Case Study Woman Implanted With Wrong Embryo

Woman Implanted with Wrong Embryo
This was a difficult scenario to even imagine but when I looked at it from the point of medical mistake, it became obvious that human error abounds in health care and because our business is dealing with human life, any such error can be devastating if not catastrophic. Implanting the wrong embryo in a mother who had undergone the process of harvesting her eggs, fertilizing it and saving it to be used for later fertility is I believe an extremely rare occurrence. I however cannot process what I would do if it happened to me. The ethical dilemma here is autonomy and non-maleficence. The principle of autonomy recognizes the rights of individuals to self-determine and is based on the human capacity to direct one's life according to rational principles. Autonomy in this case recognizes that this family had the ability to determine what to do with this pregnancy either, to carry it to term or not. Another ethical principle is non maleficence which means not harming or inflicting the least harm possible to reach a beneficial outcome. The intersection between these two ethical principles culminated into the final decision which granted that they had the ability to self-determine and terminate the pregnancy, choose to preserve the embryo despite the fact that they were well aware that the baby will be taken away from them at delivery. …show more content…
The first thing that was very emotional for me is the fact that the baby that I was carrying was not mine. Secondly, even if I choose to carry the baby, I could not keep the infant after birth and with abortion conflicting with my moral standards, will not be an option because aborting a baby of another individual that had struggled with infertility and now has the opportunity to have a baby will be inconceivable to say the