As family caregivers who are everywhere yet overlooked in aging societies worldwide, we ponder and discuss this question as bioethicists: “Who cast me in this role?”

My brother-in-law Mark died a couple of weeks ago. He had struggled with schizophrenia for over 45 years, so at age 64 1/2, he had exceeded the average life expectancy...

After the election, the care needs of our aging society will continue to be met by families showing up, day after day. Whether or not our public officials decide to imagine otherwise and commit themselves to policy changes that could prove highly popular, bioethics needs to keep its eyes on the caregivers.

What “recovery” really means in aphasia is left unsaid in this novel.

Caregivers are not visitors. Hospital policies that restrict visits from family caregivers can harm patients.

Newly published first-person stories of the challenges, struggles, and joys of providing care for family members or another close person with Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia "depict humanity on the brink."

I knew that being a foster parent would be demanding, but I was unprepared for the extent of the challenges, which were exacerbated by the pandemic.

Old Jews are why I am who I am. Not only the old Jews you’d expect–my grandparents and great-grandparents, who came here because, as I learned for a family history...

Four articles in the Hastings Center Report make an array of claims about  whether advance directives should or should not be used to instruct caregivers to withhold oral feeding of...

Dying cannot be understood properly, or responded to well, without recourse to the connections between the dying experience and the larger social structures that make up a social and civic...

It’s a little-known and rarely discussed fact of medical practice that doctors value the ability to love our patients. If the thought of doctors loving patients makes you queasy, be...

For the first few years after my husband Howard died, I talked to him often. These were not ghostly, paranormal encounters; I was just thinking out loud about my life...

An old woman desperately needs medical attention. Yet she fiercely refuses every offer of help from friends, neighbors, and the local doctor. No one will get past her door, she...

Ms. Rita, whom I met as a volunteer at a local nursing home, was the most ardent lover of grapes I have ever known. She was confined to a wheelchair...

Perhaps we were naïve. Our plan was relatively simple: we would chart the legislative evolution of programs for veterans with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) to identify policy gaps for this...

For previous posts on the Singapore Casebook project, a collaboration among the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, The Hastings Center, and the Ethox Centre at...

The demise of the CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Support) Act is the calamitous result of ideological warfare and political cowardice. It would have provided a modest benefit –...