Taking Families Seriously

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