Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know ®

The questions and dilemmas of bioethics touch everyone. Should people who refuse to be vaccinated be treated for COVID-19, even if that displaces vaccinated patients with other serious conditions? What restrictions on abortion should there be, if any? Should women be paid to donate eggs? Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know ® discusses these and other similar questions facing the public today--as well as providing a way for thinking deeply about them.

Steinbock and Menzel first examine major moral theories and how they can be used to analyze bioethical issues. They then provide historical background to the birth of bioethics and explain how it shifted from a paternalistic doctor knows best approach to respect for autonomy, a fundamental value in contemporary bioethics. Subsequent chapters cover advance directives, experimentation on human subjects, the definition of death, physician-assisted dying, abortion, disability, just healthcare systems, the allocation of scarce resources, pharmaceutical drug pricing, assisted reproductive technology, egg donation, surrogate motherhood, sex selection, and the genetic modification of humans. Race and gender are considered throughout, as are the ethical issues raised by pandemics. Steinbock and Menzel consider the controversial questions that surface in the public sphere, explaining the facts, and then evaluating different approaches to resolving them.

Paul T. Menzel is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Pacific Lutheran University. He is the author of Strong Medicine: The Ethical Rationing of Health Care, and co-editor of Prevention vs. Treatment: What's the Right Balance? and Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Compassionate, Widely Available Option for Hastening Death.

Bonnie Steinbock is Professor Emerita of the Department of Philosophy at the University at Albany. She is the author of Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos and Fetuses, the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Bioethics, and the co-editor of Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine: Contemporary Readings in Bioethics.