A graphic memoir documents clinical and ethical disagreements and decision points throughout a paramedic team’s time with an incarcerated patient in labor.
AMA J Ethics. 2019;21(10):E902-903. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2019.902.
This comic invites readers to consider aesthetic and ethical intersections of how odds might be presented—even exaggerated—to cultivate fear in public health messaging.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(8):E643-645. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.643.
This multipaneled comic follows a woman robot preparing for a breast examination. Oil “leakage” recurs in the comic, suggesting its ethical importance in metaphorically representing a patient’s stress responses.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(8):E646-650. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.646.
The experience of an English professor dying of ovarian cancer in Margaret Edson’s play Wit shows that both literary and medical discourse obfuscate and objectify rather than promote communication of “simple human truths” that dignify life and death.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(9):858-864. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.9.imhl1-1509.
In the past, forced sterilizations violated the autonomy of vulnerable women. Today, measures intended to protect such women from the abuses of the past may in fact hamper their autonomy in a different way.
The responsibilities of motherhood have changed in the era of longer life expectancies. Women are often simultaneously caregivers for their children, grandchildren, and parents.
Neutral, nondirective counseling of women who are about to give birth to extremely premature infants can undermine their autonomous decision making rather than promoting it.