In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory (...) listings to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

In response to the many changes currently going on in health care, this book offers the combined insight and wisdom of a stellar group of scholars and professionals with extensive experience in the health care field. The book opens with a look at people's actual experience of health care today, from four different perspectives. It then addresses foundational questions, including the nature of medicine, nursing, and justice. Surveyed next are the changing economics of health care as well as the impact (...) of these changes on such areas as mental health care, long-term care, health care for minorities, and legal malpractice. The closing section of the book assesses from a Christian perspective available constructive alternatives, including creative funding strategies with special attention to the needs of poor persons, physician unions, and the use of "alternative medicine" therapies. (shrink)

Missouri, the "Show Me State," has become the epicenter of several important national public policy debates, including abortion rights, the right to choose and refuse medical treatment, and, most recently, early stem cell research. In this environment, the Center for Practical Bioethics (formerly, Midwest Bioethics Center) emerged and grew. The Center's role in these "cultural wars" is not to advocate for a particular position but to provide well researched and objective information, perspective, and advocacy (...) for the ethical justification of policy positions; and to serve as a neutral convener and provider of a public forum for discussion. In this article, the Center's work on early stem cell research is a case study through which to argue that not only the Center, but also the field of bioethics has a critical role in the politics of public health policy. (shrink)

The arrival of the Covid‐19 pandemic in Pakistan necessitated that the Centre of Biomedical Ethics and Culture in Karachi realign its activities to changing realities in the country. As Pakistan's only bioethics center, and with no guidelines available for allocation of scarce medical resources, CBEC developed “Guidelines for Ethical Healthcare Decision‐Making in Pakistan” with input from medical and civil society stakeholders. The CBEC blog connected to the center's bioethics programs for students from Pakistan and Kenya shifted (...) to Covid‐related issues specific to the context of existing social and political realities within these countries. As part of its outreach activities, CBEC initiated a popular Facebook series, #HumansofCovid, as an experience‐sharing platform for health care professionals and members of the public. Narratives received vary from those by frustrated physicians under quarantine to those concerning street vendors left jobless and a transsexual person in whose opinion “social distancing” is not a new phenomenon for their communities. (shrink)

The National Catholic Bioethics Center’s commentary on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2018 responsum concerning hysterectomy fails to address the explicit reasoning that the CDF offers to justify its response. The CDF does not condone the hysterectomies in question as indirect sterilizations, justified by double effect. Rather, it defines procreation—and consequently sterilization—such that the moral categories of direct and indirect sterilization are not applicable in such cases. The CDF responsum is far more radical and consequential (...) than the NCBC commentary acknowledges. The responsum provides Catholic ethicists with an occasion for a necessary conversation that can be had only once the reasoning of the 2018 responsum is taken seriously in its own right. (shrink)

At the request of the Midwest Bioethics Center (MBC), we surveyed nurses' and physicians' attitudes and needs regarding Hospital Ethics Committees (HECs). The primary objective of this research project was to inform the practices and policies of the Ethics Committee Consortium of the Bioethics Center.Four thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine surveys were distributed to the medical and nursing staff of eight Kansas City metropolitan area hospitals. One thousand and fifty-five surveys were returned, representing a response (...) rate of 21%. (shrink)

Philosophically grounded, methodologically sound, and theoretically rigorous, this paradigm-challenging collection ponders the most dynamic areas of feminist inquiry into bioethical thought and practice and sketches future directions for this rapidly growing field.

