Bioethics, Medicine and the Criminal Law:The Criminal Law and Bioethical Conflict: Walking the Tightrope

0.0

Who should define what constitutes ethical and lawful medical practice? Judges? Doctors? Scientists? Or someone else entirely? This volume analyses how effectively criminal law operates as a forum for resolving ethical conflict in the delivery of health care. It addresses key questions such as: how does criminal law regulate controversial bioethical areas? What effect, positive or negative, does the use of criminal law have when regulating bioethical conflict? And can the law accommodate moral controversy? By exploring criminal law in theory and in practice and examining the broad field of bioethics as opposed to the narrower terrain of medical ethics, it offers balanced arguments that will help readers form reasoned views on the ethical legitimacy of the invocation and use of criminal law to regulate medical and scientific practice and bioethical issues. Table of Contents 1. Introduction – when criminal law encounters bioethics: a case of tensions and incompatibilities or an apt forum for resolving ethical conflict? Part I. Death, Dying, and the Criminal Law: 2. Euthanasia and assisted suicide should, when properly performed by a doctor in an appropriate case, be decriminalised 3. Five flawed arguments for decriminalising euthanasia 4. Euthanasia excused: between prohibition and permission Part II. Freedom and Autonomy: When Consent Is Not Enough: 5. Body integrity identity disorder – a problem of perception? 6. Risky sex and 'manly diversions': the contours of consent in criminal law – transmission and rough horseplay cases 7. 'Consensual' sexual activity between doctors and patients: a matter for the criminal law? Part III. Criminalising Biomedical Science: 8. 'Scientists in the dock': regulating science 9. Bioethical conflict and developing biotechnologies: is protecting individual and public health from the risks of xenotransplantation a matter for the (criminal) law? 10. Thecriminal law and enhancement – none of the law's business? 11. Dignity as a socially constructed value Part IV. Bioethics and Criminal Law in the Dock: 12. Can English law accommodate moral controversy in medicine? The case of abortion 13. The case for decriminalising abortion in Northern Ireland 14. The impact of the loss of deference towards the medical profession 15. Criminalising medical negligence 16. All to the good? Criminality, politics, and public health 17. Moral controversy, human rights and the common law judge