Taking Families Seriously

Abstract

Here, I attend particularly to how families are affected, not by reproductive technologies, but by day-to-day patterns of medical practice, decisionmaking in particular. Succinctly stated, what I find is this: standard accounts of medical ethics obscure what is particularly morally significant about families. Medical practice, influenced by those accounts as well as by its own traditions, can dishonor, sometimes possibly erode, those morally important features. What I will propose in response is a modification of the received view of how medical decisionmaking ought to occur that is sensitive both to the important values featured by current practice, and to values arising out of intimate relationships that current practice neglects. But the concerns I raise do have implications for reproduction, confidentiality, indeed for the whole way in which we tend to think about the role of families in healing.