Can Researchers Experience Moral Distress?
In the context of healthcare, moral distress has traditionally described the emotional and psychological distress health...
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Read the latest posts from the Bioethics blog
Latest Posts
How Should Adolescents Be Included in Clinical Psychedelic Research?
Psychedelic-assisted therapy will soon be approved for adults. If the history of adult psychiatric drugs is any guide, a...
In Every Country I Practiced, I Was a Doctor — Until America
In American hospitals, beneath the noise of day-to-day clinical work, a quieter, more insidious shift has taken place—a ...
TikTok Ethics: Social Media’s Influence on Moral Values
Used by one-third of US adults and the majority of teens, the social media platform TikTok, has emerged as a hotbed for ...
Bioethics TV: The Pitt Puts the Spotlight on Supported Decision-Making
The Pitt has been praised not only for its superb writing, direction, and acting, but also for its accuracy. For example...
Why Bioethics Matters in the Debate Over Routine Infant Circumcision
Bioethics exists to help us think clearly about difficult medical decisions, especially when those decisions affect indi...
The Promises and Challenges for Ethical Carebots
Our research team has recently completed a pilot study with groups of older adults (N=11) and family care partners (N=9)...
My Great Aunt Had a Choice. Bill 18 Threatens That for Others.
My great-aunt chose medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in Alberta, Canada. It was sad – all death is – but i...
Updating the Canon: The Story of Henrietta Lacks Is Not Over
Three cases appear in almost every bioethics course: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the death of Jesse Gelsinger, and the ...
AI, Informed Consent, and Fallacious Reasoning
In an effort to justify the growing landscape of AI use in healthcare, there have been countless studies and empirical a...
An Open Letter to the American Red Cross and the International Red Cross: Calling for Imme...
February 27, 2026 The death of an immigrant detainee at an El Paso, Texas facility has been ruled a homicide, according ...
Citation Accuracy in the Make America Healthy Again Report (MAHA)
This editorial appears in the March Issue of the American Journal of Bioethics ncreasing attention has been devoted to q...
Top read essays
America Needs a Marshall Plan for Saving the Future of Science
At the end of World War Two, most of Europe lay in ruins. The Nazis had been defeated but at a terrible price to both th...
We Are Not Okay: Moral Injury And a World on Fire
The following editorial can be found in the April 2024 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics. After giving the name...
The ACOG Slap: In a culture that protects predators, someone was bound to snap
Content warning: This post addresses sexual assault, sexual harassment, and violence. On Saturday, May 20, 2023, at the ...
I Shouldn’t Have to be a Supercrip: Promoting Anti-Ableism and Disability Justice for Bioe...
Becoming a successful bioethics scholar is no easy feat, even for a supercrip like me. I am a supercrip, a person with d...
Why Bioethics Needs Pride: Anti-LGBTQ Laws and Health Disparities
So far this year there have been over 300 anti-LGBTQ laws introduced in the US, already breaking last year’s recor...
Editors Picks
Updating the Canon: The Story of Henrietta Lacks Is Not Over
Three cases appear in almost every bioethics course: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the death of Jesse Gelsinger, and the ...
Open Science, Counterscience, and the Limits of Trust
A recent New York Times investigative report by Mike McIntire describes how genetic and brain imaging data from thousand...
How to Write a Winning Normative Bioethics Paper: Lessons from an Editor and Author
Normative bioethics writing can be deceptively hard; what feels like a sharp argument to you might read as unclear, unde...
Virtual Reality in Medical Education: Can Empathy Become a Simulation?
Medical education has always relied on simulators. From wooden mannequins in the 17th century to the digital cadavers of...
Getting it Right: “The Pitt’s” Depiction of Neurodiversity
A decade ago, we wrote an AJOB blog post critiquing the then-new medical drama Chicago Med. We took the pilot to task fo...
‘Tell Them You Love Me’ is Shamefully Ableist: Stop Sensationalizing the Rape ...
In 2015, an exposé in The New York Times Magazine brought national attention to Anna Stubblefield’s sexual assault trial...
The Hopkins-Oxford Psychedelics Ethics (HOPE) Working Group Consensus Statement
The first Hopkins-Oxford Psychedelic Ethics (HOPE) workshop convened to discuss ethical matters relating to psychedelics...
We Are Not Okay: Moral Injury And a World on Fire
The following editorial can be found in the April 2024 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics. After giving the name...
Coercive Sterilization Isn’t A Matter of the Past: A Call to Action for Medical Providers...
Reproductive coercion is alive and well in the United States, violently robbing women of their ability to build f...
To ‘Shroom or not to ‘Shroom?: Lopsided Research And Policy Within Psychedelics Increases ...
Whether due to industry pressure, media hype, or a sense of optimism over a handful of recent clinical trials, the FDA m...
Doctoring Dobbs: On the Art and Ethics of Erasing Abortion Law
It has been one year since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling ended federally protected a...
Risking Death over Debt:The Moral Distress of EMTs Treating Patients Afraid of Medical Bil...
In the USA, some patients in emergency situations refuse treatment because they’re scared of medical bills. Even if they...