Ethical virtues and professional skills of a midwife (generally speaking, professional in obstetrics). Moral roles and responsibilities in health-care settings. Cases of conflict between moral principles and new Italian and European laws about the aims, role and limits of the professionals involved in the biomedical field (medical obstetricians, midwives, nurses, technicians, researchers, educators, social workers). Definition of biomedical ethics in a nursing outlook; bioethics at the beginning of life (paying attention to the moral status of embryo, the abortion and the assisted procreation/reproduction) and end of life (with special regard to palliative care, in a bio-psycho-social and person-centered perspective); counselling, psychotherapy and ethics; ethical issues in the scientific research and in drug experimentation (in order to protect human rights, to defend an independent scientific information and to avoid conflicts of interest), in the clinical practice (truth telling, confidentiality, consent and so on), in the public health care (justice, risks of health care commercialization, vaccination, organ transplantation, animal rights, the social meaning of birth and the duty to respect gender-identities, religious values, conditions of poverty, ethnic origins). About 16 hours of direct interpersonal teaching (8 for beginning of life, 4 for end-of-life issues, 4 for the other issues) are required as a general basic introduction.