Medicine and law
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This article aims to highlight issues related to malpractice in plastic surgery and to point out the importance of good understanding of the law and the value of a patient's written informed consent as measures of professional protection. ⋯ In today's litigious society, maintenance of high standards in daily practice with continuous training and appropriate documentation of every procedure are all a sufficient defense of the plastic surgeon in case of medical litigation. Written patient's informed consent remains an integral part of the communication between physicians and patients, and importantly is facilitating professional protection.
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A number of countries adopt abortion laws recognizing rape as a legal ground for access to safe abortion service. As rape is a crime, these abortion laws carry with them criminal and health care elements that in turn result in the involvement of legal and medical expertise. The most common objective of the laws should be providing safe abortion services to women survivors of rape. ⋯ Still others require medical examination as a prerequisite for abortion. As a result, a number of abortion laws remain on the books. The paper attempts to analyze legal and practical issues related to medical examination in rape cases.
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In this paper I examine the question whether physicians have a legal and ethical duty to sustain pregnancies of women who die during the first or second trimester by the delivery of their fetuses. One ground for such a duty, on which I am focusing, is the duty of "special relationship" between the mother and the fetus. In my paper, I claim that the special relations the pregnant woman and the fetus have do provide such a moral duty. ⋯ In addition to being social entities I further show how the intrinsic values of families play an important role in forming such a moral duty. Nevertheless, I argue that such an instrumental duty that enables the establishment of families no more exists as the pregnant woman is no more socially and morally part of the family she belonged to while alive. I strengthen my argument by applying ethics of care, and by analyzing the practical conclusion I arrived at from a religious perspective.