EDITORIAL REVIEWS
Book Description A twenty-first century science will not easily answer to an eighteenth century philosophy. Abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and organ transplantation all raise seemingly irresolvable issues. Koch offers new approaches--public and inclusive--that may resolve them. After explaining the limits of principled ethics, he offers new approaches and then uses them to examine two critical issues: how do we decide who will receive organ transplants and "the problem of Baby K," the care or non-care of "brain stem babies." This is a unique, innovative argument that challenges traditional bioethics' approach to complex problems.
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 1 review)
superb book for people facing tough medical ethics issues This is a superb book for nurses, doctors, social workers and family members wrestling with difficult medical ethical questions. Who should go first in the lineup to receive a heart transplant: a young child or a father of three? Should a person with Down's Syndrome be equal to others? How about a convicted criminal? Or someone age 75? Tom Koch explores these difficult questions and then offers a framework for health care workers and others to help work through their own answers. He examines what it means to be human and the sanctity of human life -- and how a better historical understanding of these concepts and a reasoned methodology can help guide us as we make difficult life and death choices today. Koch does an excellent job of weaving the practical and human with the technical and philosophical. This is a must for those who are forced to make the choice of who lives, and who dies. April 27, 1999