Article Text
Abstract
Fetal surgery has been practised for some decades now. However, it remains a highly complex area, both medically and ethically. This paper shows how the routine use of ultrasound has been a catalyst for fetal surgery, in creating new needs and new incentives for intervention. Some of the needs met by fetal surgery are those of parents and clinicians who experience stress while waiting for the birth of a fetus with known anomalies. The paper suggests that the role of technology and visualisation techniques in creating and meeting such new needs is ethically problematic. It then addresses the idea that fetal surgery should be restricted to interventions that are life-saving for the fetus, arguing that this restriction is unduly paternalistic. Fetal surgery poses challenges for an autonomy-based system of ethics. However, it is risky to circumvent these challenges by restricting the choices open to pregnant women, even when these choices appear excessively altruistic.
- Applied and professional ethics
- autonomy
- concept of health
- embryos and fetuses
- fetal surgery
- history of health ethics/bioethics
- paternalism
- philosophy of the health professions
- pregnancy
- ultrasound
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Other content recommended for you
- Current state of antenatal in utero surgical interventions
- Prenatal regenerative fetoscopic interventions for congenital anomalies
- Percutaneous transuterine fetal cerebral embolisation to treat vein of Galen malformations at risk of urgent neonatal decompensation: study protocol for a clinical trial of safety and feasibility
- The case for fetal cardiac intervention
- Recent developments in fetal medicine
- Dotting the I's and crossing the T's: autonomy and/or beneficence? The ‘fetus as a patient’ in maternal–fetal surgery
- Fetal surgery
- Fetal surgery for spina bifida aperta
- Attitudes of paediatric and obstetric specialists towards prenatal surgery for lethal and non-lethal conditions
- Paediatric surgery