Each year, hundreds of thousands of women in the United States confront significant medical illness while pregnant: Hypertension, diabetes, serious psychiatric illnesses, autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and lupus, and even cancers complicate pregnancies. Yet we face a critical dearth of information about how to treat them. Little is known about how drugs work in … Read more

Feminist and disability scholars have critiqued the role of prenatal testing technologies in fostering parental expectations to give birth to “perfect” children. However, in the case of postnatal screening for genetic disorders, identifying large numbers of asymptomatic infants brings previously hidden imperfections into critical relief. Consequently, newborn screening technologies have altered the day-to-day landscape of … Read more

In the last decade, there have been efforts to globalize the field of bioethics, particularly in developing countries, where biomedical and other research is increasingly taking place. We describe and evaluate some key ethical criticisms directed towards these initiatives, and argue that while they may be marked by ethical, practical, and political tensions and pitfalls, … Read more

In this paper, I analyze the illness stories narrated by a mother and her 13-year-old son as part of an ethnographic study of child chronic pain sufferers and their families. In examining some of the moral, relational and communicative challenges of giving an account of one’s pain, I focus on what is left out of … Read more

OBJECTIVE: To describe fertility patients’ preferences for disposition of cryopreserved embryos and determine factors important to these preferences. DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey conducted between June 2006 and July 2007. SETTING: Nine geographically diverse U.S. fertility clinics. PATIENT(S): 1020 fertility patients with cryopreserved embryos. INTERVENTION(S): Self-administered questionnaire. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): Likelihood of selecting each of five conventional … Read more

Renée Fox and Judith Swazey’s most recent book traces the origins and development of the field of bioethics, including their participation in it over the past 40 years. According to the authors, the aims of Observing Bioethics are to describe the “intellectual, professional, and organizational development” of bioethics and to situate the field within its … Read more

Virtue ethics has its theoretical roots in ancient Greek and Chinese ap- proaches to the question of how to live well as a human being—that is, how to live a good life. A “good life” in this sense is one that expresses excellences of human character. In both ancient and modern forms of virtue ethics, … Read more

On July 25, 1978 in England, Louise Brown became the first baby born by in vitro fertilization (IVF). Three years later, Elizabeth Carr followed suit as the first “test tube baby” born in the United States. Since then, much has changed in the field of human reproduction. Once reported “with a fervor not seen since … Read more