ABSTRACT
This chapter develops an extended discussion of the foundational commitments of the virtue-based defense of perinatal palliative and hospice care. Section II summarizes Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the virtues of acknowledged dependence, focusing on the vital role of local communities in fostering and sustaining these dispositions. Section III offers a sketch of Robert Adams’s analysis of the connections between virtue and good common projects. In light of commitments, the chapter proposes the following: perinatal hospice is a good common project of care that manifests virtues crucial to addressing human vulnerability. Engaging in and caring properly for this project is a manifestation of virtue. Section IV offers an account of how one may ground the ascription of virtues and their corresponding vices to institutions and their social structures. Section V notes that a virtue-based defense of perinatal hospice has important normative implications for the reform of deficient practices and social structures within contemporary medical institutions.
