Medical Ethics

A

Mortality Issues

For many centuries death was clearly indicated by the absence of a pulse or signs of breathing. In the 1960s advances in life-support technology, such as mechanical respirators and the heart-lung machine, enabled physicians to artificially maintain function in the heart and lungs, and the clear signs of death became blurred. The resulting challenge—to forge a new definition of death—was a major spur to the growth of medical ethics during the 1960s and 1970s.

An early effort along these lines was a set of guidelines issued by a committee at the Harvard University Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1968. These guidelines introduced the concept of brain death—defined as an end of all function in the brain and central nervous system, even in a body sustained by artificial technology. In 1981 a United States federal advisory group on medical ethics, the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, created a guideline for defining death that specifies not only “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions,” but also “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain.” Within a few years, most states had adopted this definition. Most European nations, Canada, Australia, and Central and South American nations define death either as the loss of all independent lung and heart function or the permanent and irreversible loss of all brain function.

The concept of brain death did not solve the dilemma of patients being sustained by artificial means—particularly in cases of permanent vegetative states (when a patient has some brain function but shows no response to the external environment). Using medical technology, these patients can be kept alive for years, if not decades. A landmark bioethical and legal case in this area concerned Karen Ann Quinlan, a 21-year-old woman in 1975 who fell into a permanent vegetative state as a result of ingesting a mixture of tranquilizers and alcohol. Her parents, carrying out what they believed their daughter's wishes would be, requested that she be disconnected from her life-support system. Hospital officials, while sympathetic to the parents’ wishes, would not agree, and a long court battle followed. Ultimately a New Jersey court agreed with the parents, and Quinlan was disconnected from her respirator. (Unexpectedly, she began to breathe on her own and lived another ten years in a nursing home.)

The Quinlan case brought the “right to die” issue into the realm of public discussion. As a result, in many cases, patients can now make advanced directives, also known as living wills, directing that their lives not be sustained by artificial means. Other aged or gravely ill patients have used living wills to specify that if they should suffer heart failure or other crises while in the hospital, medical staff should make no extraordinary effort to resuscitate them.

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Allowing a patient to die raises one set of ethical issues. Actively helping a patient achieve death, often referred to as euthanasia, raises still other moral questions. For many years, medical ethicists have debated whether there is a significant distinction between the two courses of action. In the United States (with the exception of Oregon), Canada, and most other nations, euthanasia is illegal. In the Netherlands, the parliament in 1993 established informal guidelines under which physicians would not be prosecuted for participating in voluntary euthanasia. The Dutch parliament formally legalized voluntary euthanasia in 2000, provided that it involved the full consent of the patient and agreement of all concerned medical personnel.

Still another controversy related to euthanasia concerns the decision of when, and if, it is ethically permissible to withhold treatment from a child. This issue came into public focus with the case of “Baby Doe” in 1982. The newborn infant was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, a chromosomal disorder that causes moderate to severe developmental disabilities. The baby also had a hole in the esophagus (the passageway through the throat) that prevented the baby from feeding. The parents, apparently unwilling to raise a child with Down Syndrome, refused to consent to the routine surgery that could have corrected the esophageal defect, and the baby died after six days. The case outraged many, and officials in the administration of President Ronald Reagan rushed to pass legislation preventing future similar scenarios.

An issue related to euthanasia is assisted suicide, voluntary suicide with the help of another person. In the United States this matter has been highly publicized through the actions of American physician Jack Kevorkian, who in recent years assisted in more than 130 suicides. In 1999, after several previous acquittals in other cases, Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder after administering a lethal injection to a Michigan man suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressively debilitating, currently incurable disease. Kevorkian was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison but was released in 2007 after serving 8 years of his sentence.

In Canada, assisted suicide is illegal. In the United States, the legal situation regarding assisted suicide has been left largely to the individual states. In the 1997 decision of State of Washington v. Glucksberg, the Supreme Court of the United States determined that there is no constitutional right to die with the help of a physician. The Court has also upheld state laws that ban assisted suicide. However, in 1994 and again in 1997 voters in the state of Oregon approved a measure allowing physicians to prescribe lethal medications when requested by a mentally competent adult who is suffering in the final stages of terminal illness. In 2006 the Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s assisted suicide law by a 6-3 vote, after the administration of President George W. Bush challenged the law’s legality.

All these issues—determining when life has ended and deciding what constitutes a reasonable quality of life and whether the patient, the health-care system, or the courts should have ultimate authority in life or death—remain unresolved and continue to challenge medical ethicists.

