• Medicine and law · Mar 2008

    Problems with claims that sanctity leads to 'pro-life' law, and reasons for doubting it to be a convincing 'middle way'.

    • John Coggon.
    • Centre for Social Ethics and Policy and Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, School of Law, University of Manchester.
    • Med Law. 2008 Mar 1; 27 (1): 203-13.

    AbstractThis paper focuses on the idea of pro-life arguments and the sanctity of life doctrine in the context of debates on end-of-life law. Advocates of the sanctity doctrine are often thought of as being pro-life, which has potentially troublesome implications in policy debate. I explore what it means to be pro-life, and consider sanctity's relation to this. I question the coherence and appeal of truly pro-life law, and law that is premised on the sanctity doctrine. The analysis allows me to examine and reject the idea that the sanctity doctrine is reasonably described as a 'middle way' that we should enshrine in policy and practice.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…