Books in the Hastings Center Studies in Ethics series series

According to a Institute of Medicine report, as many as 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical error - a figure higher than deaths from automobile accidents, or breast cancer. This book examines how conventional structures of accountability in law and medical structure should be replaced by ethically informed institutional policies.

The government, the media, and individual Americans have all embraced programs to promote disease prevention. Yet obesity is up, exercise is down, teenagers continue to smoke, and sexually transmitted disease is rampant. Why? This title examines the ethical and social problems that create subtle obstacles to changing Americans' unhealthy behavior.

An introduction to bioethics. It examines a comprehensive range of ethical questions and covers such topics as moral decision making, abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, life-sustaining technologies, organ transplantation, reproductive technologies, and the allocation of health care resources.

Long-acting and reversible contraceptives, such as Norplant and Depo-Provera, have been praised as highly effective, moderately priced, and generally safe. This book argues that the very qualities that make these contraceptives an important alternative for individual choice in family planning make them a potential tool of coercive social policy.

A comprehensive examination of setting mental health services priorities that explores the history, ethics, and politics of setting priorities for public mental health services. It also explores the social factors that most influence attempts to set priorities. It illustrates priorities at the federal level and in the private sector.

Offers a complementary and alternative medicine - from acupuncture and chiropractic treatments to homeopathy and nutritional supplements. This title tells how to scientifically measure the effectiveness of a particular treatment. It examines the clash between public support and the often hostile stance of clinicians and medical researchers.

Deriving from a Hastings Center research project, this text explores the ethical aspects of decisions made by hospital trustees.

Mental illness is the poor, and somehow "damaged," cousin to physical ailments in the eyes of too many in our society. This title presents a provocative analysis of the mental health care system in the United States, dealing with issues of justice and access to mental health care.

Used primarily to decide to abort a fetus that would have been born with mental or physical impairments, prenatal tests arguably reinforce discrimination against and misconceptions about people with disabilities. This title presents a debate about prenatal testing and selective abortion.