Main description:

Health and social care decisions, and how they impact a family, are often viewed from the perspective of the individual family member making them-for example, the role of the parent in surrogacy questions, the care of the elderly, or decisions that involve fetuses or organ donations. What About the Family? represents a concerted, collaborative effort to depart from this practice-it rather shows that the family unit as a whole is intrinsic and inseparable from
patient's ethical decisions. This deeper level of thinking about families and health care poses an entirely new set of difficult questions. Which family members are relevant in influencing a patient? What is a family, in the first place? What duties does a family have to its own members? What makes an
ethics of families distinctive from health care ethics, an ethic of care or feminist ethics is that it theorizes relationships characterized by ongoing intimacy and partiality among people who are not interchangeable, and remains centered on the practices of responsibility arising from these relationships.

What About the Family? edited by bioethicists Hilde Lindemann, Marian Verkerk, and Janice McLaughlin, represents an interdisciplinary effort, drawing, among other resources, on its authors' backgrounds in sociology, nursing, philosophy, bioethics, and the medical sciences. Contributors begin from the assumption that any ethical examination of the significance of family ties to health and social care will benefit from a dialogue with the debates about family occuring in these other disciplinary
areas, and examine why families matter, how families are recognized, how families negotiate responsibilities, how families can participate in treatment decision making, and how justice operates in families.

Contents:

Introduction: Hilde Lindemann, Janice McLaughlin, and Marian Verkerk

Chapter 1: Why Families Matter, Hilde Lindemann

Case Study: Lesbian Parents' Search for "The Right Way" to Disclose Donor Conception to Their Children, Veerle Prevost

Chapter 2: Recognizing Family, Janice McLaughlin

Case Study: The Family Imperative in Genetic Testing, Lorraine Cowley

Case Study: What Counts as a Family-And Who Is to Decide? Margareta Hyden

Chapter 3: Negotiating Responsibilities, Marian A. Verkerk

Case Study: Paternal Responsibility for Children and Pediatric Hospital Policies in Romania, Daniela Cuta

Case Study: Family Care-Giving as a Problematic Category, Jacqueline Chin

Chapter 4: Health Care Decisions, Ulrik Kihlbom and Christian Munthe

Case Study: Family-Centeredness as Resource and Complication in Outpatient Care with Weak Adherence, Using Adolescent Diabetes Care as a Case in Point, Andre Herlitz and Christian Munthe

Case Study: Annie's Problem, Jackie Leach Scully

Chapter 5: Justice, Intimacy, and Autonomy
Jamie Lindemann Nelson and Simon Woods

Case Study: Young Carers, Gideon Calder

Case Study: Autism, Family Life, and Epistemic Injustice: A Case Study, Richard Ashcroft