Re-Creating Medicine

CHOICE

Chapters provide thorough and persuasive arguments for rethinking economic incentives for organ donation, providing optimal autonomy for reproductive decision-making, and other controversial positions. Whether or not one agrees with his arguments, Pence challenges stale thinking. At the very least, the development of careful responses to his positions should help to clarify thinking on the issues that he addresses.

Religious Studies Review

The book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in bioethics, both for its clear summaries of the debates to date and for its willingness to call into question previously unchallenged beliefs about how medicine should be practiced.

Bioethics

Throughout the book, Pence provides a penetrating critique of moralistic and paternalistic arguments and assumptions, and champions individual choices and conceptions of the good. The book's optimistic and visionary but practical tone stands in sharp contrast to the pessimistic, conservative, 'sky is falling' diatribes one finds in op-ed pages and academic journals. Pence has little patience for tired, old arguments and attitudes and embraces new ideas and developments. On the dust jacket Kelly Smith describes the book as 'a breath of fresh, common sence air.' I concur and would add 'well worth reading.'

Journal Of The American Psychoanalytic Association

Pence has done a service to the field of bioethics in addressing important issues in less than popular way.

Abraham Verghese M.D.

This is a brave work that looks at all the controversies in the current practice of medicine. Using examples from history, literature, and from current clinical practice, Dr. Pence beautifully illustrates and illuminates the most important bioethical issues of our day. This is a ground breaking and important work and I recommend it highly.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Pence argues concisely, if sketchily, for increasing the pace of medical progress in areas where he believes ethical issues are unnecessarily slowing the way. Some topics discussed by Pence, who teaches medical ethics at the University of Alabama-Birmingham medical school, are more controversial than others. No doubt few will find fault with his call for greater patient control over medical records in cyberspace, and many Americans have already accepted the moral permissibility of in vitro fertilization and even of payment for surrogate mothers. On topics such as these, Pence seems to be merely mopping up, seeking to quell remaining doubts. But he goes on to take more contentious positions: advocating payment to families for their dead relatives' organs, or endorsing cloning and genetic enhancement of children. Pence does a good job of undermining weak arguments: he notes, for example, that critics hold new techniques of reproduction to "Olympian standards" of virtue and safety from which the old sexual one is generally exempt. Yet he blithely ignores some arguments that many find equally compelling. For example, he dismisses the premise that "loss of human embryos morally matters" without even engaging the case that it does. Further, he displays a philosophical bad habit he himself denounces, that of overlooking one's "first step." Thus he takes for granted, and does not bother to defend, the truth of utilitarian ethics and the coherence of a distinction between public morality and private theories of the good. For readers who accept those premises, Pence may be persuasive; for others, he misses the deepest objections. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

William Beatty

Should we get a synonym for cloning, which is now more a land mine than a scientific term? Should genes be patentable? Pence doesn't just cover the subjects broached by those questions; he illuminates them.
—Booklist