This Is Bioethics. Udo Schüklenk. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Udo Schüklenk
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Медицина
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781118770733
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href="http://www.szasz.com/">Thomas Szasz17 fought from the 1960s to liberate people from what he considered to be an oppressive psychiatry (Schaler 2004). Gay activists demanded from the American Psychiatric Association that it remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses18. They denied that there ever was a scientific basis for the profession’s mental illness designation verdict of homosexuality (Bayer 1981). These activists succeeded in 1973. Equally, women also fought to gain control over their bodies from the medical profession and the law, campaigning to have abortion decriminalized. In 1973 in Roe v Wade the United States Supreme Court decriminalized abortion19. In 1988 the Supreme Court in neighboring Canada, in effect, declared laws limiting access to abortion unconstitutional (R v. Morgentaler, [1988] 1 S.C.R. 3020).

      3.9 In a very general sense, trust that the doctor or medical researcher knows best, as it were, was replaced with the idea that competent patients are entitled to make their own self‐regarding choices and to see those choices respected by health care professionals and clinical researchers. Today, in many jurisdictions, patients are legally entitled to decline even life‐preserving medical care, provided they are competent at the time of their decision‐making. Patients became more powerful, medical researchers and doctors’ generally saw their powers cut.

      3.12 A lively debate continues among people working in the field about the question of ‘who is a bioethicist’. Today specialized programs exist in universities that award doctoral degrees in bioethics. For the purpose of this volume we are looking specifically at how philosophical ethics bears on bioethical questions.