The rewards of social distancing are beginning to accrue in former hotspots such as Seattle, the New York metropolitan area, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where the number of new Covid-19 cases requiring hospitalization is declining. Assuming the rewards hold in the face of pressures to reopen the economy, hospitals will now face challenges of reopening their own nonpandemic services for patients whose elective surgeries and other procedures were postponed. Which patients should get priority?

Hastings Center Issue Brief [download] Liz Bowen, Emily Cleveland-Manchanda, Peppar E.P. Cyr, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Susan Havercamp, Kristi Kirschner, Rebecca Kronk, Lisa M. Meeks, Peter Poullos, Zoie Clarise Sheets, Dorothy W....

In a recent commentary, physician Alan Astrow  expressed skepticism about the legalization of medical aid in dying.  He cited the subjectivity of determining whose suffering qualifies for medical assistance and...

A central philosophical question in the abortion debate concerns the moral status of the embryo and fetus. If the fetus is a person, with the same right to life as any human being who has been born, it would seem that very few, if any, abortions could be justified, because it is not morally permissible to kill children because they are unwanted or illegitimate or disabled. However, the morality of abortion is not settled so straightforwardly. Even if one accepts the argument that the fetus is a person, it does not automatically follow that it has a right to the use of the pregnant woman’s body. Thus, the morality of abortion depends not only on the moral status of the fetus, but also on whether the pregnant woman has an obligation to continue to gestate the fetus.

With ventilator support, Ms. J would have a 50% chance of making a full recovery. Without it she would almost certainly die. That notwithstanding, Ms. J declined to consent to the ventilator.

Despite its intended use as a treatment of last resort, some patients can remain on ECMO for weeks or months. And some are awake, alert, and capable of medical decision-making. RD was one such patient.

Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Nature, Human Nature, and Biotechnology Moral views about nature—claims that nature or a natural state of affairs has value—are important in contemporary...

Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Clinical Trials Clinical trials are specifically designed to test the safety and efficacy of interventions in humans and are preceded by laboratory...

Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Public Health Ethics and Law Public health encompasses what society does to assure the conditions that are necessary for its members to...

Thomas H. Murray was president of The Hastings Center from 1999 to 2012. He was formerly the director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at...