ABSTRACT
Is health care just a business like any other, or should health care professionals have a higher standard of ethics? Should we invent a pill that enables people to live for hundreds of years? Have parents the right to use science to design the kind of children they want? Does everyone have an equal right to health care, whatever it costs? Is abortion the same as killing babies? Should we create creatures that are partly animal and partly human? Is it OK to sell our body parts, such as one of our kidneys, like we buy and sell our material possessions, our cars or our mobile phones? Should the state force people to adopt healthy life styles? Should mercy killing be made legal? Does it matter if our current use of natural resources is likely to totally destroy the environment in a few years from now? These are the kinds of questions raised and discussed by bioethics.
As we shall see, the subject began with concerns about the morality of doctors and other health care workers, but as science and technology have opened up a myriad of possibilities for changing human life, it has broadened out to include a wide range of ethical issues related to human health and welfare. Although, literally, the word ‘bioethics’ just means the ‘ethics of life’, I shall restrict its
