Bioethics, Law, and Human Life Issues

by D. Brian Scarnecchia
Bioethics, Law, and Human Life Issues
Author: D. Brian Scarnecchia
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2010-06-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810874237
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Bioethics, Law, and Human Life Issues: A Catholic Perspective on Marriage, Family, Contraception, Abortion, Reproductive Technology, and Death and Dying draws on the Magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church to outline a Catholic response to a host of controversial issues related to human life. Scarnecchia lays out a Catholic moral theology based on the writings of Pope John Paul II and Thomas Aquinas, and he then applies those Christian moral principles to today's most contentious ethical issues, including reproductive technology, embryo adoption, contraception, abortion, family and same-sex marriage, and euthanasia and assisted suicide. This review of Catholic moral principles brings together an in-depth consideration of the central human life issues of our day with abundant reference to the Church's social teaching and to contrasting positions of today's leading ethicists.

The Law and Ethics of Medicine

by John Keown
The Law and Ethics of Medicine
Author: John Keown
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199589550
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The principle of the sanctity of life is key to the law governing medical practice and professional medical ethics. It is also widely misunderstood. This book clarifies the principle and considers how it influences the law governing abortion; 'test-tube' babies; euthanasia; feeding patients in persistent vegetative states; and palliative treatment.

Bioethics and the Human Goods

by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo
Bioethics and the Human Goods
Author: Alfonso Gómez-Lobo
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2015-10-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 162616164X
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Bioethics and the Human Goods offers students and general readers a brief introduction to bioethics from a “natural law” philosophical perspective. This perspective, which traces its origins to classical antiquity, has profoundly shaped Western ethics and law and is enjoying an exciting renaissance. While compatible with much in the ethical thought of the great religions, it is grounded in reason, not religion. In contrast to the currently dominant bioethical theories of utilitarianism and principlism, the natural law approach offers an understanding of human flourishing grounded in basic human goods, including life, health, friendship, and knowledge, and in the wrongness of intentionally turning against, or neglecting, these goods. The book is divided into two sections: Foundations and Issues. Foundations sketches a natural law understanding of the important ethical principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice and explores different understandings of “personhood” and whether human embryos are persons. Issues applies a natural law perspective to some of the most controversial debates in contemporary bioethics at the beginning and end of life: research on human embryos, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the withdrawal of tube-feeding from patients in a “persistent vegetative state,” and the definition of death. The text is completed by appendices featuring personal statements by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo on the status of the human embryo and on the definition and determination of death.

Bioethics, Law, and Human Life Issues

by D. Brian Scarnecchia
Bioethics, Law, and Human Life Issues
Author: D. Brian Scarnecchia
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2010-06-02
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0810874229
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Provides an overview of the Catholic perspective on some of the most controversial issues in today's society, covering reproductive technology, embryo adoption, contraception, abortion, family, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.

What It Means to Be Human

by O. Carter Snead
What It Means to Be Human
Author: O. Carter Snead
Publisher:
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674987721
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American law assumes that individuals are autonomous, defined by their capacity to choose, and not obligated to each other. But our bodies make us vulnerable and dependent, and the law leaves the weakest on their own. O. Carter Snead argues for a paradigm that recognizes embodiment, enabling law and policy to provide for the care that people need.

Bioethics and the Character of Human Life

by Gilbert Meilaender
Bioethics and the Character of Human Life
Author: Gilbert Meilaender
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2020-05-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725251302
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In the essays collected here Gilbert Meilaender invites readers to reflect upon some of the bioethical issues that are important for all of us. The essays treat bioethics less as a discipline confined to a few experts than as a deeply humanistic set of concerns that inevitably draws us into religious and metaphysical issues. From reflections on his experience as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics to the way in which Christian trinitarian teaching has shaped what it means to be a person, from life's beginning to its ending, these essays offer readers a chance to think about matters of fundamental human significance.

Disputes in Bioethics

by Christopher Kaczor
Disputes in Bioethics
Author: Christopher Kaczor
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0268108110
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Disputes in Bioethics tackles some of the most debated questions in contemporary scholarship about the beginning and end of life. This collection of essays takes up questions about the dawn of human life, including: Should we make children with three (or more) parents? Is it better never to have been born? and Why should the baby live? This volume also asks about the dusk of human life: Is "death with dignity" a dangerous euphemism? Should euthanasia be permitted for children? Does assisted suicide harm those who do not choose to die? Still other questions are asked concerning recent views that health care professionals should not have a right to conscientiously object to legal and accepted medical practices. Finally, the book addresses questions about separating conjoined twins as well as the issue of whether the species of an individual makes a difference for the individual’s moral status. Christopher Kaczor critiques some of the most recent and influential positions in bioethics, while eschewing both consequentialism and principalism. Rooted in the Catholic principle that faith and reason are harmonious, this book shows how Catholic bioethical teaching is rationally defensible in terms that people of good will, secular or religious, can accept. Proceeding from a natural law perspective, Kaczor defends the inherent dignity of all human beings and argues that they merit the protection of their basic human goods because of that inherent dignity. Philosophers interested in applied ethics, as well as students and professors of law, will profit from reading Disputes in Bioethics. The book aims to be both philosophically sophisticated and accessible for students and experienced researchers alike.

Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Responsibility

by Yechiel Michael Barilan
Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Responsibility
Author: Yechiel Michael Barilan
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2012-09-14
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0262304880
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A novel and multidisciplinary exposition and theorization of human dignity and rights, brought to bear on current issues in bioethics and biolaw. “Human dignity” has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term—like love, hope, and justice—that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Some ethicists and bioethicists dismiss it; other thinkers point to its use in the service of particular ideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thorough conceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issues in ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, applied ethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethos to human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of the formative texts on Imago Dei; provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity and of vulnerability; presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanist perspective; explores issues of moral status; and examines the value of responsibility as a link between virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim with numerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-life care, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care, the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting many relevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law.

Scarlet A

by Katie Watson
Scarlet A
Author: Katie Watson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0190624876
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Winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language Although Roe v. Wade identified abortion as a constitutional right in1973, it still bears stigma--a proverbial scarlet A. Millions of Americans have participated in or benefited from an abortion, but few want to reveal that they have done so. Approximately one in five pregnancies in the US ends in abortion. Why is something so common, which has been legal so long, still a source of shame and secrecy? Why is it so regularly debated by politicians, and so seldom divulged from friend to friend? This book explores the personal stigma that prevents many from sharing their abortion experiences with friends and family in private conversation, and the structural stigma that keeps it that way. In public discussion, both proponents and opponents of abortion's legality tend to focus on extraordinary cases. This tendency keeps the national debate polarized and contentious, and keeps our focus on the cases that occur the least. Professor Katie Watson focuses instead on the cases that happen the most, which she calls "ordinary abortion." Scarlet A gives the reflective reader a more accurate impression of what the majority of American abortion practice really looks like. It explains how our silence around private experience has distorted public opinion, and how including both ordinary abortion and abortion ethics could make our public exchanges more fruitful. In Scarlet A, Watson wisely and respectfully navigates one of the most divisive topics in contemporary life. This book explains the law of abortion, challenges the toxic politics that make it a public football and private secret, offers tools for more productive private exchanges, and leads the way to a more robust public discussion of abortion ethics. Scarlet A combines storytelling and statistics to bring the story of ordinary abortion out of the shadows, painting a rich, rarely seen picture of how patients and doctors currently think and act, and ultimately inviting readers to tell their own stories and draw their own conclusions. The paperback edition includes a new preface by the author addressing new cultural developments in abortion discourse and new legal threats to reproductive rights, and updated statistics throughout.