American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries - Softcover

Annas, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195390296 ISBN 13: 9780195390292

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Bioethics was "born in the USA" and the values American bioethics embrace are based on American law, including liberty and justice. This book crosses the borders between bioethics and law, but moves beyond the domestic law/bioethics struggles for dominance by exploring attempts to articulate universal principles based on international human rights. The isolationism of bioethics in the US is not tenable in the wake of scientific triumphs like decoding the human genome, and civilizational tragedies like international terrorism. Annas argues that by crossing boundaries which have artificially separated bioethics and health law from the international human rights movement, American bioethics can be reborn as a global force for good, instead of serving mainly the purposes of U.S. academics. This thesis is explored in a variety of international contexts such as terrorism and genetic engineering, and in U.S. domestic disputes such as patient rights and market medicine. The citizens of the world have created two universal codes: science has sequenced the human genome and the United Nations has produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The challenge for American bioethics is to combine these two great codes in imaginative and constructive ways to make the world a better, and healthier, place to live.

About this title

About the Author:

George Annas is Edward R. Utley Professor and Chair, Health Law Department at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Review:

"AMERICAN BIOETHICS is a book of many good essays. It will afford bioethicists and students of bioethics excellent explanations of certain important legal cases. It will make them think more largely about their field."--The American Journal of Bioethics

"...like most of his previous work, this collection of essays shows [Annas] to be at his oppositional best...he clearly and directly challenges us to engage substantive issues of human rights across a wide array of troubling and difficult areas of bioethical concern."--JAMA

"Annas provides a lively text with many entertaining anecdotes that do not distract a reader from the serious, reformative policies he advocates. Their relevance extends far beyond US borders."--The Lancet

"The evolution of bioethics from marginal intellectual hybrid to the mainstream might be expected to elicit a more reflective response, and it has done so in the form of George Anna's American Bioethics. This book is an explicit argument that the love of technology, self-determination, and free markets that produced the field of bioethics will no longer suffice."--The New England Journal of Medicine

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0195390296
• ISBN 13: 9780195390292
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264