Prologue to the Symposium: Bioethics and care in sexual reproductive health

Abstract

The author has taken as the basis of this manuscript the content of the Presentation to a similar symposium published in 2009 in the Peruvian Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (RPGO) (1). The ultimate goal of medicine, has traditionally been to seek the improvement of the sick person avoiding harm, according to the maxim dubiously attributed to Hippocrates primum non nocere; However, Bioethics as a discipline did not appear until the second half of the 20th century. For many researchers, the birth of the concept of bioethics, although it was not called by that term, occurs in Seattle (USA) when a non-medical committee was created in the early 1960s to decide who had preference for hemodialysis. The fundamental question was: why a medical breakthrough should create medical discrimination? How and who chose the candidates? The answer to these questions did not fall on the doctors, but on a representation of the community (2).