Law Case 6: Case Six Encountered A Moral Dilemma

Case Six outlines a physician who has encountered a moral dilemma. A seventeen-year-old girl is pregnant – estimated to be eleven or twelve weeks along – and wishes to keep the baby. She has not told her mother, as she fears she will be pressured into a getting an abortion, and has asked the physician to keep the secret. The physician agrees to not disclose the pregnancy to the patient’s mother until all three parties can discuss the matter in person the following week. Not long after the appointment, the patient’s mother calls the physician’s office, demanding to know why her daughter had been there. The physician is then faced with a choice: they can either go against her promise to the patient – who is legally a minor – and disclose the pregnancy to the mother, or keep the secret and deny the mother’s

This applies both to the Hippocratic oath, which will be discussed in more detail below, and the promise identified in Case Six. The physician has previously entered into a promise with the patient to keep the pregnancy a secret. It is up to the physician to decide whether the prima facie of keeping a promise weights out the repercussions of withholding information from the patient’s mother. It could also be argued that, in some legal instances, since the patient is a minor, the physician has a fidelity prima facie to the mother. A morally dubious situation would occur in an instance where the physician chooses to override fidelity. In telling the mother about the pregnancy, the physician may subject the patient to the pressure that the patient feared enough to keep her pregnancy confidential in the first place. Contrarily, informing the mother of the pregnancy may be seen as the responsible thing to do as one could argue that a seventeen year old has not yet developed the level of reason required to make life-altering