Arguments against providing futile care include potential harm to patients, family members, or caregivers with little or no likely benefits, and the diversion of resources to support the futile care of patients when resources could be used to provide care to patients that could respond to care. Futile care does not offer benefits to the patient as a whole, and at the same time the physical, emotional, spiritual, economic, or ethical hardship and harm caused by futile care to the patient or to family members may be significant. While futile care does not benefit patients, it may cost providers, the state, and patient families significant money and resources. In some cases, futile care involves the expenditure of resources that could be used by other patients with a good likelihood of achieving a positive outcome. For instance, in the case of Baby K, attempts to transfer the infant to other centers were unsuccessful because there were no unoccupied pediatric ICU beds in the region. Many critics of that case insist that the medical expenses used to keep the anencephalic child on life support for over two years could have been better spent on awareness and prevention efforts for her condition. Issues in futile care considerations The issue of futile care in clinical medicine generally involves two questions. The first concerns the identification of those clinical scenarios where the care would be futile. The second concerns the range of ethical options when care is determined to be futile. Assessment of futility in a clinical context Clinical scenarios vary in degrees and manners of futility. While scenarios like providing ICU care to the brain-dead patient or the anencephalic patient when organ harvesting is not possible or practical are easily identifiable as futile, many other situations are less clear. A study in the United Kingdom with more than 180,000 patients aimed to define a timeframe for quantitative futility in emergency laparotomy and investigate predictors of futility using the United Kingdom National Emergency Laparotomy Audit (NELA) database. A two-stage methodology was used; stage one defined a timeframe for futility using an online survey and steering group discussion; stage two applied this definition to patients enrolled in NELA December 2013–December 2020 for analysis. Futility was defined as all-cause mortality within 3 days of emergency laparotomy. Results showed that quantitative futility occurred in 4% of patients (7442/180,987) and median age was 74 years. Significant predictors of futility