2015, Vol.18, No.3

Korean Journal of Medical Ethics 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.21

pISSN : 2005-8284 / eISSN : 2234-3598
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medethics

The harm principle has been widely used for constraining and guiding reproductive rights since John A. Robertson defined reproductive rights and gave presumptive primacy to them. However, this article argues that the peculiar attributes of reproductive ethics, in which it is necessary to compare existing to non-existing beings, make the harm principle incapable of properly guiding reproductive rights. At best the harm principle can play an auxiliary role in this task. This article calls for an alternative principle for guiding reproductive rights.

A web survey was conducted to examine the experiences with, and understanding of medical decision-making among adults in South Korea. The subjects for the study were 500 residents, 19 years of age or older living in Seoul, Gyeonggi-do, and Incheon. The average satisfaction with the current health-care system was found to be 3.08 on a 5-point Likert scale. The degree of trust in health institutes was 3.15 and the degree of trust in medical doctors was 3.24. More than 90% of the respondents want to receive an accurate diagnosis when they experience a serious disease, and 73.2% want to be informed from the doctor directly. With respect to medical decision-making, 41.2% of subjects prefer a decision-making model that involves the doctor, the patient, and a guardian (usually a family member); 36.2% of subjects prefer that the relevant decisions be made by the patient in consultation with the doctor. More than 60.0% of subjects answered that they would respect the preference of their parents in medical decision-making, while 21.0% responded that it would depend on the condition. The gender, age, occupation, and education level all had very little influence on subjects’ responses; gender did exhibit some influence on certain items. The results of this study indicate that while Korean adults accept the importance of their own judgements in medical decision-making, many of them want to engage their guardians in the actual decision-making process.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a bioethics education program on caregivers’ understanding of biomedical ethics and their attitudes toward the elderly. A nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was adopted. The subjects in this study were 58 caregivers who work in long-term care facilities in South Korea. An experimental group and a control group were organized with 29 caregivers in each group, and the effects of the bioethics education program developed for this study were tested. The data were analyzed with the SPSS 19.0K statistical package. The findings of the study were as follows. First, after subjects in the experimental group received the bioethics education program, positive changes were detected in their understanding of biomedical ethics and their attitudes to the elderly. Second, the experimental group underwent more positive changes than the control group in terms of their understanding of the right to life of fetuses, artificial abortion, artificial insemination, prenatal diagnosis of fetuses, brain death and human biotechnology as well as in their attitudes toward the elderly. Accordingly, the bioethics education program that was provided to caregivers in this study had a positive effect on caregivers’ understanding of biomedical ethics and their attitudes toward the elderly.