Ethical Principles In The Belmont Report Essay

NU310_Unit4_AssignmentWorksheet
1. Discuss what ethical principles in the Belmont Report were violated during the medical experiments cited in the article. (20 pts)
The ethical principles in the Belmont Report that were violated were respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Dr. Sims’ violated respect for persons when he performed surgeries on black slave women without use of anesthetics and treated them as anything but human. As a doctor, Dr. Sims pledged to do no harm, which he never upheld because he caused bodily harm to the women. He chose his patients based on their race and status in the society, which was unjust. The respect for persons and beneficence principles had been violated by many Southern hospitals when they only treat blacks because these

Although some of the subjects agreed to be participants, they never knew or had not been informed of what the study was about. The government agency deliberately withheld life-saving medications to the subjects when such medication became available (Grove et al., 2015). The disturbing part was that the government agency continued their research knowing that it was unjust and inhumane, and even published results of the study for people to read. Americans condemned the acts of the Nazi Germans to the Jews, yet they committed this experiment to the unknowing African Americans. The African American men used for the syphilis study were considered vulnerable because these men were susceptible to attack or physical harm due to their race. Aside from that, some of the men didn’t even know they were participants of the study due to the racial discrimination of the US Public Health Service agency (Grove et al., 2015). What makes Americans better than the Nazi Germans? It was only when the public clamored about the injustice and inhumane acts of the study that the government stopped their research (Grove et al.,