The questions and dilemmas of bioethics touch everyone. Should people who refuse to be vaccinated be treated for COVID-19, even if that displaces vaccinated patients with other serious conditions? What restrictions on abortion should there be, if any? Should women be paid to donate eggs? Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) discusses these and other similar questions facing the public today-as well as providing a way for thinking deeply about them. Steinbock and Menzel first examine major moral theories and how they can be used to analyze bioethical issues. They then provide historical background to the birth of bioethics and explain how it shifted from a paternalistic doctor knows best approach to respect for autonomy, a fundamental value in contemporary bioethics. Subsequent chapters cover advance directives, experimentation on human subjects, the definition of death, physician-assisted dying, abortion, disability, just healthcare systems, the allocation of scarce resources, pharmaceutical drug pricing, assisted reproductive technology, egg donation, surrogate motherhood, sex selection, and the genetic modification of humans. Race and gender are considered throughout, as are the ethical issues raised by pandemics. Steinbock and Menzel consider the controversial questions that surface in the public sphere, explaining the facts, and then evaluating different approaches to resolving them.

The questions and dilemmas of bioethics touch everyone. Should people who refuse to be vaccinated be treated for COVID-19, even if that displaces vaccinated patients with other serious conditions? What restrictions on abortion should there be, if any? Should women be paid to donate eggs? Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) discusses these and other similar questions facing the public today-as well as providing a way for thinking deeply about them. Steinbock and Menzel first examine major moral theories and how they can be used to analyze bioethical issues. They then provide historical background to the birth of bioethics and explain how it shifted from a paternalistic doctor knows best approach to respect for autonomy, a fundamental value in contemporary bioethics. Subsequent chapters cover advance directives, experimentation on human subjects, the definition of death, physician-assisted dying, abortion, disability, just healthcare systems, the allocation of scarce resources, pharmaceutical drug pricing, assisted reproductive technology, egg donation, surrogate motherhood, sex selection, and the genetic modification of humans. Race and gender are considered throughout, as are the ethical issues raised by pandemics. Steinbock and Menzel consider the controversial questions that surface in the public sphere, explaining the facts, and then evaluating different approaches to resolving them.

Everyone knows the old adage, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," but we seem not to live by it. In the Western world's health care it is commonly observed that prevention is underfunded while treatment attracts greater overall priority. This book explores this observation by examining the actual spending on prevention, the history of health policies and structural features that affect prevention's apparent relative lack of emphasis, the values that may justify priority for treatment or for prevention, and the religious and cultural traditions that have shaped the moral relationship between these two types of care.
Economists, scholars of public health and preventive medicine, philosophers, lawyers, and religious ethicists contribute specific sophisticated discussions. Their descriptions and claims lean in various directions and are often surprising. For example, the imbalance between prevention and treatment may not be as great as is often thought, and we may be spending excessively on many preventive measures just as we do on treatments compelled by the felt demands of rescue. A standard practice in health economics that disadvantages prevention, "discounting" the value of future lives, may rest on weak empirical and moral grounds. And it is an "apocalyptic" religious tradition (Seventh-day Adventism) whose members have put some of the strongest and most effective priority on long-term prevention.
Prevention vs. Treatment is distinctive in carefully clarifying the nature of the empirical and moral debates about the proper balance of prevention and treatment; the book pursues those debates from a wide range of perspectives, many not often heard from in health policy.