Bioethics and Disability

Alicia Ouellette is a Professor of Law at Albany Law School and a Professor of Bioethics in the Union Graduate College/Mount Sinai School of Medicine Bioethics Program. Her recent publications include 'Shaping Parental Authority over Children's Bodies' and 'Growth Attenuation, Parental Choice, and the Rights of Disabled Children'. She is also a co-editor (with Laurence McCullough and Robert Baker) of The Cambridge Dictionary of Bioethics (2010). Before joining the law faculty, she served as an Assistant Solicitor General for the State of New York. As ASG, she briefed and argued more than 100 appeals on issues ranging from termination of treatment for the terminally ill to the responsibility of gun manufacturers for injuries caused by handguns. She continues her advocacy work in select cases and was lead counsel on the law professors' brief submitted in support of same-sex couples who sought the right to marry in New York State.

• 1. The struggle: disability rights versus bioethics; 2. Clashing perspectives and a call for reconciliation; 3. Infancy; 4. Childhood; 5. The reproductive years; 6. Adulthood; 7. The end of life; 8. Toward a disability-conscious bioethics.

'… impressive … a worthwhile contribution to the field of bioethics and, hopefully, a model for people who are so struck by these thorny issues that they are likely to take up the challenge to be disability-conscious.' Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics