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Author: Giovanni Berlinguer
Publisher: Baywood, Amityville, New York, USA, 2003
Hb ISBN 0-89503-225-2, price US$ 38
Pb ISBN 0-89503-231-7, price US$ 29
In recent years calls for a closer connection between bioethical analysis and social reality have become almost mainstream. The number of authors who have actually ventured to provide such an account is much more limited. Giovanni Berlinguer, the renowned Italian physician and bioethicist, is one of these few, as this publication clearly shows. It is in the Baywood "Policy, Politics, Health and Medicine Series", edited by Vicente Navarro.
Berlinguer contrasts his "everyday bioethics" with a "frontier bioethics" that focuses narrowly on new biotechnological developments. Many bioethics textbooks do indeed concentrate on the latter, treating issues arising from assisted reproductive technologies and pre-implantation diagnosis as typical ethical problems at the beginning of life, and physician-assisted suicide in intensive care units as representative of problems at the end of it. The broader perspective of the "everyday bioethics" that Berlinguer advocates includes thematic areas such as procreation and birth, population and equity, work and health, the human body as a commodity, and global health. He thus resists the widespread view that moral values are endangered mainly by technological development. As he puts it: "Human freedom must prevail over all limits and obstacles, whether due to social injustice, the manipulation of minds, or genetic predetermination."
His...