Medicine and law
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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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Among solutions to the problems of HIV/AIDS, a public health preventive measure has been proposed to notify the sexual partners of patients, this being a justifiable exception to professional secrecy. Every such measure must conform to a legal framework in order to facilitate the task of the health care worker, to respect the patient's right to privacy and to protect life as a juridical value. The General Law governing HIV/AIDS and its Costa Rican regulations propose a procedure to notify sexual partners. This study analyses how the procedure is developing in Costa Rica as well as its legal justificaitons.
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The effect of shortcomings in the system of civil procedure in Japan, such as excessive delay and possible mistaken judgment on the existence of negligence, on medical malpractice litigation and legal outcomes has not been examined. Using data on judgments and the decisions in medical malpractice litigation by the Tokyo and Osaka District Courts, we examined the association between civil procedure and medical malpractice litigation, and predictors of the decisions of medical malpractice litigation. ⋯ Although the study implies that shortcomings in civil procedure negatively influence medical malpractice litigation, it was not determined whether decisions were made based on mistaken judgment concerning the existence of negligence. Since there are methodological limitations to this study, further studies are necessary to verify these findings.
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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.