An introduction to bioethics. It examines a comprehensive range of ethical questions and covers such topics as moral decision making, abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, life-sustaining technologies, organ transplantation, reproductive technologies, and the allocation of health care resources.

Selected from the Hastings Center Report mostly from the past 15 years, 45 articles provide a reader for a course in bioethics. They address some major issues such as allocation, rights and responsibilities, reproductive freedom, limiting care, terminating treating for the terminally ill, birth defects, handling human embryos, genetic diagnosis and screening, organ and tissue procurement, and genetic engineering. The 1994 edition is here enlarged with new sections on the goals and allocation of medicine and human cloning. There is no index.