Bioethics and Disability
Toward a Disability-Conscious Bioethics

This book provides the tools for understanding the concerns, fears and biases people with disabilities and bioethicists have.

Alicia Ouellette (Author)

9780521110303, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 April 2011

386 pages
23.4 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.64 kg

'… impressive … a worthwhile contribution to the field of bioethics and, hopefully, a model for people who are so struck by these thorny issues that they are likely to take up the challenge to be disability-conscious.' Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics

Bioethics and Disability provides tools for understanding the concerns, fears and biases that have convinced some people with disabilities that the health care setting is a dangerous place and some bioethicists that disability activists have nothing to offer bioethics. It wrestles with the charge that bioethics as a discipline devalues the lives of persons with disabilities, arguing that reconciling the competing concerns of the disability community and the autonomy-based approach of mainstream bioethics is not only possible, but essential for a bioethics committed to facilitating good medical decision making and promoting respect for all persons, regardless of ability. Through in-depth case studies involving newborns, children and adults with disabilities, it proposes a new model for medical decision making that is both sensitive to and sensible about the fact of disability in medical cases.

1. The struggle: disability rights versus bioethics
2. Clashing perspectives and a call for reconciliation
3. Infancy
4. Childhood
5. The reproductive years
6. Adulthood
7. The end of life
8. Toward a disability-conscious bioethics.

Subject Areas: Bio-ethics [PSAD], Medical & healthcare law [LNTM], Legal ethics & professional conduct [LATC], Law [L]