Elizabeth Chaitin is director of the medical ethics and palliative care services at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Shadyside. She is also on the faculty of the Consortium Ethics Program and is an ethics consultant for the Ethics Consultation Service for the Center for Bioethics and Health Law of the University of Pittsburgh. She is a co-author of Ethics in End […]

The Center for Clinical Bioethics was established in 1991 at Georgetown University Medical Center as a university-based bioethics resource for those who shape and give health care. Edmund D. Pellegrino is founding director.

The Kennedy Institute of Ethics is the oldest academic bioethics center. See a list of its scholars. Contact Kelly Heuer.

Marie T. Hilliard is a senior fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center, where she also serves as director of bioethics and public policy. The center offers a resource guide on Catholicism and the use of vaccines.

Nancy Berlinger is deputy director and research scholar at the Hastings Center in Garrison, N.Y., and director of its Guidelines on End of Life Care project. She is the author of After Harm: Medical Error and the Ethics of Forgiveness.

In October 2009, Nature magazine published an editorial calling for a “realistic definition of life’s end” in order to facilitate the harvesting and donation of organs, among other things. The editorial sums up the current laws and policies and the state of the debate.

On Jan. 6, 2011, the Obama administration reversed course on end-of-life counseling regulations due to concerns that they would revive the “death panels” controversy. Read about it in an article from Christianity Today.

Read a June 6, 2011, “Personal Health” column in The New York Times about a New York State law, the Palliative Care Information Act, that requires doctors to offer to discuss end-of-life care with terminally ill patients. California passed a similar law in 2009 and other states are considering similar measures.

Read the June 3, 2011, Washington Post obituary on Jack Kevorkian. It says that, “Though [Kevorkian] was the most well known figure in fighting for euthanasia’s legalization, the legislative results of his efforts were largely unsuccessful, if not counterproductive.”