Bioethics and Disability: Toward a Disability-Conscious Bioethics (Cambridge Disability Law and Policy Series)

Bioethics and Disability provides tools for understanding the concerns, fears, and biases that have convinced some people with disabilities that the health care setting is a dangerous place and some bioethicists that disability activists have nothing to offer bioethics. It wrestles with the charge that bioethics as a discipline devalues the lives of persons with disabilities, arguing that reconciling the competing concerns of the disability community and the autonomy-based approach of mainstream bioethics is not only possible, but essential for a bioethics committed to facilitating good medical decision making and promoting respect for all persons, regardless of ability. Through in-depth case studies involving newborns, children, and adults with disabilities, Bioethics and Disability proposes a new model for medical decision making that is both sensitive to and sensible about the fact of disability in medical cases. Disability-conscious bioethics will bring together disability experts and bioethicists to identify and mitigate disability bias in our health care systems.