Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation

Reynolds, Joel Michael; Guidry‐Grimes, Laura; Savin, Katie

doi:10.1017/s0963180120000833

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…One could even conceptualize the entire disability rights movement as an attempt to draw this distinction” [ 31 ]. Some key recommendations from disability activists and scholars include removing any quality-of-life assessment in triage criteria, not having disability status as an exclusion criterion for scarce resources, and disallowing personal ventilator reallocation in a crisis [ 25 , 30 , 32 ].…”

Section: Scarce Resources and Equal Regard During The Covid-19 Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality

Guidry‐Grimes

2022

Theor Med Bioeth

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Robert Veatch’s The Foundations of Justice: Why the Retarded and the Rest of Us Have Claims to Equality (1986) delves into deep questions of justice through the case of a child with disabilities. I describe what is basically right about this vision, as well as what is problematic from the standpoint of contemporary disability bioethics. From there, I dive into the notion of vulnerability that is at play in his work. He describes disability as necessarily a condition of weakness, lesser-than existence, and neediness. When disability is viewed in this way as an inherently vulnerable state of being, the essential sociopolitical dimensions of disability receive inadequate attention, which, in turn, makes it impossible to identify injustices correctly. I connect these points to concrete challenges faced by disability communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, which have raised profound questions about the just use of scarce critical care resources. Any case drawn from the pandemic is a very different kind of case than that of the child in Veatch’s book, but a commonality is the question of who should get what limited resources when needs and urgency vary.

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Section: Scarce Resources and Equal Regard During The Covid-19 Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%