My Sister's Keeper is the story of Anna Fitzgerald, who by the age of thirteen has undergone many blood transfusions, numerous surgeries, and multiple bone marrow transplants. “Most babies are accidents, not me. I was engineered, born to save my sister’s life.” At the beginning of the movie Anna explains that she as conceived to be a donor for her sister, Kate. Kate is a 16 year old with renal failure due to a very rare form of leukemia. The girls' parents expect Anna to donate her kidney to help her sister. Instead of donating the kidney, Anna files a lawsuit against her parents for the rights of her own body so that she could not be forced into the surgery against her will. This causes mixed reactions between Anna’s parents, Brain and Sara.
As the movie starts, Anna explains how she came into being, how she was not an accident. She was planned to be on this Earth to save her sister’s life. Sara and Brian are left with a tough decision when the doctor tells them that there is no donor for their daughter Kate. The doctor then mentions that there is always the option of genetically producing a child that would be a genetic match donor for Kate. Sara and Brian decide to follow through and make a “designer baby,” Anna. In the weeks following Anna's birth, she was used to serve Kate’s medical needs. Whenever Kate needed a donor, her parents did not hesitate to use Anna’s body. The ethical issue seen here is the underlying reason why Anna was brought into this world and the decision made by her parents to do so. The decisions made by Sara and Brain to genetically make a baby were ethically wrong in the sense that they were solely making a baby to cater Kate’s needs. It is understandable that they were doing everything...
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...to make Kate as happy as she could. Anna made the right decision by listening to her sister. Kate was clearly very ill and exhausted of continuously going into surgery. I would grant Kate’s wishes, just as Anna did for Kate. Family is very important, listening and acting on what your family wants and needs is very essential.
Shortly after, Brain and Sara come to realize why Kate made the decision that she did. After a long fight, Kate’s wishes do come true and she passes away. Later, Anna’s lawyer presents legal papers stating that Anna won the case and now has the rights to her own body.
Works Cited
Grimm, Dr. Michelle. “Biomedical Engineering Ethics – A First Look.” Wayne State Universtiy, Detroit.
My Sister’s Keeper. Dir. Nick Cassavetes. Perf. Abigail Breslin, Walter Raney, Sofia
Vassilieva, and Cameron Diaz. New Line Cinema, 2009. DVD.
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
Once altered, the baby will have no say in how its cells are used, or traits they wish to keep but no longer will have the chance too. Some designer babies are created to help others through transplants. Even though the intention may be decent, it is still taking away the child's chance to have a choice in his body. Certain transplants are painful, such as a bone marrow transplant, and creating the child to be used as a donor could possibly put him through involuntary pain.
Charlotte’s existence continued, but medical prognosis was bleak and doctors decided it was most humane not to prolong her pain. According to the Journal of Medical Ethics, they felt that there was no way to improve her quality of life, which would always be intensely painful. The decision was made to continue current treatment, but not to resuscitate if she stopped breathing. Her parents, however, dissented. They drew upon their strong Christian beliefs, hoping for a miracle and saying that Charlotte deserved every chance to live. They relied on evidence of her development, saying that she was now able to see and respond to stimuli. Her doctors, however, felt that her quality of life would not improve; she would always be in pain and could not live beyond infancy.
...the responsibility to exercise the wishing on the behalf the patient. Hospital has the right to enforce the wishes of the individual. Many time family members are so emotional and tried to reverse the patient wishes in court but the court has many times sided with a appointee the appointee has the right to make importance decision in the care of the patients, for example:
After April and Roger search desperately for Cheryl, they look for several weeks, and have no idea where she has gone. One night Cheryl’s friend Nancy calls April, and explains that she was leaving with her, but she had left suddenly and believes she is going to do something bad. April remembers that Cheryl told her how their mother committed suicide, by jumping off the Louis Bridge. When they arrive at the bridge a group of people say they saw a women jumped off and commit suicide about five minutes before they arrived.
In her article Thomson starts off by giving antiabortionists the benefit of the doubt that fetuses are human persons. She adds that all persons have the right to life and that it is wrong to kill any person. Also she states that someone?s right to life is stronger than another person?s autonomy and that the only conflict with a fetuses right to life is a mother?s right to autonomy. Thus the premises make abortion impermissible. Then Thomson precedes to attacks the premise that one?s right to autonomy can be more important to another?s right to life in certain situations. She uses quite an imaginative story to display her point of view. Basically there is a hypothetical situation in which a very famous violinist is dying. Apparently the only way for the violinist to survive is to be ?plugged? into a particular woman, in which he could use her kidneys to continue living. The catch is that the Society of Music Lovers kidnapped this woman in the middle of the night in order to obtain the use of her kidneys. She then woke up and found herself connected to an unconscious violinist. This obviously very closely resembles an unwanted pregnancy. It is assumed that the woman unplugging herself is permissible even though it would kill the violinist. Leading to her point of person?s right to life is not always stronger than another person?s right to have control over their own body. She then reconstructs the initial argument to state that it is morally impermissible to abort a fetus if it has the right to life and has the right to the mother?s body. The fetus has the right to life but only has the right to a ...
