PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

Bernard M Dickens

Publications and source records attributed to Bernard M Dickens.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Ethical misconduct by abuse of conscientious objection laws.

This paper addresses laws and practices urged by conservative religious organizations that invoke conscientious objection in order to deny patients access to lawful procedures. Many are reproductive health services, such as contraception, sterilization and abortion, on which women's health depends. Religious institutions that historically served a mission to provide healthcare are now perverting this commitment in order to deny care. Physicians who followed their calling honourably in a spirit of self-sacrifice are being urged to sacrifice patients' interests to promote their own, compromising their professional ethics by conflict of interest. The shield tolerant societies allowed to protect religious conscience is abused by religiously-influenced agencies that beat it into a sword to compel patients, particularly women, to comply with religious values they do not share. This is unethical unless accompanied by objectors' duty of referral to non-objecting practitioners, and governmental responsibility to ensure supply of and patients' access to such practitioners.

Ethics, Medical↗
PubMed2005

Interactions of law and ethics affecting reproductive choice.

Controversies affecting reproductive choice can often be resolved within interactions of legal and ethical decision-making. This paper addresses three topics, following the methodology presented in Reproductive Health and Human Rights: Integrating Medicine, Ethics, and Law, by R.J. Cook, B.M. Dickens and M.F. Fathalla (Oxford University Press, 2003). The book's 15 case studies each addresses medical, ethical, legal and human rights aspects, and structural approaches at clinical, healthcare system and societal levels. STERILIZATION: Individual self-determination supports legal and ethical rights of intellectually competent persons to sterilization. Sterilization of intellectually compromised persons was historically abused, causing reactions of excessively protective prohibition. ABORTION: Most developed countries have liberalized abortion legislation, thereby reducing abortion-related mortality and morbidity, but many developing countries retain repressive colonial laws. Over 95% of the estimated 20 million unsafe abortions annually occur in developing countries. COURT-ORDERED CAESAREAN DELIVERIES: A concern in developed countries is the willingness of some courts to order Caesarean procedures over competent women's objections.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Access to emergency contraception.

The merits of non-prescription distribution of levonorgestrel as emergency contraception (EC), which is effective within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, are contentious. The advantage of promptness and convenience of access may be offset by the absence of medical counselling. Opposition to EC based on the possibility of the drug acting after fertilization but before implantation departs from standard medical criteria of pregnancy. Physicians who propose to apply non-medical criteria, and use religious objections to abortion to deny prescription of EC, must publicize their opposition in advance, so that women may seek assistance elsewhere. When objecting practitioners, or facilities, become responsible for women for whom EC is indicated, such as rape victims, they are bound ethically and legally to refer them to reasonably accessible non-objecting sources of care.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Malpractice liability implications of pacemaker and defibrillator guidelines in Canada.

Different guidelines for implantable pacemaker and cardioverter defibrillator therapy pose problems for legal liability in Canada. Medical practices in the United States provide measures for comparative assessment, but the Canadian health care system is operated and publicly funded on West European principles. Provincial governments accept the responsibility to provide their residents with reasonable access to medically necessary services, including devices, on conditions of partial reimbursement by federal government funds. However, some provinces may fund services for which they will not be reimbursed. Practitioners may practise according to governmental funding arrangements. The law recognizes that practitioners in a respected minority in their specialty can depart from generally approved professional guidelines, by retaining earlier practices that are not discredited, or by adopting newer, but non-mainstream practices. They can similarly follow professional guidelines different from those of their colleagues. Practitioners who depart from guidelines they profess to follow risk legal liability, but compliance does not invariably ensure judicial approval. Judges preserve the right to set standards of professional proficiency, since they are a matter of law, but usually endorse professional guidelines. Patients' choices must be adequately informed, according to well-established criteria of disclosure that must be applied to evolving professional views of best and acceptable practice, which are usually influenced by practice guidelines. Inadequate governmental provision of devices or services to ensure patients' care according to practice guidelines can be challenged in legal proceedings. Success may require governments to improve supplies, but judges may decline to give directions with serious budgetary implications. However, unsuccessful litigants against, for instance, governments or physicians, are liable to be required to pay the successful defendants' legal costs, and usually their own.