B

Reproductive Medicine

Many new questions of medical ethics have occurred as a result of developments in reproductive medicine. In the 1960s the development of the birth-control pill raised ethical issues, especially for people whose religions forbade the use of artificial birth control. In 1973 the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion with its landmark Roe v. Wade decision. In 1988 the Canadian Supreme Court removed abortion from the Criminal Code of Canada, enabling the decision of abortion to be made confidentially between a patient and her physician within the confines of Canadian law. Controversy surrounding these rulings—including discussion of the origins and meaning of personhood, the rights of the fetus and pregnant women, and the role the state should play in reproductive decisions—have kept abortion a volatile political and ethical issue into the 21st century.

Contributing to this heated debate has been the development of a variety of drugs that either prevent or end pregnancies. Emergency contraceptive pills, commonly known as morning-after pills, use high doses of hormones that can prevent or delay ovulation, inhibit a sperm from fertilizing an egg, or make the uterine lining inhospitable to a fertilized egg. If taken by a woman within 72 hours after unprotected sexual intercourse, these drugs can prevent pregnancy. Doctors have long prescribed high doses of certain oral contraceptives to patients within three days after unprotected intercourse. More recently, drugs specifically created for the purpose of emergency contraception have become available. In some states of the United States, these drugs can be dispensed by a pharmacist without a doctor's prescription. Abortion rights advocates consider these drugs a welcome addition to the limited number of effective contraceptive methods, but abortion opponents strongly disagree. Since there is a small chance that these drugs may take effect after an egg is fertilized, when abortion opponents believe a human life has already begun, critics view the drug as just another form of abortion.

Even more controversial is the drug mifepristone, also known as RU-486. Mifepristone is used to induce abortion in the first seven weeks of pregnancy—when an embryo is less than 2.5 cm (1 in) in length—without requiring surgery. Developed by a French pharmaceutical firm, mifepristone was first approved for use in France in 1988; later it was approved in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and other European countries. The drug was approved for use in the United States in 2000 under the brand name Mifeprex.

Mifepristone blocks progesterone, a hormone required to maintain pregnancy. A woman receives mifepristone in her physician's office. She then returns to the doctor's office within 48 hours to take the drug misoprostol, a hormone-like substance that makes the uterus contract and expel fetal tissue. A woman typically experiences bleeding and cramping that may last from 9 to 16 days. Two weeks after receiving the second drug, the woman returns to her physician to make sure the drug treatment was successful in terminating the pregnancy.

Opponents of abortion contend that the easy availability of this drug increases the chance that women will choose this method as a form of belated birth control. Abortion rights advocates note that, since use of the drug is a private matter between a woman and her physician and requires no surgery, a woman no longer needs to visit an abortion clinic, which may be targeted by antiabortion protesters. Proponents also cite evidence from clinical trials of the drug showing that many women preferred the less invasive procedure to a surgical abortion because it helped them feel more in control of their personal health. As with other abortion procedures, the cost of mifepristone will not be covered by Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income individuals and families, unless the pregnancy results from rape or incest or endangers the life of the mother. Advocates complain that as a result poor women do not have the same access to reproductive health care that wealthier women have.

Infertility is also an important area of medical ethics. Many couples unable to have children turn to fertility-enhancing technologies for help. Artificial insemination, a method in which doctors introduce semen into the cervix, raised new ethical issues about how potential parents should choose sperm or egg donors, on what basis and with what assurances of privacy donors should be recruited, and whether donors are entitled to parental rights or financial compensation.

In 1978 the birth of the first so-called test-tube baby was an important technological breakthrough. Doctors used in vitro fertilization (IVF), a method in which fertilization of the ovum with sperm was conducted in a laboratory and the resulting embryo was subsequently implanted in the mother's uterus. Soon thereafter, a variety of other IVF techniques were developed. Not surprisingly, these procedures have raised significant ethical questions, including some about the safety of the costly technique. To increase the chance for success, doctors may fertilize and implant more than one embryo into a woman’s uterus. Some experts have raised concerns about this practice because it increases the incidence of multiple births, which can create a health risk for the mother and babies and can place a heavy burden on the parents. When more than one embryo implants in the uterus, doctors can selectively remove one or more of the embryos to improve the chances that the others will survive, but this raises additional ethical issues related to abortion. Questions have also arisen over the fate of the fertilized eggs that are not implanted and the fate of the human embryos if the couples who created them die, become incapacitated, or no longer want to have children.

Advances in prenatal diagnostic techniques, such as genetic testing, in the 1960s and 1970s made it possible to test a fetus (and more recently an embryo) for genetic diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia, and other disorders prior to birth. These techniques, including chorionic villus sampling and amniocentesis, led to discussions about the morality of using medicine to end pregnancies based on the predicted disability and quality of life that the baby might face. An experimental technique known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis could help couples avoid facing this difficult decision. This technique enables doctors to analyze the genetic material of embryos created through IVF before they are implanted in a woman's uterus. Only healthy embryos are then implanted. A related technique enables doctors to determine the sex of the baby before the embryos are implanted. Couples at risk of passing on a genetic disorder that affects males may choose to have only female embryos implanted. However, these prenatal techniques have raised additional ethical questions about the rights of parents to design their descendants.