The Hastings Center was founded in 1969 to study ethical problems in medicine and biology. The Center arose from a confluence of three social currents: the increased public scrutiny of medicine and its practices, the concern about the moral problems being generated by technological developments, and the desire of one of its founders (Callahan) to make use of his philosophical training in a more applied way. The early years of the Center were devoted to raising money, developing (...) an early agenda of issues, and identifying a cadre of people around the country interested in the issues. Various stresses and strains in the Center and the field are identified, and some final reflections are offered on the nature and value of the contributions made by bioethics as an academic field. (shrink)

"The extensive attention devoted to abortion has led Christians for too long to overlook much of the exploding bioethics agenda. Moreover, to focus only on 'issues' is to fail to address the profound changes taking place in the very nature of the medical profession. This book signals the commitment of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity to help expand the church's bioethical vision and to foster a more substantial Christian contribution to the public debate."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary (...) field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Contemporary bioethics has evolved over the past 40 years predominantly as a “Western” construct drawing fundamental inspiration for its conceptual and methodological frameworks from secular, Anglo-American philosophical traditions. American bioethicists can be credited with playing a defining role in the globalization of this new discipline to the developing countries of the world, but in this process, in the words of LaFleur, “Bioethics has become international without becoming internationalized.” Among the criticisms leveled against the dominant American model of (...) class='Hi'>bioethics is that in its focus on universalism it ignores local cultural and religious influences that are vital to the comprehension of the moral life in many societies. Medical sociologist Renée C. Fox and historian Judith P. Swazey have termed this as a form of “cultural myopia.”. (shrink)

In their article “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) invite us to prioritize environmental health...

Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, on the Margins is a collection of essays that “reflect on the positioning of feminist bioethics” (xi). The volume editors suggest that the discipline of feminist bioethics, twenty years after it began, faces tension between becoming incorporated into mainstream bioethics, which would mean that it has greater influence on bioethics as a whole, and remaining “on the margins,” where it can perhaps better continue its critical project of drawing attention (...) to the ways in which “dominant ways of doing bioethics” are gendered and “thus contribute to culturally inscribed oppressive practices” (3). The volume includes papers with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches and .. (shrink)

The Hastings Center was founded in 1969 to study ethical problems in medicine and biology. The Center arose from a confluence of three social currents: the increased public scrutiny of medicine and its practices, the concern about the moral problems being generated by technological developments, and the desire of one of its founders to make use of his philosophical training in a more applied way. The early years of the Center were devoted to raising money, developing an (...) early agenda of issues, and identifying a cadre of people around the country interested in the issues. Various stresses and strains in the Center and the field are identified, and some final reflections are offered on the nature and value of the contributions made by bioethics as an academic field. (shrink)

Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick, Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, on the Margins, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, reviewed by Robyn Bluhm.

Book reviewed in this article: In That Case: Medical Ethics in Everyday Practice. By Alastair Campbell and Roger Higgs. Medical Genetics Casebook: A Clinical Introduction to Medical Ethics Systems Theory. By Colleen D. Clements. Cases in Bioethics from the Hastings Center Report. Edited by Carol Levine and Robert M. Veatch. Hastings‐on‐Hudson.

This book will also inform the general public, patients, and family members as they seek answers to the bioethical issues of the day.

The 1994 edition is here enlarged with new sections on the goals and allocation of medicine and human cloning. There is no index.

We present the perspective of a Bioethics Consultation Service operating in an urban hospital in Dayton, Ohio, USA, as it adapted to treating Sars-CoV-2 patients throughout 2020. Since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Ohio on 9 March 2020, until 1 January 2021, the Bioethics Consultation Service was consulted 60 times, a 22.5% increase from the same period of 2019. The most common diagnoses requiring consultation included end-stage renal disease requiring dialysis, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and sepsis. (...) Only 10% of consultations were for patients hospitalized with COVID-19. This is a qualitative analysis of the cases we saw and a discussion of factors that affected our service while adapting to COVID-19 standards of care. (shrink)

Nonhuman primates represent an important reservoir for the transmission of new infectious diseases to humans. While several working groups and international agencies have grappled with the ethics of xenotransplantation, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics have recently published a comprehensive and far-reaching series of recommendations that, while not eliminating the infectious disease risks, have nonetheless detailed the major points for concern and have developed a rational approach to minimizing these risks. This report should serve as the blueprint from which to (...) proceed with xenotransplantation. (shrink)

The anthology, Feminist Bioethics, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick, examines how feminist bioethics theoretically and methodologically challenges mainstream bioethics, and whether these approaches are useful for exploring difference in other contexts. It offers critical conceptual analyses of "autonomy", "universality", and "trust", and covers topics such as testing for hereditary cancer, prenatal selection for sexual orientation, midwifery, public health, disability, Indigenous research reform in Australia, and China's one child policy.

