ISSUES
Abortion
ABSTRACT:
As healthcare professionals dedicated to saving and protecting human life, we affirm that all human life has special value derived from being a part of the human family.
A. The value of human life is independent of an individual person’s genotype, developmental stage, age, sex, ethnicity, place of origin, disability, or perceived worth.
B. The value of human life is continuous throughout lifetime, from fertilization to death.
Advance Directives
ABSTRACT:
Advance directives are medically and ethically appropriate. Advance directives should be recommended to all adult patients regardless of health and reviewed and updated periodically. An essential part of an advance directive is the patient’s discussion with designated family or other close associates and the healthcare team about the patient’s values and wishes. Conversations about death, dying, and end-of-life medical care should be a routine part of care. Healthcare professionals should assist patients with advance care planning in accordance with patients’ beliefs, values, and preferences, particularly when they are clearly and consistently expressed.
Cloning
ABSTRACT:
Cloning humans presents serious personal, familial and societal difficulties, thereby creating a new category of biological relationships. Who would be the "parents?" Who would be legally and morally responsible for these cloned babies? Human cloning violates fundamental human rights and demeans the unique physical identity over those who are cloned. Cloning would make human life a commodity while lessening respect for the value of human life.
Embryonic Stem Cell Research
ABSTRACT:
Embryonic stem cell research is unethical and unnecessary. Medical technology must be subjected to moral scrutiny. Our technology is developing faster than our ethics. A utilitarian plan to sacrifice a few humans for the good of many is simply immoral. And as history demonstrates, sanctioning a value judgment on the worth of human life is never contained to a single circumstance.
It is faulty reasoning to say it is acceptable simply because many of the embryos will die anyway. Most of the one million frozen embryos currently being stored in in-vitro clinics around the U.S. 100,000 frozen embryos are precious to their parents. If these parents decide not to implant their embryos themselves, they can offer them for adoption through programs such the National Embryo Donation Center.
Healthcare Institution’s Right of Conscience
ABSTRACT:
AAME affirms that healthcare professionals' primary obligation in our society is to serve humanity. AAME believes that the healthcare professional’s conscience should be informed by available evidence and the standards of one's community or tradition, and its conclusions reached according to the dictates of his or her own careful reasoning, reflection on personal experience, worldview, and spirituality.
Healthcare Patient’s Right of Conscience
ABSTRACT:
The right of patients with decisional capacity, on the basis of conscience, to refuse treatment, even when such refusal would likely bring harm to themselves, should be respected.
The right of patients, on the basis of conscience, to refuse treatment, when such refusal would likely threaten the health and/or life of others, should be resisted and should become a matter of public interest and responsibility.
The right of a healthcare surrogate, for example, the parent of a minor, on the basis of conscience, to refuse treatment, thereby threatening the health and/or life of another, should be resisted and should become a matter of public interest and responsibility.
Healthcare Professional’s Right of Conscience
ABSTRACT:
In healthcare the right of choice of moral refusal is foundational and applies to all participants, including patients and healthcare professionals. Healthcare by its nature cannot be morally neutral, as it is actively concerned with human health and need. Issues of conscience arise when a proposed medical or surgical intervention conflicts with the deeply-held personal beliefs and values of the patient or the healthcare professional. AAME believes that in such circumstances Rights of Conscience have priority.
Healthcare Professional Trainee’s Right of Conscience
ABSTRACT:
In healthcare the right of choice of moral refusal is foundational and applies to all participants, including patients and healthcare professionals. Healthcare by its nature cannot be morally neutral, as it is actively concerned with human health and need. Issues of conscience arise when a proposed medical or surgical intervention conflicts with the deeply-held personal beliefs and values of the patient or the healthcare professional. AAME believes that in such circumstances Rights of Conscience have priority.
