The following two dilemmas where presented in a lecture by Anthony Land and are based on real life situations.
Adoption
A weak, malnourished woman dies in labour. The child is alive but its chances of survival seen minimal. with careful nursing from you, the child survives the first days, then weeks of life and seems to be out of danger. You then discover that, as a prostitute, no one in the community is willing to take care of this “child of sin”. you continue to take care of the child for the remaining months of your contract and when the time comes to leave, you feel that you cannot abandon this young life into a community who feels no responsibility for its care. You decide to adopt the child, despite this being totally against the policy of you agency. You intend to return to your home country and bring the child up outside of its own culture-
What are the ethcial issues and boundaries of this dilemma?
The truth or the whole truth?
The project which you have been managing for the past two years is being evaluated by a donor. You know that the results of this evaluation will be a big factor in the descision as to wheather or no to continue funding. There still remains a lot to bve done and the loss of funding at this point would reslut in a big loss of support to the beneficiaries. In four of the five sites in which the porject opeates, things has been going well and objectives have been achived. In the fifth, however, there has been one problem after another and, despite you best efforts, little prgoress has been made.
You, and you headquarters, are worried that if the donor knows the extent of the problem at the fifth site, funding to the whole project may be jeopardised. You think of all the possible reaons why, int the limited time avilable for the evaluation, you can only manage to arrage visits of the evaluatots to three of the five sites and carefully leave the poorly performing site off the agenda. Hopefully the evaluation team will be satisfied wih the programme you have arranged for them and leave without ever knowing about the problems.
If you do this, ahve important ethical boudaries been crossed? Was there a better way?pe
Now I personally don’t have any problem with any one of these questions, but it is always interesting to see how others percive and answers them.
Well, taking a child to another country and bringing it up in a different culture is sort of the unavoidable point in international adoptions.
Either you have a problem with that and discuss international adoptions as a whole, or you don’t.
For a baby in a refugee camp, without anyone to care for it, brought up by a foreigner from they day it was born – “outside of it’s own culture” is probably not the most relevant thing to consider. The question has a rather unpleasant presumption of innate, biological culture that is probably more interesting to discuss.