Professor Katie Watson joins Ethics Talk to consider key questions about clinical and legal risk management for clinicians trying keep patients safe and for patients with complex pregnancies trying to stay alive.
The social institutions of medicine and the state have a complex history of interaction in which doctors have been the originators of political ideals, goals, and social change but equally often have found themselves to be instruments of political authority.
In the iconic painting Broken Column, Kahlo represents her spine as a Greek column that is fractured and disintegrating. In this beautiful and tragic interpretation, the fractured column bespeaks Kahlo’s physical weakness and emotional instability.
This narrative information graphic contextualizes the lack of current maternal morbidity and mortality data in the United States since the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022.
AMA J Ethics. 2024;26(1):E92-93. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2024.92.
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.
Herman Melville's account of Bartleby the scrivener has something to teach us about the interactive nature of refusal and the empathy necessary for an exchange of values in the setting of conscientious refusal.
Physicians need to exhaust every possible alternative to bring about political changes before resorting to breaking the law as an act of civil disobedience.