Weighing Conflicting Duties in the Face of Scarcity and Vulnerability
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2025
Arturo González was a thirty-eight-year-old man who presented to our hospital during the Delta variant surge with COVID-related pneumonia that badly damaged his lungs. He was cannulated for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) upon admission; he had been on ECMO for seventy days and was awake and alert when Ethics was consulted. Due to multiple marginalized identities—he was an undocumented immigrant, uninsured, and had limited social support—Arturo did not have access to a lung transplant and was dependent on ECMO for survival. In the face of mounting critical care resource scarcity, Arturo’s intensivists disagreed about whether to continue ECMO indefinitely or to explore discussions about withdrawing support. In this book chapter, we discuss our role as ethics consultants balancing the organizational duty to justly steward scarce resources with the professional duty to this vulnerable patient: setting treatment boundaries while collaborating with Arturo on a treatment plan within these boundaries. We also discuss our role in addressing the care team’s moral distress at the most haunting aspect of this case: that Arturo’s social position limited his access to a lifesaving transplant.
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