About limits. Incompleteness. Even failure. Like the friend of a friend who is dying and has just been admitted to hospice, whose young teenaged daughter...
View ArticleSurrogacy in the Market of Desire
The State of Florida has spilled no small quantity of ink outlining the legal confines of gestational surrogacy (see particularly sections 742.13-742.17, here). Legally permitted gestational surrogacy...
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“She Can’t Help The Choices She Makes”
STUDENT VOICES | CHYNN PRIZE FIRST-PLACE WINNER By Madeleine Cardona I will never forget the day my mother got diagnosed. I could swear that just yesterday I was thirteen years old waiting anxiously to...
View ArticleEthics As An Evolving Activity: The Need To Remain Vigilant
Working as an ethicist in a professional work environment, you quickly realize that any ethical advice worth giving to practitioners must always be relevant to real problematic, human situations....
View ArticleEnhancing Pediatric Decision-Making: Australian Law Allows Children to...
It always interesting to see how different countries handle pediatric decision-making in health care. For example, Australia now has shifted more towards respecting minors’ autonomy with its recent...
View ArticleThe Idea of a “Standard View” of Informed Consent
This editorial is re-posted from the December 2017 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics. You can read more on this topic through the target article and open peer commentaries. by Tom L....
View ArticleThe Homeless as Human Subjects
STUDENT VOICES | CHYNN ETHICS PRIZE FIRST-PLACE WINNER By Sarah Reis During my senior year of high school, on a bitter Saturday morning in January, I found myself at the entrance to the Boston Common...
View ArticleBioethicsTV (March 5-9, 2019): #The Resident, #The Good Doctor, #New Amsterdam
“Examining ethical issues in TV medical dramas” Jump to The Resident (Season 2; Episode 16): Money corrupts, patient autonomy; Jump to The Good Doctor (Season 2; Episode 17): Reporting suspicions of...
View ArticleA Clinical Ethicist’s Reflections on The Farewell
“Based on an Actual Lie”—thus begins The Farewell, a film that follows 30-year-old Billi from her New York City home to Changchun, China, where she and her family visit her dying grandmother Nai-Nai....
View ArticleDiet, Changing Desires, and Dementia
Last week saw the launch of a campaign (run by the group Vegetarian For Life) that seeks to ensure that older people in care who have ethical commitments to a particular diet are not given food that...
View ArticleIncapacitated Refusal
Sometimes patients who lack decision-making capacity refuse treatment that would be in their best interests. Imagine, for example, a patient suffering from acute schizophrenia who adamantly and...
View ArticleThe Right Not to Know and the Obligation to Know
By Ben Davies Most people accept that patients have a strong claim (perhaps with some exceptions) to be told information that is relevant to their health and medical care. Patients have a Right to...
View ArticleConsent Without Alternatives
Written by Ben Davies and Joshua Parker “COVID-19: Do not resuscitate orders might have been put in place without consent, watchdog says”. This recent headline followed an investigation by the Care...
View ArticleAIDD, Autonomy, and Military Ethics
by Sally J. Scholz, PhD This editorial can be found in the latest issue of American Journal of Bioethics. In “Artificial Intelligence, Social Media and Depression,” Laacke and colleagues (2021)...
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Your Doctor Has a DNR Order, But Not for the Reasons You’d Think
by Jacob Dahlke, Bioethics Program Alum (MSBioethics 2012) How many doctors would choose to have a “Do-Not Resuscitate” (DNR) order over a full code option? 88.3%, at least according to a new study....
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