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)

9781107610651, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2013

386 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.51 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]