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Program of the Petire-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Co-sponsored with the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund. This is a free event, but it requires advance registration.
Click here to register, and for a course brochure.
Course Description
We often talk, in bioethics, about individual autonomy. Yet our most challenging ethical, legal and clinical controversies in health care often center around family roles and responsibilities: How should we handle parents’ refusals of medically recommended treatment or, conversely, parents’ requests to medicate or surgically alter their children? What should be known, and by whom, about a child’s genome, especially when genetic information effects other family members? What weight should be given to family interests in decisions about a child’s health care? How should we think about 3-parent embryos? Gamete donors? Gestational mothers? What rights and responsibilities should fathers have with regard to decisions about abortion and adoption, for example, as well as health care decisions for their offspring? Health care decisions might be messier, but maybe they would also be better if we gave more attention to family matters.
This multidisciplinary program has been developed to inform and deliberate with ethicists, health care providers, attorneys and the public about changes in conceptions of the family and medical technologies and practices that challenge moral conventions and contemporary law. Faculty experts and participants will engage in thoughtful discussion regarding a broad range of ethical and legal issues that arise from new ways of creating and new ways of understanding families and providing health care for expectant parents, growing fetuses, infants, children, adolescents… and their families.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:
- Explore changes and challenges in social concepts of “family” and the impact these have on health-related decisions and legal parameters.
- Discuss conflicts of interest and rights of parents, fetuses, children and adolescents
- Apply ethical and legal frameworks for addressing controversies in health care of parents and children
- Evaluate the implications for children and families of current and future applications of genetic/genomic information, vaccine policy, medically suppressing puberty and other ethical and legal controversies in obstetric, pediatric and family health care.
Target Audience
- Ethics committee leaders and members, ethics consultants and bioethicists;
- Pediatricians, obstetricians, gynecologists, neonatologists, fetal surgeons, maternal fetal specialists, and other physicians;
- Nurses and nurse practitioners working in family health care, pediatric and related health care specialties;
- Health lawyers, hospital legal counsel, risk managers, and attorneys working in public policy positions related to health care of children and families;
- Chaplains, psychologists, social workers, therapists and members of the public interested in ethical and legal issues in family health care.