Article explains the right granted to state public health agencies by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v Massachusetts to mandate vaccination in the presence of actual or threatened danger to the health of its residents from infectious disease.
The Catholic Health Association of the United States has chosen to allow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services to supersede Pope John Paul II’s allocution on patients in a permanent vegetative state.
Physicians have an obligation to consider a patient’s quality of life when making treatment decisions and should consider giving patients the options of withholding or withdrawing aggressive treatment if that treatment will not restore the kind of life the patient finds meaningful.
Direct sterilization by means of tubal ligation is morally unacceptable in Catholic bioethics but other procedures that result in indirect sterilization may be acceptable under certain conditions.
Catholic medical school education and the Catholic health care systems in the U.S. emphasize the moral growth of the physician and respect for the body, mind and spirit of patients.