C

Genetic Technology Issues

Along with developing new methods for ending pregnancies or aiding fertility, modern medical science has created new means of manipulating the very building blocks of life itself. These techniques, in the fields of genetic engineering and biotechnology, have caused much public discussion on medical ethics in recent years.

Since the early 1970s, scientists have refined and improved methods for isolating and manipulating genes—the basic units of heredity made up of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that hold the master instructions for the creation of proteins. Proteins act as molecular laborers, controlling every aspect of cell activity. Specific segments of DNA can be removed from one organism and inserted into the genes of another species. In this way the function of selected genes can be deactivated or amplified, changing the actions of hormones and other proteins and fundamentally altering the characteristics of life forms.

For some medical ethicists and other observers, such gene manipulation raises serious ethical and practical concerns. These doubters have asked the following questions: Just because scientists can perform such wonders, does it follow that they should do so? Are there unforeseen dangers in altering life at the biochemical level? Is genetic diversity threatened by such activity?

Biotechnology and genetic engineering also raise issues concerning commercial exploitation, such as attempts to patent human gene sequences. Patents protect inventors and others by forbidding any imitators from using or profiting from the patent-holder’s original material. But can life itself be patented? In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court suggested in its decision Diamond v. Chakrabarty that life can be patented. The Court granted patent protection to a scientist who had developed a new bacterium strain that was capable of serving as a natural cleanup agent in accidental oil spills (see Bioremediation).

Six years later the Court ruled that any life form developed through biotechnology—excluding humans—could be considered a patentable invention. More recently, as work has proceeded on mapping the human genome (the entire set of genes found in the nucleus of each human cell), biotechnology companies have scrambled to file patents on individual genes that they have “discovered”—whether the companies know the function of the gene or not. In 2000, for example, a controversy erupted when a biotechnology company won a patent for a gene involved in the process by which the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), infects cells. The patent was granted even though other scientists had previously made discoveries regarding the gene’s function.

To some medical ethicists, the patenting of genes is troubling. A central argument against patenting is that competitive ownership of individual genes might prevent scientists from sharing knowledge. This, of course, would hamper basic biomedical research and the ongoing search for treatments and cures. President Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair addressed this concern early in 2000 when they jointly called for an agreement for American and British scientists to openly share all information derived from the sequencing of the human genome (see Human Genome Project).

D

Cloning

Perhaps no event in biotechnology has caused more uproar and bioethical discussion than the cloning of Dolly the sheep by Scottish scientists. Dolly was created when the scientists removed the nucleus from a cell taken from the udder of a six-year-old sheep, placed it into the egg cell of another sheep from which the nucleus had been removed, and planted the egg cell within a surrogate mother, which carried Dolly to term. Dolly was born an identical twin to her six-year-old parent.

Dolly’s birth created a sensation in the press and caused a wave of anxiety over the prospects for cloning humans. President Clinton announced an immediate ban on federal funding for research related to human cloning. The U.S. National Bioethics Advisory Committee recommended that federally funded research that had produced Dolly not be applied to humans. Several other nations have laws prohibiting human cloning, including Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The debate over the ethics of creating human clones and the circumstances under which human cloning might be used remains unsettled.

E

Physician-Patient Issues

Since the time of Hippocrates more than 2,000 years ago, a central concern of medical ethics has been the relationship between physician and patient. Aspects of this relationship continue to be the source of ethical dilemmas. For example, what is the extent of the doctor’s duty to a patient if treating the patient places the doctor at risk? This issue was brought to the forefront in recent years by the advent of the AIDS crisis. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread by contact with blood and other bodily fluids of an infected person. This poses a potential hazard for doctors and other health-care workers. In the 1980s, during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, some doctors refused to treat persons in high-risk groups for AIDS, such as homosexual men and users of intravenous drugs—even though these patients were not known to be infected with HIV.

Is there an ethical obligation for doctors to treat patients with communicable and potentially fatal diseases? In a statement in 1988, the AMA’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs declared that no patient should suffer discrimination or be denied care because of infection with HIV. Many states and cities have passed laws barring health-care discrimination against persons with HIV and AIDS. Nevertheless, the licensing boards that oversee the practice of medicine in each state have taken varied approaches. The boards in some states have passed regulations against any refusal to treat persons with HIV infection; other state boards specify that doctors may refuse to treat such patients provided that they make a reasonable effort to secure alternate care. In 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that denying care to an HIV-infected person violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. AIDS advocates hope that this ruling will protect the rights of many people with AIDS.

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