Recently, several states in the United States have sought to adopt more restrictive abortion policies. Most have tried to enact "heartbeat bills" that prohibit most abortions once a fetal heartbeat becomes detectable. This article explores this question: Are heartbeat bills ethically defensible? I argue that they are not. There are at least four problems with them. First, heartbeat bills rely on a problematic understanding of human death. Second, they contradict and even undermine the leading arguments in ethics against abortion. Third, they are ambiguous not just in terms of when they judge fetal heartbeats to be detectable but also in what they deem to be heartbeats. Finally, there is a case to be made that heartbeat bills are disingenuous, both in their intentions and in their underlying motives.
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Gregory Brown, MD, PhD, Department of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania; Sol De Jesus, MD, Department of Neurology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania; Emily Leboffe, MD, Department of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania; Andy Esch, MD, Center to Advance Palliative Care, New York, New York; and Kristina Newport, MD, Department of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Goals: Advance care planning (ACP) procedure codes have been established to reimburse meaningful care goal discussions; however, the utilization frequency of these codes in neurological disease is unknown. The objective of this study is to identify the association between ACP codes and healthcare utilization in chronic neurodegenerative diseases.
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