Eugenic sterilization: medico-legal and sociological aspects.
(59/83)
The court-ordered sterilization of a normal 18-year-old black female in North Carolina focused attention on the unfortunate impact of eugenic statutes that allow sterilization as a method of social control. The existence of these laws in many states allows misapplication and abuse of authority which, not infrequently, is directed liberally to blacks and other minority groups.Eugenic sterilization is, at this time, a legally accepted form of "medical treatment." The justification of such sterilization is the vague concept that the presumed "mentally deficient" individual is probably a potential parent of socially inadequate offspring who would likewise be socially inadequate.Since there never has been factual substantiation of whether the sterilization of these individuals will diminish the incidence of mental retardation, it is necessary to focus attention on the concept of eugenic sterilization and point out its many fallacies. (+info)
In the matter of Stephen Dawson: right v. duty of health care.
(60/83)
In cases like that of Stephen Dawson the ethics of proxy decision-making are at stake. As long as patients are persons they have rights, the incompetent ones no less than those who are competent. The only difference is that in the case of incompetent persons the rights must be exercised by proxy. The import of the Stephen Dawson case is that by this precedent Canadian law now radically alters the status of incompetent minors in such a way that their rights are curtailed in two fundamental ways. First, the parameter of qualitative considerations that is available to any other person is removed from the armory of the decision-making criteria of incompetent minors and can no longer be employed by the proxy decision-makers. Second, what are rights in the case of competent individuals--the right to life and the right to health care--become duties. Ethically this denouement is deplorable. The medical profession now not only faces the pragmatically unenviable task of having to save or sustain all incompetent minors so long as medical science will permit but will have to do so even at the cost of quality of life. I shall pass over in silence the ethics of the resource-allocation problem that now arises. As a medical ethicist I can only hope that the medical profession will soon see fit to challenge this decision on a formal basis. (+info)
Consent to treatment: the medical standard reaffirmed.(61/83)
These discussions are selected from the weekly staff conferences in the Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. Taken from transcriptions, they are prepared by Drs Homer A. Boushey, Associate Professor of Medicine, and David G. Warnock, Associate Professor of Medicine, under the direction of Dr Lloyd H. Smith, Jr, Professor of Medicine. Requests for reprints should be sent to the Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, San Francisco, CA 94143. (+info)