According to your worldview, what value does a human person have? Bioethical Issues Regarding Human Value How does your position affect your stance on controversial bioethical issues, such as abortion, designer babies, and stem cell research?

Bioethical Issues Regarding Human Value

Human rights in nursing, the right to life and to be treated with dignity, influences human value. Accordingly, medical procedures that affect human value raise bioethical issues. Values influence human relations, and they include; trust, empathy, psychological and physical proximity, support for patients and management, knowledge, and professional responsibility (Snellman and Gedda, 2012). Subsequently, human value is considered during medical procedures that raise bioethical issues such as abortion, designer babies, and stem cell research.

The first procedure that raises bioethical issues is abortion. Abortion involves the termination of a fetus’s life and its removal before seven months of gestation. Subsequently, in medical conditions where the fetus’s life threatens that of a mother, fetus abortion is recommended. A sickly fetus with a high probability of deformity can also be susceptible to abortion (MJ, 2021). Therefore, a medical practitioner allows abortion when the fetus poses threats to the mother’s life or to itself. Human value is considered during this procedure because the termination of a pregnancy will save a human life.

The second procedure that raises bioethical issues is designer babies. With the development of DNA Recombinant technologies, the creation of designer babies advanced. Technology such as CRISPR Cas9 allows for gene therapy, which might lead to creation the perfect designer babies. However, CRISPR Cas9 is not perfected and can cause errors while editing the genome resulting in non-reversible defects and disorders. Editing the human genome will eradicate some hereditary conditions either linked to the DNA or chromosomes. Therefore, designer babies will be saved from ill-fated lives, thereby conserving human life and value (Knoepfler, 2016).

The third procedure that raises bioethical issues is stem cell research. Stem cell research is on a quest to eradicate some diseases that ail humans. Pluripotent cells are harvested and cultured, where they differentiate into specialized cells that can be used in transplantation. Ethical issues arise from the donation of biological material to creating embryos for experiments only to the risks in clinical trials (Lo and Parham, 2009). To conclude, these medical procedures are for the greater good of improving the quality of human life, and therefore, people should support the procedures.

References

Knoepfler, P. (2016). GMO Sapiens:The Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies (1st ed.). World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Lo, B., & Parham, L. (2009). Ethical Issues in Stem Cell Research. PMCID: PMC2726839. Retrieved 20 April 2021, from http://10.1210/er.2008-0031.

MJ, F. (2021). Abortion ethics. PubMed. Retrieved 20 April 2021, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7041095/.