Bioethics and disability toward a disability-conscious bioethics

• Main Author: Ouellette, Alicia (Author)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2011
• Series: Cambridge disability, law and policy series
• Subjects: Bioethical Issues; Disabled Persons; Patient Advocacy; Patient Rights; Prejudice; Ethics, Medical; United States
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.

 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.