Bioethics and Disability

Bioethics and Disability provides tools for understanding the concerns fears and biases that have convinced some people with disabilities that the health care setting is a dangerous place and some bioethicists that disability activists have nothing to offer bioethics. It wrestles with the charge that bioethics as a discipline devalues the lives of persons with disabilities arguing that reconciling the competing concerns of the disability community and the autonomy-based approach of mainstream bioethics is not only possible but essential for a bioethics committed to facilitating good medical decision making and promoting respect for all persons regardless of ability. Through in-depth case studies involving newborns children and adults with disabilities it proposes a new model for medical decision making that is both sensitive to and sensible about the fact of disability in medical cases.