Sister

College of Nursing

A movie Review

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

I. Introduction

My Sisters's Keeper is a 2009 drama directed by Nick Cassavetes and starring Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin, Sofia Vassilieva, and Alec Baldwin. Based on Jodi Picoult's novel of the same name, My Sister's Keeper was released in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, and the United Kingdom on June 26, 2009. With her penetrating insight into the hearts and minds of real people, Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person, and what happens when emotions meet with scientific advances. This movie explore the psychological consequences of wrenching incidents and decisions, and they deal largely in moral gray areas, where the ethics of medicine, law, and society come into conflict with one another. This movie offered easy resolution. Picoult published My Sister’s Keeper. Like most of her works, the novel takes on a range of morally complex issues, from the ethics of genetic engineering, to the right of terminally-ill patients to elect to die, to a minor’s right to control her own body. Genetic engineering alone has been the subject of controversy since its very first uses to help infertile couples conceive via in vitro fertilization. As the potential uses of the method have grown, so have the moral questions that such genetic manipulation raises. Notably, the ethics of using science to create a so-called “designer baby,” meaning one whose physical traits are selected by the parents, has become the object of frequent and heated debates. These quandaries, and those regarding the rights of terminally ill patients and minors to determine what happens to their bodies, all intertwine in My Sister’s Keeper, which tells the story of one family devastated by their child’s battle with acute promyelocytic leukemia, an extremely aggressive form of cancer.

Acute...