Homosexuality
ABSTRACT:
A healthcare professional would never consider telling their patients who struggle with alcoholism or obesity (in spite of the fact that there may be genetic predisposition to these conditions) that they should celebrate their condition as part of the wonders of diversity. Such an attitude would deny their patients the treatment to allow them to avoid unhealthy consequences of those conditions. Why, then, should healthcare professionals condone homosexual behavior with unhealthy consequences as great or worse than alcoholism, when, in fact, treatment for homosexuality has a cure rate at least as good, if not better, than that for alcoholism?
Medical Marijuana
ABSTRACT:
The term “medical marijuana” refers to the insufficiently regulated use of the whole, unprocessed marijuana plant or its extracts to treat symptoms of illness and other conditions. Note that pharmaceutical-grade medications from components of the marijuana plant have been developed according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards, but these medications are distinct from what is classified here as “medical marijuana.”
Moral Complicity
ABSTRACT:
Moral complicity with evil is culpable association with or participation in wrongful acts. Evil is defined as anything immoral or wrong based on various religious texts. Questions about moral complicity with evil can arise in regard to an individual’s relationship to or involvement with past, present or future evil.
Moral complicity may occur with the use of information, technology or materials obtained through immoral means. This complicity may involve using, rewarding, perpetuating, justifying, or ignoring past or present evil.1 Moral complicity may involve enabling or facilitating future immoral actions of patients or professionals.
Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
ABSTRACT:
Despite the proven importance of the well-established principle that healthcare professionals must not, and will not, kill, and the clear historical record of the tragedies that have occurred when this boundary has been breached, there is a growing movement within and outside of medicine for the legalization of assisted suicide (the use of medical knowledge, judgment and licensure to provide the patient with the means for committing suicide, usually a prescription for a lethal overdose of medications) and euthanasia (the direct provision of lethal quantities of medications into the patient for the sole purpose of causing death). The stark nature of these killing acts has been obscured by euphemistic yet ethically equivalent terms such as “mercy killing,” “aid in dying,” and ‘’assistance in dying” based on a putative "right to die."
Recreational Marijuana
ABSTRACT:
Because marijuana has been illegal in the United States until its recent, selective legalization in multiple states, and because it remains illegal federally, high-quality research regarding the safety or risks associated with current recreationally-used marijuana products (especially those containing high levels of THC) is sparse. However, a lack of studies on such products does not mean risk is absent. On the contrary, there is moderate to substantial evidence of health hazards with marijuana use, including associations with respiratory problems (when smoked), motor vehicle crashes, mental or psychosocial problems, increased incidence of schizophrenia and other mental health problems, and addiction. Maternal marijuana smoking is also associated with complications for unborn children. Future research on higher level THC products has the potential to demonstrate even more harm.
Reproductive Technology
ABSTRACT:
Married couples may choose to seek assisted reproductive technology, especially when they are unable to have children naturally. We encourage couples to seek counsel and guidance when considering these technologies. However, certain assisted reproductive technologies present direct and indirect dangers to the sanctity of human life and family. As technology permits further divergence from normal physiologic reproduction, it can lead to perplexing moral dilemmas. Not every technological procedure is morally justified and some technologies may be justified only in certain circumstances. The moral and medical complexities of assisted reproductive technologies require full disclosure both of the medical options available and their ethical implications.
Transgender Identity
ABSTRACT:
The AAME recognizes that gender identity issues are complex, and inclination to identify with the opposite gender may have biological, familial, and social origins that are not of the making of particular individuals. In contrast to the current culture, the AAME believes that finding one’s identity within one’s biological sex will result in a healthier and fulfilled life. The AAME believes, moreover, that social movements which contend that gender is decided by choice are mistaken in defining gender, not by nature, but according to desire. Authentic personal identity consists in social gender expression that is congruent with one’s natural biological sex. The AAME is concerned that efforts to compel healthcare professionals to affirm transgender ideology, provide medical legitimization for transgender psychology, or cooperate with requests for medical or surgical sex reassignment threaten professional integrity.