The birth of Siamese twins joined at the chest (thoracopagus twins) and sharing a heart creates an ethical dilemma. Infants with conjoined hearts survive no more than a few months, and physicians must decide whether to ...

In the Tennessee case of

Appellate courts in California and New Jersey have reached conflicting conclusions in the first legal tests of whether artificial feeding is a "medical treatment," and whether it is ever legally permissible to allow a ...

Annas argues that current public policy that emphasizes cost containment over quality of care and equity of access is an effort to transform medical care from a social good to an economic good. This trend threatens to ...

Annas fears that efforts to control health care costs will erode the traditional ethic that hospitals have an obligation to provide emergency care to anyone, regardless of ability to pay. He characterizes emergency ...

Annas discusses three 1987 New Jersey Supreme Court cases in which the court decided that life-sustaining treatment could be terminated either because this was what the patient clearly wanted (