PROGRAMMATIC AND POLICY ETHICS IN MATERNAL AND CHILD PUBLIC HEALTH: A CALL FOR ACTION

Public health has become the face of much of modern medicine's successes. Since maternal and child health (MCH) has taken a central role in Western healthcare, outcomes have been greatly improved in all of Western Europe and North America. Social justice calls for bringing these successes to developing countries, where childbirth and childhood still remain the most deadly life stages for mothers and infants, respectively. At present, the nascent field of public health ethics has produced literature providing frameworks for intervention and policymaking, yet these frameworks have not seen a transition into practice. This has led to a sharp dichotomy between public health research and practice, where the former is subject to ethical oversight and the latter is not. The importance of ensuring that the targets of MCH interventions, who are more vulnerable than the general population, are protected from unethical practice means that concrete steps must be taken now, despite the lack of an agreed upon framework for governing interventions. I propose four actions that would hasten bringing ethics to the forefront of MCH practice: reforming MCH education, replacing current philosophical approaches to public health, strengthening ethics at the CDC, and creating ethical review boards for interventions that are similar to those already present in public health research.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Kirzhner, Eugene

• maternal child health

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/39398

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/39398