The relevance of a biological definition of life to fundamental rights.
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The application of investigative ethics to religious objections to the autopsy is essential for harmony in achieving the mission of medical legal death investigations. In Florida, an ethical advisory committee composed of religious, ethics, legal, and medical leaders established a unified statement for the practice of discretionary judgment and liaison with clergy. Our approach to religious objections to the autopsy as well as illustrative cases will be discussed.
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In recent years, religious objection to autopsy has become an ethical dilemma for medical examiners. We present two cases that illustrate these dilemmas, and we also review the history and legal considerations of religious objection to autopsy.
In vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo transfer (ET) have recently become an accepted treatment modality for patients with mechanically caused infertility. The first series admitted to our program comprised 42 patients with confirmed mechanical infertility. The method of patient selection and the techniques of laparoscopy, follicular aspiration and oocyte recovery are described. From 26 laparoscopies, a total of 39 oocytes was recovered. Normal cleavage of 10 oocytes was obtained; they were transferred into the uterus at the 4- to 16-cell stage. One pregnancy was obtained. An IVF and ET program involves certain ethical, legal and religious questions, which have special implications in Israel: foster mothers and the use of donor sperm are forbidden. Only married couples may enter the program. Indications, methods, success rates and method failure are discussed.
Since 1973 the practice of infanticide for some severely handicapped newborns has been receiving more open discussion and defence in the literature on medical ethics. A recent and important argument for the permissibility of infanticide relies crucially on a particular concept of personhood that excludes the theological. This paper attempts to show that the dispute between the proponents of infanticide and their religious opponents cannot be resolved because one side's perspective on the infant is shaped by a metaphysics that is emphatically rejected by the other. In such a situation philosophical argument is powerless to bring about a resolution because there can be no refutation of one side by the other.
A previous essay (Erde, 1988) tracked the influence of the major Western historical paradigm of the great chain of being through various positions taken about abortion. This essay shows the paradigm's influence on our language--especially in animating the use of "god" and phrases like "playing god". This is important given the prevalence of religious values in bioethics debates and the pervasiveness of the language. I hunt unsuccessfully for a meaning that could serve as a moral principle, and I show how these phrases are rooted in the paradigm. I conclude that all that such language can do is offer the pretense that there is a specific absolute ground for forbidding something which could otherwise be morally acceptable. But such language is nearly senseless, and worse still, it is immoral in that it cuts off reflection and debate.
There are religious and philosophical versions of the thesis that AIDS is a punishment for homosexual behaviour. It is argued here that the religious version is seriously incomplete. Because of this incompleteness and because of the indeterminacies that ordinarily attend religious argumentation, it is concluded that the claim may be set aside as unconvincing. Homosexual behaviour is then judged for its morality against utilitarian, deontological, and natural law theories of ethics. It is argued that such behaviour involves no impediment to important moral goals and is not therefore immoral. Where natural law might be used to condemn homosexual behaviour, it is argued that the theory itself is not well established. Consequently there is a prima facie reason for rejecting the philosophical version of the punishment thesis. This conclusion is further supported by noting the lack of proportion between the purported immorality of homosexuality and a punishment as devastating as AIDS.
This is a retrospective study of the outcome of surgical procedures in patients who were Jehovah's Witnesses. Over a 75-month period, 58 Jehovah's Witness patients had 78 surgical procedures at the Vancouver General Hospital. Three patients had preexisting anaemia of less than 100 g.L-1 haemoglobin. Postoperative haemoglobin concentration decreased below 50 g.L-1 in three patients. One patient had a postoperative haemoglobin of 34 g.L-1 (haematocrit 10.1 per cent) and survived. One patient died from uncontrollable postoperative haemorrhage. Perioperative morbidity was not uncommon, including significant hypotension (eight cases), cardiac arrhythmias (six), myocardial ischaemia (three), excessive bleeding (four), postoperative nausea or syncope (four), and wound or urinary tract infection (four).
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