The Child’s Body and Bone Marrow Transplantation: Introduction

Questions concerning the ethical status of children, and their position and their relationships within families, have been widely debated in recent moral philosophy and biomedical ethics, as well as in pedagogic sciences and sociology. This volume is intended to contribute to these interdisciplinary debates from a very specific angle. Combining philosophical, ethical and qualitative empirical research, it focuses on a medical practice that brings out a particularly challenging and complex social and familial situation, thus illuminating family responsibilities and their conflicts, children’s dependency, the child’s body with all its meanings, and the specific roles of family members in a transformative situation. The practice concerned is the transplantation of bone marrow between siblings who are children at the time of transplant. These renewable haematopoietic stem cells, derived from the marrow of the hip bone, can serve as a medical therapy for the sick brother or sister.