Patients seeking IVF are highly motivated to become parents and may wish to preserve financial resources for surrogacy or adoption should IVF not succeed, so risk sharing appeals to them, which makes its high cost especially problematic.

Studies of families whose children were born through assisted conception need larger sample sizes to determine the effects of various family structures on children.

Decisions about whether to pursue IVF for savior siblings are difficult to make when probable success rates differ by clinic and evidence is lacking.

Even seasoned doctors can have trouble confronting the topic of death. For medical students, training and role modeling are needed to make them valuable to patients facing death.

Some medical interventions for the dying have no medical rationale and may in fact violate a cardinal principle of medical ethics: first, do no harm.

New York State's recent initiatives to improve end-of-life care do not address the true, practical barriers to optimizing such care.

One strategy is to determine “triggers” that alert the primary clinician that the patient has a high symptom burden or difficulty coping with the diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment plans and should be offered palliative care services.

American Medical Association Code of Medical Ethics' opinion on care at the end of life.

The reluctance of medicine to shift from treatment to palliation has existed since at least the 1700s and remains stubborn today.

Court decisions play a significant role in determining the ways in which terminally ill people and their families can determine the manner of their deaths.