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Is infertility a disease and does it matter?

Claims about whether or not infertility is a disease are sometimes invoked to defend or criticize the provision of state‐funded treatment for infertility. In this paper, I suggest that this strategy is problematic. By exploring infertility through key approaches to disease in the philosophy of medic...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Maung, Hane Htut
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6492453/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30106176
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12495
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author Maung, Hane Htut
author_facet Maung, Hane Htut
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description Claims about whether or not infertility is a disease are sometimes invoked to defend or criticize the provision of state‐funded treatment for infertility. In this paper, I suggest that this strategy is problematic. By exploring infertility through key approaches to disease in the philosophy of medicine, I show that there are deep theoretical disagreements regarding what subtypes of infertility qualify as diseases. Given that infertility’s disease status remains unclear, one cannot uncontroversially justify or undermine its claim to medical treatment by claiming that it is or is not a disease. Instead of focusing on disease status, a preferable strategy to approach the debate about state‐funded treatment is to explicitly address the specific ethical considerations raised by infertility. I show how this alternative strategy can be supported by a recent theoretical framework in the philosophy of medicine which avoids the problems associated with the concepts of health and disease.
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spelling pubmed-64924532019-05-07 Is infertility a disease and does it matter? Maung, Hane Htut Bioethics Original Articles Claims about whether or not infertility is a disease are sometimes invoked to defend or criticize the provision of state‐funded treatment for infertility. In this paper, I suggest that this strategy is problematic. By exploring infertility through key approaches to disease in the philosophy of medicine, I show that there are deep theoretical disagreements regarding what subtypes of infertility qualify as diseases. Given that infertility’s disease status remains unclear, one cannot uncontroversially justify or undermine its claim to medical treatment by claiming that it is or is not a disease. Instead of focusing on disease status, a preferable strategy to approach the debate about state‐funded treatment is to explicitly address the specific ethical considerations raised by infertility. I show how this alternative strategy can be supported by a recent theoretical framework in the philosophy of medicine which avoids the problems associated with the concepts of health and disease. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2018-08-14 2019-01 /pmc/articles/PMC6492453/ /pubmed/30106176 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12495 Text en © 2018 The Authors Bioethics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Articles
Maung, Hane Htut
Is infertility a disease and does it matter?
title Is infertility a disease and does it matter?
title_full Is infertility a disease and does it matter?
title_fullStr Is infertility a disease and does it matter?
title_full_unstemmed Is infertility a disease and does it matter?
title_short Is infertility a disease and does it matter?
title_sort is infertility a disease and does it matter?
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6492453/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30106176
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12495
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