Quality of Life and Human Difference
Genetic Testing, Health Care, and Disability

Discusses the role of quality assessments in social policy, raised by prenatal testing for disability.

David Wasserman (Edited by), Jerome Bickenbach (Edited by), Robert Wachbroit (Edited by)

9780521832014, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 May 2005

288 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm, 0.5 kg

'… what is most interesting about this volume is that while addressing the central issues in the debate about disability and well-being, it sets this in a wider context of getting to grips with deeper theoretical issues … In addition to addressing the particular topic at hand this collection makes a contribution more broadly to bioethics. The material on measuring health versus well-being, for example, has significant implications for the endeavors in population genetic databases that are currently being advocated.' Ruth Chadwick, Lancaster University

This study brings together two important literatures together in the one volume. One concerns the role of quality assessments in social policy, especially health policy. The second concerns ethical and social issues raised by prenatal testing for disability. Hitherto, these two literatures have had little contact with each other: few scholars have written about both, or have compared the two domains in a systematic way, while people with disabilities and disability scholars are underrepresented in recent discussion on health policy and quality of assessment. This book turns the perspectives of disability scholars on issues that have largely been the province of health methodology, policy and philosophy, while angling philosophical policy analysis on problems that have largely been the province of disability scholarship. This volume will be sought after by bioethicists, philosophers, and specialists in disability studies and healthcare economics.

Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction David Wasserman, Jerome Bickenbach and Robert Wachbroit
1. Assessing quality of life: clinical versus health policy uses Robert Wachbroit
2. Predicting genetic disability while commodifying health Anita Silvers
3. Preventing genetically transmitted disabilities while respecting persons with disabilities Dan W. Brock
4. Disability, ideology and quality of life: a bias in biomedical ethics Ron Amundson
5. Values for health states in QALYs and DALYs: desirability versus well-being and worth Erik Nord
6. Preventing the existence of people with disabilities Jeff McMahan
7. Where is the sin is synecdoche? Prenatal testing and parent-child relationship Adrienne Asch and David Wasserman
8. The social context of individual choice Tom Shakespeare
9. Disability and health systems assessment Jerome Bickenbach
Index.

Subject Areas: Medicine: general issues [MB], Disability: social aspects [JFFG], Social & political philosophy [HPS]