Personal ventilators used by people with disabilities should not reallocated to people with Covid-19. Triage protocols should be immediately clarified and explicitly state that personal ventilators will be protected in all cases.

As hospitals and public health authorities devise triage protocols to allocate scarce critical-care resources during the Covid-19 pandemic, people with disabilities are expressing alarm that these protocols devalue them and exacerbate long-entrenched ableism in health care. Lawsuits alleging disability discrimination in have been filed in Washington and Alabama. The U.S. Office for Civil Rights is investigating disability discrimination complaints in triage protocols. The challenge is to develop protocols that will minimize discrimination in the health care system.

This is the second clinical ethics case study in our series. It concerns a patient with delusions and no surrogate decision-maker who refuses all treatment, even after a game-changing finding.

Louisiana—a state with sweeping abortion restrictions—issued an emergency declaration last August with a list of fetal diagnoses for which abortions will be permitted. The “List of Conditions that Shall Deem...

J is a 21-year-old male with multiple disabilities. He has a brain tumor. Would he benefit enough from brain surgery?

Each year, tens of thousands of clinical ethics case consultations are performed in hospitals around the country. These consultations respond to fraught, complex questions from patients, families, health care professionals,...

The purpose of this series is to illustrate how clinical ethicists analyze, process, and address complex cases. The primary author of each essay should be a clinical ethicist (individual, team,...

Download PDF Nancy Berlinger, PhD; Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH; Tia Powell, MD; Aimee Milliken, RN, PhD, HEC-C; Parinda Khatri, PhD; Fatma Marouf, JD, MPH; Keisha Ray, PhD; Johanna Crane, PhD...