Bioethical Consideration of Maternal-Fetal Issues Essay

Beneficence involves the medical practitioners doing well in what they feel is the best for the patients. Another component of the ethical fundamentals is non-maleficence. Non-maleficence gives a guideline that the medical personnel should not harm the patient. The last part of the basics of medical ethical practice is justice, which means that the doctors and other medical personnel should always be fair to all the patients (Killion & Dempski 2010, p. 37).
Mrs Smith reached the clinic about 30 minutes late and found Patty, the nurse at the reception desk. She was in the company of her adolescent son and her 10-year-old daughter. The nurse realized that she was pregnant and, as a result, she had gone to the clinic for a prenatal checkup.Bioethical Consideration of Maternal-Fetal Issues Essay.  Dr Daniels had a quick look at Mrs Smith’s chart before inviting her patient into the exam room. The doctor realized that the patient had stayed too long before having a medical checkup, for this case, ten years. During the interview, Dr Daniels discovers that her patient’s pregnancy was important to her relationship with her new husband. Mrs Smith was excited about the pregnancy because she was expectant of her first child to her new husband. The doctor learned that the client had not attended her clinics because she was jobless and did not have a medical cover (Bowes 2007, p. 1). Bioethical Consideration of Maternal-Fetal Issues Essay.

ORDER A PLAGIARISM -FREE PAPER NOW

The doctor finished the interview and informed Mrs Smith that on that day, she would perform a pap smear and draw some blood for urinalysis along with her client’s examination. Dr Daniels also informed her client that she would schedule an ultrasound to enable her to determine the correct age of her pregnancy and when she should expect her newborn. The doctor asked Mrs Smith if she had any questions, which the patient replies that she was content.
While in the physical exam room, the doctor discovers that her patient had several lesions in her cervix, which prompted her to tell of the problem

Practitioners who care for pregnant women face dilemmas when their patients use illicit drugs, reject medical recommendations, or cause fetal harm. Many ethics scholars characterize those situations as maternal-fetal conflicts. In conflict-based models, maternal rights are considered to conflict with fetal rights, or moral obligations owed to pregnant women are considered to conflict with those owed to their fetuses. Bioethical Consideration of Maternal-Fetal Issues Essay. I offer an alternative model of pregnancy ethics by applying relational and equality-based moral theories to situations of fetal harm by pregnant women. In this model, clinicians faced with ethical dilemmas should attempt to understand pregnant women and their decisions within their broad social networks and communities, ask how the clinician’s personal standpoint influences outcomes judged to be ethical, and determine whether the clinician’s ethical formulations reduce or enhance existing gender, class, or racial inequality. This model focuses on the mutual needs of pregnant women and fetuses rather than on their mutually exclusive needs. It also avoids many pitfalls of traditional ethical formulations, specifically their tendency to neglect gender-specific modes of moral reasoning, their implicit assumptions that application of universal principles like autonomy and beneficence results in objective ethical solutions, and their failure to account for the ways that projecting fetal needs perpetuates social inequalities. This model provides the ethical foundations for moving law and policy away from criminalization and toward prevention of prenatal harm. Bioethical Consideration of Maternal-Fetal Issues Essay.