"A book from the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics." Includes bibliographical references (p. [141]-195) and index.

The various features of bioethics center around a person’s right to decide what happens to her body and what she may do with it. This is true for patients and medical professionals. Our intuitions concerning rights in bioethics are similar to our intuitions concerning rights in other areas. Consider, for example, rights concerning movement, privacy, religion, sex, speech, and thought. Intuitively, these rights are consistent with one another, trump other moral considerations, and can be lost. If people (...) were to own themselves, this would provide a unified explanation of what justifies other rights, what particular rights people have, why these particular rights are consistent with one another, and why these particular rights have certain features, such as trumping utility. Here I explore whether people own themselves. (shrink)

Life Choices is the second edition of a collection of “some of the very best articles published in the Hastings Center Report over the last 28 years”. The collection has two main aims: to provide a challenging text for classrooms and to serve as a testimony to the achievements of the Hastings Center. The first edition was published in 1994 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Hastings Center's foundation. The Hastings Center, based in New York (...) state, is the oldest independent, non-partisan interdisciplinary research institute of its kind in the world and has become a highly influential organisation. The center's mission is the study of the moral problems that arise out of the rapid advances in medicine and biology, and collaboration with policy makers, both in the private and public sphere, to aid the analysis of the ethical dimension of their work. The collection is organised around themes which reflect the center's research …. (shrink)

In 2022, the Research Center for Islamic Legislation & Ethics (CILE) and the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) submitted a proposal to host the 17th edition of the World Congress of Bioethics. After announcing that the CILE‐WISH proposal was the winning bid, concerns were raised by bioethicists based in Europe and the USA. To address these concerns, the International Association of Bioethics (IAB) developed a dedicated FAQ section, in coordination with the host institutions, for the first (...) time in IAB history. One‐to‐one communication ensued and individual responses were shared with these colleagues. As a continuation of this conversation, we (CILE Acting Director, WISH Research Fellow and Head of Content, and WISH CEO) address the concerns raised in the Letter‐to‐the‐Editor of Bioethics by Graaf et al. As we support the call to revisit some contentious issues within the global community of bioethicists, we maintain that this should be based on meticulously discussed, informed, consistent and equitable criteria. We also argue that mutual learning from diverse cultures and moral traditions is the optimal way for our scholarly community to be truly global and to eschew the flaws ensuing from ethnocentric discourses. (shrink)

Issues concerning patients' rights are at the center of bioethics, but the political basis for these rights has rarely been examined. In Bioethics in a Liberal Society: The Political Framework of Bioethics Decision Making , Thomas May offers a compelling analysis of how the political context of liberal constitutional democracy shapes the rights and obligations of both patients and health care professionals. May focuses on how a key feature of liberal society -- namely, an individual's right (...) to make independent decisions -- has an impact on the most important relational facets of health care, such as patients' autonomy and professionals' rights of conscience. Although a liberal political framework protects individual judgments, May asserts that this right is based on the assumption of an individual's competency to make sound decisions. May uses case studies to examine society's approach to medical decision making when, for reasons ranging from age to severe mental disorder, a person lacks sufficient competency to make independent and fully informed choices. To protect the autonomy of these vulnerable patients, May emphasizes the need for health care ethics committees and ethics consultants to help guide the decision-making process in clinical settings. Bioethics in a Liberal Society is essential reading for all those interested in understanding how bioethics is practiced within our society. (shrink)

The anthology, Feminist Bioethics, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick, examines how feminist bioethics theoretically and methodologically challenges mainstream bioethics, and whether these approaches are useful for exploring difference in other contexts. It offers critical conceptual analyses of "autonomy", "universality", and "trust", and covers topics such as testing for hereditary cancer, prenatal selection for sexual orientation, midwifery, public health, disability, Indigenous research reform in Australia, and China's one child policy.