A baby is born with anencephaly, or absence of the entire brain above the brains

Question

A baby is born with anencephaly, or absence of the entire brain above the brainstem. The brainstem is intact, which means that the baby can breathe and have a heart beat and blood pressure, but there is no chance for any human brain function or cognition, due to this birth defect. The health care team begins to educate the mother, since children with this deficit generally die shortly after birth. However, the mother is devoutly religious, and her minister has told her that if she prays hard enough to God, that God will work a miracle and her baby's brain will heal itself. She is insistent that all possible care be given to her baby, including a months-long stay in the ICU, constant care by a caregiver, regular brain scans, and other expensive modalities. The hospital, finding her adamant, asks the court for guardianship of the baby, with the medical plan to provide only maintenance care with no life-prolonging techniques until the baby dies. What are the ethical issues at play here? How do the principles of autonomy, beneficence, nonmalfeasance, and justice manifest themselves? If you were called as an ethical consultant, what would you do/recommend?

Explanation / Answer

Answer:

The ethical issues that can play here is the respect of autonomy of your patient rights in order to provide good to the patient where patient health should be given priority such that it shouldn't be providing any kind of discomport to patient and the facilities which is provided should be equal for all group of patient.

Under Autonomy a patient or patient family members should be well aware of the fact about the decision they are taking for the patient and also the risk involve with decision. Sometimes it's difficult for patient to take decision being aware of all the facts.

Under Beneficence the health care member should take care of all procedure that is involved in order to provide better health for the patient.

Under nonmalfeasance the patient or others should not get any kind of harm during the entire procedure.

Under justice issue the new technology or idea that is going to benefit the patient or society should be distributed equally among various groups of people. According to this all medical benefits should be provided equally for all group of people.

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