Bioethics and Disability

Toward a Disability-Conscious Bioethics

Alicia Ouellette

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780521110303
• eBook ISBN: 9781139118996
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Medical Law
• Index: Law

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Struggle: Disability Rights versus Bioethics
• 2 Clashing Perspectives and a Call for Reconciliation
• 3 Infancy
• 4 Childhood
• 5 The Reproductive Years
• 6 The Adult Years
• 7 The End of Life
• 8 Toward a Disability-Conscious Bioethics
• Index