AbstractIn the July‐August 2023 issue of the Hastings Center Report, the lead article and two responding commentaries concern how telemedicine affects the relationships that physicians have with patients or their family members. Relationships are also at the heart of a case‐study essay that brings together family ethics and clinical ethics to argue that the types of food provided to a patient and by whom the patient is fed should be a topic for shared decision‐making. The second article in the issue focuses on why and how the assessment of an individual's decision‐making capacity should take into consideration the risk‐benefit profile of the given decision.

AbstractIn Tyranny of the Gene: Personalized Medicine and Its Threat to Public Health (Knopf, 2023), James Tabery traces the ascendance of personalized or precision medicine in America, arguing that America's emphasis on genetics offers more hype than transformational power. In his examination of the power struggles, social relationships, and technological advances that centered the gene in American health policy, Tabery demonstrates how an intensive focus on genetics draws attention away from both the fundamental causes of health disparities and more‐effective changes that could be made to developmental, physical, and social environments. American policy‐makers, health care institutions, funders, and bioethicists should not let the technological shine and attractive politics of personalized medicine continue to replace the hard but necessary work of addressing sociopolitical causes of disease and illness.

AbstractIn this, the May‐June 2023, issue of the Hastings Center Report, articles and short pieces explore ethical issues found in the field of bioethics’ expanding boundaries and issues involving people who have been pushed to society's boundaries. In the lead article, Valerie Moyer, Amanda Zink, and Brendan Parent argue for allowing transgender kids to compete on sports teams that accord with their gender identity. Theodore Schall and Jacob Moses take a historical look at gender‐affirming care in the second article. They argue that a categorical distinction between trans and cis gender‐affirming care is unwarranted and that it draws on (and reinforces) unjust social attitudes about transgender people. The third article, by Coleman Solis et al., makes the case that, due to the economic, professional, and underlying social status of home care workers, the home care industry is not structured to provide the sort of care that should be its goal. And the last article, by Samuel Director, makes a carefully specified argument against the policies of nursing homes and similar facilities that prohibit residents who have dementia from engaging in sexually intimate interactions.

Hastings Center ReportVolume 53, Issue 3 p. 48-48 Contributors Contributors First published: 07 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.1491Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume53, Issue3May‐June 2023Pages 48-48 RelatedInformation

Two articles in the March-April 2023 issue of the Hastings Center Report challenge principlism and propose new moral frameworks for bioethics. In the lead article, Tyler Tate and Joseph Clair argue that bioethics must be grounded in an understanding of ideal character and relationship to others. The virtue of love, they propose, provides the fundamental conceptual and emotional resources that physicians need. In the second article, Samuel Reis-Dennis offers historical and philosophical explorations of Kantian versus bioethical conceptions of autonomy as he argues that bioethics should be centered on the idea of dignity.

Bioethicists frequently call for empirical researchers to engage participants and community members in their research, but don't themselves typically engage community members in their normative research. In this article, we describe an effort to include members of the public in normative discussions about the risks, potential benefits, and ethical responsibilities of social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research. We reflect on what might-and might not- be gained from engaging the public in normative scholarship and on lessons learned about public perspectives on the risks and potential benefits of SBG research and the responsible conduct and communication of such research. We also provide procedural lessons for others in bioethics who are interested in engaging members of the public in their research.

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court removed constitutional protection from the individual's right to end a pregnancy. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Court invalidated previous rulings protecting that right as part of the individual liberty and privacy interests embedded in the U.S. Constitution. Now, many observers are speculating about the fate of other rights founded on those interests. The Dobbs ruling conflicts with the Court's 1990 Cruzan decision restricting the government's power to interfere with personal medical choices. The language and reasoning in Dobbs and Cruzan offer guidance on how the Court might address future cases involving the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment. The decisions also point to policy strategies for preserving that right.

AbstractThe People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine, by Ricardo Nuila (Scribner, 2023), is a brilliant analysis of the reasons for the failure of our present health care system to meet the needs of patients. It is also a setting for the stories of patients whom Nuila encounters as a hospitalist at Ben Taub, a safety‐net hospital (in the shadow of the medical metropolis of Houston) that cares for all who arrive at its doors. The book is a masterful weaving of data on how money has corrupted the medical establishment and the effects on patients and those who love them.

Bioethics is reexamining how to implement diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice concerns into scholarship. However, bioethicists should question the categories used to define diversity. The act of categorization is value laden, and classification systems confer power and benefits and generate harms. For example, what conditions count as disabilities? We should consider the equity implications of offering only "male" and "female" options for self-identification in health records. However, we should also interrogate all ideas about categorization, including how categories are formed, why they are formed, and who decides. Bioethicists cannot comprehend fully what equity and justice mean for underrepresented, underserved, or marginalized people until there is an understanding of how the boundaries of marginalization are created.