Euthanasia is the practise of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering.
Informed consent is a principle in medical ethics, medical law and media studies, that a patient must have sufficient information and understanding before making decisions about their medical care. Pertinent information may include risks and benefits of treatments, alternative treatments, the patient's role in treatment, and their right to refuse treatment. In most systems, healthcare providers have a legal and ethical responsibility to ensure that a patient's consent is informed. This principle applies more broadly than healthcare intervention, for example to conduct research and to disclose a person's medical information.
Medical ethics is an applied branch of ethics which analyzes the practice of clinical medicine and related scientific research. Medical ethics is based on a set of values that professionals can refer to in the case of any confusion or conflict. These values include the respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice. Such tenets may allow doctors, care providers, and families to create a treatment plan and work towards the same common goal. It is important to note that these four values are not ranked in order of importance or relevance and that they all encompass values pertaining to medical ethics. However, a conflict may arise leading to the need for hierarchy in an ethical system, such that some moral elements overrule others with the purpose of applying the best moral judgement to a difficult medical situation. Medical ethics is particularly relevant in decisions regarding involuntary treatment and involuntary commitment.
Utilitarian bioethics refers to the branch of bioethics that incorporates principles of utilitarianism to directing practices and resources where they will have the most usefulness and highest likelihood to produce happiness, in regards to medicine, health, and medical or biological research.
The right to die is a concept based on the opinion that human beings are entitled to end their life or undergo voluntary euthanasia. Possession of this right is often understood that a person with a terminal illness, incurable pain, or without the will to continue living, should be allowed to end their own life, use assisted suicide, or to decline life-prolonging treatment. The question of who, if anyone, may be empowered to make this decision is often the subject of debate.
Stephanie Keene, better known by the pseudonym Baby K, was an anencephalic baby who became the center of a major American court case and a debate among bioethicists.
Intersex medical interventions, also known as intersex genital mutilations (IGM), are surgical, hormonal and other medical interventions performed to modify atypical or ambiguous genitalia and other sex characteristics, primarily for the purposes of making a person's appearance more typical and to reduce the likelihood of future problems. The history of intersex surgery has been characterized by controversy due to reports that surgery can compromise sexual function and sensation, and create lifelong health issues. Timing, evidence, necessity and indications for surgeries in infancy, adolescence or adult age have been controversial, associated with issues of consent.
Eduard Verhagen is an attorney and the medical director of the department of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG). He is mainly known for his involvement in infant euthanasia in the Netherlands.
The term wrongful abortion refers to an abortion that a pregnant woman undergoes as a result of negligent or malicious conduct by a physician or health care provider.
The Groningen Protocol is a medical protocol created in September 2004 by Eduard Verhagen, the medical director of the department of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) in Groningen, the Netherlands. It contains directives with criteria under which physicians can perform "active ending of life on infants" without fear of legal prosecution.
Child abuse is physical, sexual, emotional and/or psychological maltreatment or neglect of a child, especially by a parent or a caregiver. Child abuse may include any act or failure to act by a parent or a caregiver that results in actual or potential wrongful harm to a child and can occur in a child's home, or in organizations, schools, or communities the child interacts with.
Factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA), also known as fabricated or induced illness by carers (FII), and first named as Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP), is a mental health disorder in which a caregiver creates the appearance of health problems in another person, typically their child. This may include injuring the child or altering test samples. The caregiver then presents the person as being sick or injured. Permanent injury or death of the victim may occur as a result of their caregiver having the disorder. The behaviour may be motivated by the caretaker seeking sympathy or attention.
The Baby Doe Law or Baby Doe Amendment is an amendment to the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, passed in 1984, that sets forth specific criteria and guidelines for the treatment of disabled newborns in the United States, regardless of the wishes of the parents.
Involuntary Euthanasia is currently illegal in all 50 states of the United States. Assisted suicide is legal in 10 jurisdictions in the US: Washington, D.C. and the states of California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico, Maine, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Washington. The status of assisted suicide is disputed in Montana, though currently authorized per the Montana Supreme Court's ruling in Baxter v. Montana that "nothing in Montana Supreme Court precedent or Montana statutes [indicates] that physician aid in dying is against public policy."
Eluana Englaro was an Italian woman from Lecco, who entered a persistent vegetative state on 18 January 1992, following a car accident, and subsequently became the focus of a court battle between supporters and opponents of euthanasia. Shortly after her accident, medical staff began feeding Englaro with a feeding tube, but her father "fought to have her feeding tube removed, saying it would be a dignified end to his daughter's life. He said that before the crash his daughter visited a friend who was in a coma and told him she didn't want the same thing to happen to her if she were ever in the same state." The authorities refused his request, but the decision was finally reversed in 2009, and she died after her nutrition was withheld after she had spent seventeen years in the persistent vegetative state.
The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) is a small office within the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), specifically the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health in the Office of the Secretary of DHHS, that deals with ethical oversights in clinical research conducted by the department, mostly through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Jacob M. Appel is an American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Appel's novel The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. He is the director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry and a professor of psychiatry and medical education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and he practices emergency psychiatry at the adjoining Mount Sinai Health System. Appel is the subject of the 2019 documentary film Jacob by director Jon Stahl.
Child euthanasia is a form of euthanasia that is applied to children who are gravely ill or have significant birth defects. In 2005, the Netherlands became the first country since the end of Nazi Germany to decriminalize euthanasia for infants with hopeless prognosis and intractable pain. Nine years later, Belgium amended its 2002 Euthanasia Act to extend the rights of euthanasia to minors. Like euthanasia, there is world-wide public controversy and ethical debate over the moral, philosophical and religious issues of child euthanasia.
The excommunication of Margaret McBride occurred with the sanctioning by the American religious sister Margaret McBride in November 2009 of an abortion at a Roman Catholic hospital, the St. Joseph's Hospital, in Phoenix. It was lifted in December 2011. Her decision and her subsequent excommunication aroused controversy in the areas of medical ethics and Catholic theology.
Baby M was the pseudonym of an Australian girl named Allison who was born with severe birth defects, whose treatment and eventual death caused significant controversy and international discussion about the medical ethics of disabled newborns. Right to Life activists accused her parents and the hospital of murdering the infant, leading to a lengthy legal inquest.
