Law &. Ethics for Medical Careers 5th Edition by Karen Judson,Carlene Harrison

تمرين 35

Reproductive science has progressed so rapidly that laws have not kept pace. For example, in 1996, a couple lost their adult, sin­gle daughter, Julie, to leukemia. Before her death, Julie had paid a fertility clinic to harvest and freeze several of her eggs. When Julie died, her parents inherited the frozen eggs, along with Julie's furniture and other material possessions. Julie's parents then paid a surrogate mother to carry one of Julie's implanted eggs, fertilized by a sperm donor. Julie's parents did not plan to raise their grandchild themselves.
"This field [reproductive medicine] is screaming for oversight, regula­tion and control," Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post in 1998 when asked about the above scenario. "If you are going to make babies in new and novel ways, you have to be sure it's in the interest of the baby."
In your opinion, how should the child's parents have been determined in the above scenario? (The surrogate mother miscarried.)
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According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, health care practition­ers and parents should share the responsibility for decision making involving the medical care of young patients. Practitioners should seek the informed permission of parents before medical interventions (except in emergencies when parents cannot be contacted), and the informed permission of parents should include all of the elements of standard informed consent.
However, the Academy acknowledges that in our pluralistic society, the many religious, social, cultural, and philosophical positions on what constitutes acceptable child rearing and child welfare often makes this shared decision making difficult. The law generally provides parents with wide discretionary authority in raising their children, but health care practitioners know that par­ents are sometimes guilty of child abuse and neglect. Therefore, providers of health care services to children have to carefully balance the rights of their young patients with the family's rights to raise their children as they see fit.