Bioethics and Disability

Bioethics and Disability provides tools for understanding the concerns, fears and biases that have convinced some people with disabilities that the health care setting is a dangerous place and some bioethicists that disability activists have nothing to offer bioethics. It wrestles with the charge that bioethics as a discipline devalues the lives of persons with disabilities, arguing that reconciling the competing concerns of the disability community and the autonomy-based approach of mainstream bioethics is not only possible, but essential for a bioethics committed to facilitating good medical decision making and promoting respect for all persons, regardless of ability. Through in-depth case studies involving newborns, children and adults with disabilities, it proposes a new model for medical decision making that is both sensitive to and sensible about the fact of disability in medical cases.

Author Biography

Alicia Ouellette is a Professor of Law at Albany Law School and a Professor of Bioethics in the Union Graduate College/Mount Sinai School of Medicine Bioethics Program. Her recent publications include ‘Shaping Parental Authority over Children’s Bodies’ and ‘Growth Attenuation, Parental Choice, and the Rights of Disabled Children’. She is also a co-editor (with Laurence McCullough and Robert Baker) of The Cambridge Dictionary of Bioethics (2010). Before joining the law faculty, she served as an Assistant Solicitor General for the State of New York. As ASG, she briefed and argued more than 100 appeals on issues ranging from termination of treatment for the terminally ill to the responsibility of gun manufacturers for injuries caused by handguns. She continues her advocacy work in select cases and was lead counsel on the law professors’ brief submitted in support of same-sex couples who sought the right to marry in New York State.