BIOETHICS, COVID-19 AND RACISM - THE BEGINNING OF THE AFTERMATH
Author: Joan Frances Steiner
Publisher:
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 69
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs COVID-19 spread across the United States, the bioethics community encountered challenges both familiar and unknown. Practitioners prepared to consult and advise clinicians, compiling lists of the anticipated bioethical issues, the dimensions of which were nuanced and multifaceted. However, a closer look at the discussion that developed around a single critical question, the ethics of ventilator allocation protocols, revealed that standard formulas and metrics had unintended consequences. The received wisdom of the ethical principles applied to the allocation of this scarce resource was questioned and found wanting as critics pointed out protocols that disadvantaged minorities, the disabled, and the elderly. New voices entered old debates. The practice of modern American bioethics, shaped at a time when patient autonomy was the prevailing value, was narrow in purview. The fundamental inequities of heath and healthcare experienced by racial and ethnic minorities and the poor, concerns of justice, were not central to the practice. The bioethics community had failed to sufficiently broaden its scope as the concepts of the social determinates of health were revealed by research and confirmed by lived experience. Prompted by the racial unrest of spring and summer 2020, one element of the bioethics community, represented by Association of Bioethics Program Directors, has recast its focus.
