About the Conference

The Conference Mission

The Harvard Medical School Annual Bioethics Conference (ABC) convenes leaders in the field to explore ethical questions and concerns in healthcare. Held each April, the conference facilitates conversations among experts and supports members of ethics committees, health care professionals, bioethicists, administrators, attorneys, and others who are interested in addressing ethical issues.

Poster Session

Poster sessions offer participants the opportunity to learn from the research findings and field work of bioethics students, researchers, and clinicians. This year’s call for abstracts went out to the community in February 2018. The Conference Planning Committee selected posters for presentation.

he Center for Bioethics prepares professionals to address the profound moral questions raised by advances in the life sciences.

April 2019 Annual Bioethics Conference:

Controlling Death? Ethics, Law, and the Health Professions Across the U.S. to Canada and beyond, citizens and health care professionals are engaged in a profound moral debate about the scope of our freedom to choose the timing and manner of death. A growing minority of states have legalized some form of physician-assisted death and outside the US euthanasia is now legally permissible in several countries. The 2019 Annual Bioethics Conference will explore the ethical, legal, and clinical aspects of seeking to control when and how one dies. It will assess and engage the current landscape of assisting dying and anticipate future directions including distinctions between death and suicide in the setting of mental illness.

he Center for Bioethics prepares professionals to address the profound moral questions raised by advances in the life sciences.