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Legal and Ethical Issues Essays

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Running head: LEGAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES IN MY SISTER’S KEEPER

Legal and Ethical Issues in My Sister’s Keeper
Detra Smith
Med 149: Medical Ethics

Abstract
In this paper I am going to identify some the legal and ethical issues in My Sister’s Keeper. Some of those issues include emancipation of a minor, genetic engineering, and limited termination of parental rights. I will be giving my opinion on these matters also.

My Sister’s Keeper is about a family who conceives a child strictly for the use as bone marrow donor for her gravely ill older sister. Kate is diagnosed with Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia at the age of two. As their doctor tells them of their options, he asks Sara and Brian, the parents, have they thought about …show more content…

She left her morals at home on the kitchen table that day and kept leaving them behind. In this movie, it seemed that the mother is putting one child’s quality of life over the other children. Jesse is being neglected because he has a selfish mother. He is just a shadow that sulks and creeps throughout the house and the city. As parents how they can they do that. I know that when you are dealing with a seriously ill family member, some things do get neglected or put on the back burner. But that thing should not be your child. Sara and Brian did not even realize that Jesse was suffering with dyslexia. Anna and Kate have came up with a bunch of reasons as to why Anna wants to be emancipated. At the age of eleven, Anna and her older brother, Jesse, go hire a lawyer to sue their parents for the rights to Anna’s body. The lawyer takes the case because he knows what it is like to live a life where you have no control of your body. The lawyer suffers from epilepsy. Anna wants to become a medically emancipated minor. The courts had never heard of such a case and there is no such term as medically emancipated, legally defined. With Anna becoming medically emancipated, it means that Sara and Brian’s parental rights have been terminated within limits. They still had to provide shelter, food, clothing, and other basics, but they could not tell her what to do medically. In my opinion, an eleven year old is not responsible

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