Bioethics legislation united states

The aim of this article is to carry a bioethical and a limited policy analysis on the progression and aftermath of the 2017-2018 listeriosis epidemic or disaster in South Africa. This links the context of the listeriosis epidemic/disaster to the overall public health systems, disaster medicine, and ethics in South Africa, with specific focus on standards of public service and private stakeholder conduct in the country. The public service angle is unpacked in terms the policy framework relevant to ethics and public health/disaster management...

A key public health measure has received far too little attention over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic: paid sick leave policies that encourage people at risk of spreading disease to stay home rather than come to work. The United States is one of the only developed countries that fails to guarantee paid sick leave at the federal level, leaving a patchwork of state and private policies that undersupply time off when people are contagious and protect top wage earners at wildly disproportionate rates compared with what workers with lower incomes experience...

The aim of this review was to discuss bioethics in prenatal diagnosis and health care after recent legislative and judicial changes affecting reproductive rights, such as the repeal of 'Roe v. Wade' in the United States. We recognize that abortion involves particular moralities that are not universal or shared by all cultures, groups, and individuals. We reviewed the historical aspects of embryology and personhood, fetal morbidity and mortality, and parental options for prenatal diagnostic testing. We examined relevant ethical issues including informed consent, the emergence of fetal pain, reproductive autonomy, the fiduciary responsibilities of pregnant mothers, and the obligations of physicians caring for the maternal-fetal dyad...

BACKGROUND: Penile prosthesis surgeons face an ethical dilemma when confronted with a sex offender who seeks surgical management of erectile dysfunction. AIM: To provide practice guidelines to screen and manage patients with a history of sexual violence prior to surgery. METHODS: Three urologists with expertise in penile prosthesis surgery and 1 medical bioethicist were asked to contribute their opinions and provide recommendations to address this controversial topic...

There is growing momentum to legalize medical cannabis across the United States. Positive public attitudes and permissive policies are based on growing anecdotal experiences and medical evidence that enumerate the health benefits of cannabis. Against this backdrop, Muslim stakeholders are (re)-evaluating their stance on the issue for Muslim patients who may benefit from such novel treatments, Muslim physicians who could incorporate the provision of cannabis into practices, and Muslim entrepreneurs who may seek to engage with the pharmaceutical and business aspects of the growing industry...

BACKGROUND: Respect for patients' autonomy is usually considered to be an important ethical principle in Western countries; privacy is one of the implications of such respect. Healthcare professionals frequently encounter ethical dilemmas during their practice. The past few decades have seen an increased use of courts to resolve intractable ethical dilemmas across both the developed and the developing world. However, Chinese and American bioethics differ largely due to the influence of Chinese Confucianism and Western religions, respectively, and there is a dearth of comparative studies that explore cases of ethical dilemmas between China and the United States...

Background and objectives : To explore the ethical and legal complexities arising from the controversial issue of surrogacy, particularly in terms of how they affect fundamental rights of children and parents. Surrogacy is a form of medically-assisted procreation (MAP) in which a woman "lends" her uterus to carry out a pregnancy on behalf of a third party. There are pathological conditions, such as uterine agenesis or hysterectomy outcomes, that may prevent prospective mothers from becoming pregnant or carry a pregnancy to term; such patients may consider finding a surrogate mother...

United States law recognizes adult reproductive liberty and many states view surrogacy services through that lens. During the COVID-19 pandemic in March, 2020, New York State enacted the Child-Parent Surrogacy Act (CPSA) into law, after feminists and their allies had caused its defeat in 2019. Just before approval of the CPSA, a group of legislators introduced the Alternative Surrogacy Bill (ASB). This article is a case study that examines how the CPSA and not the ASB became law, examining surrogate rights, the best interests of the child, and the ethical issues related to adult donor-conceived and surrogacy born children's rights to information about their ancestry...

Since the publication of the Institute of Medicine’s report “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” awareness of the importance of medical errors has increased. These are a major cause of morbidity and mortality and recent studies suggest that they can be the third leading cause of death in the United States. Difficulties have been identified by health personnel to prevent, detect and disclose to patients the occurrence of a medical error, an also to report them to the appropriate authorities. Although human error cannot be eliminated, it is possible to design safety systems to mitigate their frequency and consequences...

AIM: In the past few years, spectacular progress in neuroscience has led to the emergence of a new interdisciplinary field, the so-called "neurolaw" whose goal is to explore the effects of neuroscientific discoveries on legal proceedings and legal rules and standards. In the United States, a number of neuroscientific researches are designed specifically to explore legally relevant topics and a case-law has already been developed. In Europe, neuroscientific evidence is increasingly being used in criminal courtrooms, as part of psychiatric testimony, nourishing the debate about the legal implications of brain research in psychiatric-legal settings...

In legal domains ranging from tort to torture, pain and its degree do important definitional work by delimiting boundaries of lawfulness and of entitlements. Yet, for all the work done by pain as a term in legal texts and practice, it has a confounding lack of external verifiability. Now, neuroimaging is rendering pain and myriad other subjective states at least partly ascertainable. This emerging ability to ascertain and quantify subjective states is prompting a "hedonic" or a "subjectivist" turn in legal scholarship, which has sparked a vigorous debate as to whether the quantification of subjective states might affect legal theory and practice...

A growing literature examines descriptive and normative questions about medical tourism such as: How does it operate? What are its effects? Are home country patients or their governments failing in moral duties by engaging in or permitting medical tourism? By contrast, much less has been written on the regulatory dimension: What might be done about medical tourism if we were convinced that it posed ethical issues and were motivated to act? I shall argue that this kind of regulatory analysis is essential for bioethical analysis of medical tourism...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Schools may have an ethical obligation to act in response to the precipitous increase in the incidence of obesity among children. Using a bioethics framework, we present a rationale for school programs to improve the nutritional quality of students' diets. Because children are required to spend half their waking hours in school and because they consume a substantial portion of their daily food there, school is a logical focus for efforts to encourage healthy dietary behaviors to prevent obesity and its consequent individual and collective costs...

The goal of the seminar which took place in Paris on April 15th and 16th, 2010, was to understand the reasons which lead, on both side of the Atlantic and from a common basis of values, to different choice about essential rules concerning: consent strategies for after death organ donation: non heart beating donation; anonymity; living donation; paired-exchange donation ("crossed donation"); altruistic donation ("good Samaritan"); donation incentives; the place devoted to patient's representatives in health systems...

Increasingly, children and adolescents with complex chronic conditions are living in the community. Federal legislation and regulations facilitate their participation in school. Some of these children and adolescents and their families may wish to forego life-sustaining medical treatment, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation, because they would be ineffective or because the risks outweigh the benefits. Honoring these requests in the school environment is complex because of the limited availability of school nurses and the frequent lack of supporting state legislation and regulations...

A spate of legislations prohibiting cigarette smoking in enclosed public spaces, mainly on grounds of public health protection, recently swept across cities around the world. This is in tandem with a raft of increasingly restrictive national laws that emerged on the back of the ratification of the WHO Framework for Tobacco Control by more than one 168 countries in 2005. The central debate on the increasingly restrictive tobacco laws revolves on the extent to which public health interests justification should ground political intervention in a private right as basic as tobacco smoking, which interestingly is often lumped in the food and beverage category...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Legislation in individual member states of the European Union on human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research is as divergent as the different cultural, ethical, and religious views on the issue. On the occasion of the public launch of the European Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry (hESCreg: www.hescreg.eu), a two-day symposium was held on 18 and 19 January 2008 in Berlin to offer participants an overview of state-of-the-art hESC research and legislation throughout Europe and in selected regions of the world...