Canada↗
PubMed2003

Human rights dynamics of abortion law reform.

The legal approach to abortion is evolving from criminal prohibition towards accommodation as a life-preserving and health-preserving option, particularly in light of data on maternal mortality and morbidity. Modern momentum for liberalization comes from international adoption of the concept of reproductive health, and wider recognition that the resort to safe and dignified healthcare is a major human right. Respect for women's reproductive self-determination legitimizes abortion as a choice when family planning services have failed, been inaccessible, or been denied by rape. Recognition of women's rights of equal citizenship with men requires that their choices for self-determination be legally respected, not criminalized.

Abortion, Illegal↗
PubMed2003

Legal duties to respect abortion choices.

This paper addresses legal protection of individual choices to obtain abortion services, to decline to perform abortions on grounds of religious objection, and to participate in these procedures. It considers legal duties to respect women as decision-makers in their own lives, including when they decide to continue pregnancy. The choice to decline participation in abortions is an aspect of religious freedom available to physicians, nurses, and, for instance, pharmacists, but not artificial legal persons such as hospital and clinic corporations. Refusal does not extend to ancillary functions such as serving meals, routine pre-operative and post-operative care of abortion patients or typing abortion referral letters. Physicians practising in proximate care must be trained in appropriate medical management of incomplete and threatened abortion even when they would refuse to apply such techniques to induce abortion.

Abortion, Induced↗
PubMed2002

The injustice of unsafe motherhood.

This paper presents an overview of the dimensions of unsafe motherhood, contrasting data from economically developed countries with some from developing countries. It addresses many common factors that shape unsafe motherhood, identifying medical, health system and societal causes, including women's powerlessness over their reproductive lives in particular as a feature of their dependent status in general. Drawing on perceptions of Jonathan Mann, it focuses on public health dimensions of maternity risks, and equates the role of bioethics in conscientious medical care to that of human rights in public health care. The microethics of medical care translate into the macroethics of public health, but the transition compels some compromise of personal autonomy, a key feature of Western bioethics, in favour of societal analysis. Religiously-based morality is seen to have shaped laws that contribute to unsafe motherhood. Now reformed in former colonizing countries of Europe, many such laws remain in effect in countries that emerged from colonial domination. UN conferences have defined the concept of 'reproductive health' as one that supports women's reproductive self-determination, but restrictive abortion laws and practices epitomize the unjust constraints to which many women remain subject, resulting in their unsafe motherhood. Pregnant women can be legally compelled to give the resources of their bodies to the support of others, while fathers are not legally compellable to provide, for instance, bone-marrow or blood donations for their children's survival. Women's unjust legal, political, economic and social powerlessness explains much unsafe motherhood and maternal mortality and morbidity.

Abortion, Legal↗
PubMed1992

Ethics committees, organ transplantation and public policy.

CONCLUSION: It is clear that ethics committees face many dilemmas in developing sound public policy on organ transplantation through their roles in serving their institutions and their communities. With conscientiousnes and good faith, different committees may adopt different approaches to the same issue, and arrive at different solutions when subscribing to the same approach. It is valuable that committee members should be aware of other committees' approaches and disclose the reasons for their own in a frank, non-defensive way. It should also be remembered that a measure of legitimacy can attach to ethics committees' decisions because of the integrity with which their decisions are reached, even when they differ from other committees' decisions. Like courts of law, their decisions carry weight because of how they are reached, not simply because of how they comport with the judgments of others. This is not to say that every or any legally permissible policy is ethically sound, but only that ethics committees can contribute to public satisfaction that institutions are under reliable control through the demonstrable integrity and competence of their processes of policy making.

Adolescent↗