Ectopic or tubal pregnancy presents a medical emergency that requires prompt treatment in order to contain risks of maternal death and morbidity, including loss of future fertility. Medical circumstances involving individual patients and resources of the prevailing health care system will...

Physicians both collectively and individually need not be passive in the face of demonstrable evidence of social injustices that cost women their lives, in high proportions and for causes that could be cost-effectively prevented or remedied. Ethical arguments and legal means can be mobilized to...

In 2003, the World Health Organization published its well reference handbook Safe Abortion: Technical and Policy Guidance for Health Systems to address the estimated almost 20 million induced abortions each year that are unsafe, imposing a burden of about 67 thousand deaths annually. It is a...

Conflicts of interest arise when those who owe conscientious duties to others appear to have personal interests that might tempt them to subordinate those duties to their self-interest. Conflicts of interest are distinguishable from conflicts of commitment, which arise when individuals bear two...

Recent court decisions, for instance in South Africa and Latin America, have held states bound to respect and serve HIV/AIDS patients' human rights to indicated and available medical care. HIV/AIDS is estimated to affect over 36 million people worldwide, including 16.4 million women of...

Adolescents, defined by WHO as 10 to 19 years old, can give independent consent for reproductive health services if their capacities for understanding have sufficiently evolved. The international Convention on the Rights of the Child, almost universally ratified, limits parental powers, and...

Each year an estimated 515 000 women die of complications of pregnancy and childbirth, 7 million more suffer serious health problems and 50 million suffer adverse health effects. Over 98% of deaths occur in resource-poor countries. However, poverty alone neither justifies nor necessarily...

The disparity in resources between economically developed and developing countries presents ethical concerns when commercial sponsors of studies and investigators propose to conduct them with subjects in developing countries. Vulnerable people may be recruited into studies of little health...

The risk of HIV-infected or otherwise impaired practitioners infecting or injuring their patients is very low, but is of proper concern to patients, practitioners and healthcare facilities. Practitioners' general legal and ethical duties to protect patients includes protection against their own...

Liability to err is a human, often unavoidable, characteristic. Errors can be classified as skill-based, rule-based, knowledge-based and other errors, such as of judgment. In law, a key distinction is between negligent and non-negligent errors. To describe a mistake as an error of clinical...