Every family will be faced with making critically important medical choices for loved ones. Serious sicknesses, prolonged suffering, or the impending death of a family member are intensely stressful. Making sound life and death decision in such situations can be extremely difficult without having a settled moral framework.

This valuable book will teach you sound moral principles and how to apply them to concrete situations in an easy-to-understand fashion. We recommend that you read it before you are faced with a life and death decision for a family member. Don’t discard the book after you read it. Instead, keep it on hand to refer to again and again when you are in the midst of making important bioethical choices.

Life Issues, Medical Choices will teach you how to give reliable answers to a friend or an extended family member asking for advice. Here are just a few of the 57 moral questions answered in the book:

• How does one know when a medical procedure is obligatory or optional, such as continued use of a respirator for a dying patient?
  
• Which ways of treating ectopic pregnancies are moral?
  
• Which reproductive technologies are moral?
  
• Is it moral to try to select the sex of one’s baby?
  
• Are couples who have been sterilized morally obliged to get a reversal?
  
• Is it morally permissible to have relations with a contracepting spouse?
  
• Is it always wrong to let someone die?
  
• What is “brain death”? What neurological criteria does the Church approve of?
  
• How should one respond to the request by one suffering, “Will you help me die?”
  
• Is it moral to use vaccines that have been produced from aborted fetuses?
  
• What if a patient cannot be persuaded to do what is morally correct?