nursing and healthcare ethics

nursing and healthcare ethics

Robert Jones, a 3 week old baby is in the neonatal intensive and he has been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. The doctors advise his parents that they believe that Robert’s interests would be best served by using the latest therapeutic cloning methods to cure his diabetes. This treatment would require the destruction of a fertilized ova in order to get the T cells needed for the treatment.

Continued development and commercialization of cloning and genetic engineering is fraught with technical, ethical and legal challenges. Therapeutic cloning is among the most fundamental issues that our society will face. The ethical question is that “in using embryonic stem cells for therapeutic cloning, is the embryo considered a person?” Human reproductive and therapeutic cloning both begin with nuclear transplantation. In this process, the nucleus of a donor egg is replaced with the nucleus of a cell from the patient. The egg is stimulated to begin mitosis or cell division, which results in the formation of a blastocyst — a mass of about 150 stem cells, or, the implantable embryo — depending on what is done with it. In therapeutic cloning, the goal is to implant these stem cells in the patient to reproduce and replicate tissues in malfunctioning organs, such as those in the pancreas of diabetics (Greene 2002).

There are a variety of issues concerning the suggested method of treating Robert’s case of juvenile diabetes. The doctor’s advice to utilize the latest therapeutic cloning technique initiates a series of considerations regarding the moral, social, legal and economic circumstances of Robert’s parents. The suggested treatment may have implications on the parents’ ethics and morality. There are also religious considerations that may influence Robert’s parents’ response or decision to undertake such medical advancements. Their views on the issue of “potential life vs. actual life” as part of the procedure of therapeutic cloning methods may have an emotional impact on...