Word: ethicist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...problem with anencephalics is starkly different: doctors frequently do not know when death has legally occurred. Conventional measures of brain death are useless. Ethicist Caplan suggests that doctors rely on an older standard: that death occurs when the infant's pulse and breathing have stopped. Thus anencephalics would be taken off the respirator at set intervals to see whether spontaneous breathing had ceased. When it stopped, the infants would be pronounced dead and their organs taken. The few medical centers like Loma Linda that handle anencephalic transplants currently follow similar protocols...
...about the terminally ill's "duty to die," his forthrightness seemed eccentric. In his writing, the late Dr. Rene Dubos urged more emphasis on the quality rather than the length of life, but his eloquence failed to generate sustained debate. Callahan, arguably the nation's leading medical ethicist, means to make discussion of the subject inescapable. For 18 years, as director of the Hastings Center in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., he has grappled with the tide of problems arising from biomedical advances. In a new book called Setting Limits (Simon & Schuster; $18.95), he makes his hard case with a care that...
...leading medical ethicist prescribes some unflinching limits on the American life- span. -- The harvesting of a baby' s heart...
...hysterical about AIDS to introduce more coercive measures against homosexuals." Some observers even foresee attempts to control fertility in black and Hispanic communities where intravenous-drug abuse and AIDS are rampant. "I am certain there will be a lot of calls for sterilization of infected women," says Ethicist Bayer...
Others believe societal benefits from rigorous screening and tracing outweigh the invasion of some individuals' privacy. Sometimes a "concern for civil liberties has led us astray," argues Ethicist Ronald Bayer of the Hastings Center think tank, who is a strong advocate of contact notification. "Obviously this is no panacea; the case is strongest where the level of infection is still quite low. But it seems to me that the right to know is also a civil right...