Bioethics

2006, Florencia Luna, Arleen L. F. Salles, One: Latin American Bioethics: Some Reflections, Florencia Luna (editor), Bioethics and Vulnerability: A Latin American View, page 9, Bioethics has been defined as the critical and systematic reflection on ethical issues in healthcare, biological and medical research, and public health. […] In the United States, the emergence of modern bioethics has been characterized by a shift away from the religious and medical considerations that initially dominated the discourse to more philosophical and legal concepts.

This graded appreciation of the developing moral status of human life, especially during its prenatal stages, is deeply relevant to some of the most important bioethics debates of our day.

Despite the enormous breadth of bioethics, which ranges from interpersonal conflicts in medical practice, to ethical issues in animal and human subjects research, to policy formation in health care and the sciences, the bioethics field may be united by two common characteristics. First, bioethics is by nature a highly interdisciplinary activity.[…]Secondly, biothics tends to be practiced today along the main modalities of the ethics of modernity.