Susan has a successful career, but she wants to have a family also and balance the two. She finally becomes pregnant after trying for a long time, but tests show that the baby will be born with Down syndrome. She has been trying for so long, and now the doctor is recommending an abortion.
Brittany Maynard was a 29 year old woman, she was thriving and loving life then, she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Brittany did a lot of research about her cancer and she finally realized that there wouldn’t be any good outcome. After fighting the cancer for months, she had the option of living in her home with hospice coming in and caring for her. Brittany made the decision to move to Oregon with her family to be protected by the Death with Dignity law. She wanted to be able to die when it felt ‘right’. She wanted to say when enough was enough and she said all her goodbyes. Brittany also didn’t want to have hospice take care of her, because she would just be suffering and in pain for who knows how long, wondering when the time will be that she dies. Her family would have to sit there and watch that day by day. How could a family do that? Brittany chose not to go through radiation and lived her life to the fullest with her family happy and smiling, until that time felt ‘right’ and she couldn’t go on any longer. She actually had the medication for a long time, before she took it, because she didn’t want to die, but dying was going to happen anyway. She wanted to die on her terms. When my suffering becomes too great, I can say to all those I love, "I love you; come be by my side,
I wished I could have helped her more, if just to better her last moments on Earth. With all my hours in clinical shadowing or volunteering, with all my coursework as a graduate student in biomedical engineering—I was not preparred for this. I was not ready to cope with the sense of powerlessness I felt that day.
...ther’s sovereignty over her body outweigh the right of an unborn child to live. The answers to these questions are very diverse as a result of the diversity of the American society. With the issue of abortion, one’s attitude toward it is going to be based on many things such as religious background and personal morals. There is no black and white answer to the abortion issue. Luckily we live in a country where we are able to decide for ourselves whether something is morally right or wrong. Thus, ultimately, the choice is ours. As with the many other ethical issues which we are faced with in our society, it is hard to come to a concrete answer until we are personally faced with that issue. All we can do is make an effort to know all of the aspects which are involved so that we may be able to make a sound decision if we were faced with this problem in our own lives.
This report will outline the ethics of conceiving a child for the purpose of using cells, tissues or even organs to treat an existing child with a fatal disease. In outlining the ethics of saviour siblings, the question of whether it is ethical to conceive a child for the purpose of becoming a saviour will be explored.
Maternal-fetal issues spark complex and controversial debates in the field of biomedical ethics (Farber-Post, 1996). The conflicts arise when medical professionals try to determine to whom their ethical obligations are owed. Many ethicists argue that autonomy is precedential and, therefore, the duty of the medical staff is to the pregnant woman because it is her body, and she has a right to make decisions regarding her healthcare. Others argue that equally important ethical principles such as beneficence, nonmaleficence, and avoiding killing override the principle of autonomy, and therefore, these principles that govern actions towards the fetus, in particular the fetus’ right to life, demand that medical professionals override the mothers’ desires at times.
The Other Sister is about a family with a sibling that has a developmental disability also known as mildly mentally retardation (MMR), mild developmental disability, or mild intellectual disorder (MID). Carla Tate is our main character that has MMR as a disability. She is a young women, twenty-four years old, with a slender but beautiful appearance. Carla has just graduated from a special education boarding school and is returning home to her family. Carla’s mother (Elizabeth Tate) is overbearingly protective, does not appreciate all of the abilities that Carla has acquired. Her father (Bradley Tate) is a recovering alcoholic who is sympathetic and supportive of Carla, who at the same time has to deal with his domineering wife. Carla has two sisters Heather (who happens to be a lesbian) and Caroline (who is planning a wedding). Carla’s sister quickly bond again upon Carla’s return. They are supportive of Carla and her abilities.
“One need not be deeply religious or oppose abortion to be troubled by the prospect of a society in which, as bioethicist Alexander Capron puts it, ‘The wanted child becomes the made-to-order child’" (Shannon). With rising concerns of building a baby through eugenics and IVF or In Vitro Fertilization, the government, court systems, activists, and public media is starting to take notice. Being able to pick your babies’ generic make up would be an ethical disaster with a slippery slope into an era where one’s child is created by man with build-a-baby qualities instead of the natural creation of a new life. Creating a designer baby through IVF technology would have severe consequences not only affecting this generation by all the future generations to arise.
They did not follow through with what the parents ask because a Florida law states you can’t remove organs until the donor is dead. Although it would be sad to kill Baby Theresa to give her organs away, I would agree with her parents and physicians because she does not have long to live and will never be conscious so why not take the good organs and give them to another baby that could live. Ethicist disagreed with the parents and the physician because they said “it’s wrong to use people as means to other people’s ends”, they are saying by taking her organs you would be using her to help other people 's children. When you’re using somebody it means to violate their autonomy, Baby Theresa has no autonomy so there’s no way to violate it. People can’t always decide for themselves, when she could not decide for herself you need to think “what would be in her best interest?” either way Baby Theresa would die so there’s really not a best interest for her. Ethicists also said “it 's wrong to kill one person to save another”, if you killed Baby Theresa to