In the early 1970s, well before the field ofbioethics had established itself in medicine or anywhere else, the Hastings Center organized a small meeting of law school professors. The question we put to them was: what could or should be done to stimulate legal interest in the field? The answer we got was a wise one. We should do nothing to forcefeed the interest. It should simply be allowed to develop on its own, by the ordinary route of attracting a following because of its inherent importance. That is just what happened, and one of the first young legal scholars drawn to what remains (oddly enough) a relatively small field was George Annas. The idea of a column on law and ethics for the Hastings Center Report was not by 1976 a particularly bold one. It had been clear to us from the outset of the Center in 1969, and the establishment of the Report in 1971, that the rapidly emerging moral problems in medicine and biology would have enormous legal and policy implications. Even so, we were hardly prepared for the large and steady number of cases that were to come before the courts during the 1970s and that were to continue unabated in the 1980s. But our concern about a column on the subject was of a more pedestrian kind.

Zusammenfassung
There are many reasons to applaud and recommend this book....Annas is crystal clear....Especially adept at dissecting decision making into its medical, legal, and ethical components.-Journal of the American Medical Association

Inhalt
Patients Rights.- The Hospital: A Human Rights Wasteland.- The Emerging Stowaway: Patients Rights in the 1980s.- Breast Cancer: The Treatment of Choice.- Beyond the Good Samaritan: Should Doctors Be Required to Provide Essential Services?.- Adam Smith in the Emergency Room.- Sex in the Delivery Room: Is the Nurse a Boy or a Girl?.- Conception.- Redefining Parenthood and Protecting Embryos.- Artificial Insemination: Beyond the Best Interests of the Sperm Donor.- Contracts to Bear a Child: Compassion or Commercialism?.- The Baby Broker Boom.- Surrogate Embryo Transfer: The Perils of Patenting.- Pregnancy and Birth.- Fetal Neglect: Pregnant Women as Ambulatory Chalices.- Medical Paternity and Wrongful Life.- Righting the Wrong of Wrongful Life.- Is a Genetic Screening Test Ready When the Lawyers Say It Is?.- Homebirth: Autonomy vs Safety.- Forced Cesareans: The Most Unkindest Cut of All.- Disconnecting the Baby Doe Hotline.- Baby Doe Redux: Doctors as Child Abusers.- Checkmating the Baby Doe Regulations.- Reproductive Liberty.- Abortion and the Supreme Court: Round II.- Let Them Eat Cake.- Parents, Children, and the Supreme Court.- The Irrelevance of Medical Judgment.- Roe v Wade Reaffirmed 169.- Reaffirming Roe v Wade, Again.- Medical Practice.- Medical Malpractice.- Doctors Sue Lawyers: Malpractice Inside Out.- Confidentiality and the Duty to Warn.- Who to Call When the Doctor is Sick.- CPR: The Beat Goes On.- CPR: When the Beat Should Stop.- The Mentally Retarded and Mentally Ill Patient.- Denying the Rights of the Retarded: The Case of Phillip Becker.- A Wonderful Case and an Irrational Tragedy: The Phillip Becker Case Continues.- Sterilization of the Mentally Retarded: A Decision for the Courts.- Refusing Medication in Mental Hospitals.- The Incompetent Person'sRight to Die: The Case of Joseph Saikewicz.- The Case of Mary Hier: When Substituted Judgment Becomes Sleight of Hand.- Death, Dying and Refusing Medical Treatment.- The Case of Karen Ann Quinlan: Legal Comfort for Doctors.- No Fault Death: After Saikewicz.- Brother Fox and the Dance of Death.- Help from the Dead The Cases of Brother Fox and John Storar.- Quality of Life in the Courts: Earle Spring in Fantasyland.- When Suicide Prevention Becomes Brutality: The Case of Elizabeth Bouvia.- Elizabeth Bouvia: Whose Space Is This Anyway?.- Do Feeding Tubes Have More Rights Than Patients?: The Case of Paul Brophy.- The Case of Claire Conroy: When Procedures Limit Rights.- Prisoner in the ICU: The Tragedy of William Bartling.- Government Regulation.- Good as Gold: Report on the National Commission.- All the President's Bioethicists.- Creationism: Monkey Laws in the Courts.- Life Forms: The Law and the Profits.- Transfer Trauma and the Courts.- Prison Hunger Strikes: Why Motive Matters.- Transplants and Implants.- Defining Death: There Ought to Be a Law.- The Prostitute, the Playboy and the Poet: Rationing Schemes for Organ Transplantation.- Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Organ Sales.- Baby Fae: The Anything Goes School of Human Experimentation.- Consent to the Artificial Heart: The Lion and the Crocodiles.- The Phoenix Heart: What We Have to Lose.- No Cheers for Temporary Artificial Hearts.- References.