Tag: Anne Drapkin Lyerly

Honoring a person’s wishes at the end of life is widely recognized as profoundly important to humane, ethical care.1 To that end, efforts to help individuals make their preferences about end-of-life care known have involved advance care planning, including the completion of advance directives and identification of a surrogate decision...

As large-scale biobanks are developed for translational genomic research and health care quality improvement, they are also becoming attractive as sites for public health interventions, such as population-based preventive sequencing for actionable variants. With the rapid advance of next-generation sequencing, the feasibility of such population health interventions is also increasing....

Rethinking Bed Rest For Pregnancy “The bottom line is that there’s never been any proven benefit of bed rest,” says Dr. Anne Drapkin Lyerly, an OB-GYN and professor of bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lyerly and colleagues in 2013 did a review of the scientific...

As Zika virus infection during pregnancy can cause a range of congenital anomalies, pregnant women may be a target population for vaccination in future outbreaks. Their inclusion in vaccine trials is critical to ensure safe and effective vaccines in pregnancy. Though many vaccine candidates are in development, pregnant women’s willingness...

Clinical research to inform the evidence base to guide nonobstetrical care during pregnancy is critically important for the well-being of women and their future offspring. Conversations about regulations for such research, including whether paternal consent should ever be required, should be informed by the perspectives of those most affected, namely,...

Human infection challenge studies, which deliberately expose healthy volunteers to disease-causing infectious agents under carefully controlled conditions, offer a valuable method of biomedical research aimed at efficient initial efficacy testing of vaccine candidates, among other possible uses. They can be controversial, however, often evoking the response, “How can researchers do...

Two critical, recurring questions can arise in many areas of research with human subjects but are poorly addressed in much existing research regulation and ethics oversight: How should research risks to “bystanders” be addressed? And how should research be evaluated when risks are substantial but not offset by direct benefit...

Excerpt One late evening in the 1990s when I (Dr. Lyerly) was a resident, our gynecology team was called to evaluate a young woman in shock. According to her husband, she had not been herself for a couple of days, then she fainted on the kitchen floor, her pants soaked...

Childbirth is often understood as a paradigmatically “happy” event where good outcomes are expected and the process anticipated as a reason for celebration. Yet the narratives in this volume reflect sadness and grief, even when a healthy child is born. In this essay, I interrogate the genesis of and our...

Though many women in need of access to HIV preventive regimes are pregnant, there is a dearth of data to guide these care decisions. While oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has been shown to prevent HIV infection in numerous high-risk populations, pregnant women have been excluded from all major prospective trials....