Counseling Ethical Dilemmas

Due to the complexity of the counseling profession, counselors will be confronted with ethical issues that will question the steps they should take in order to work with a client. In order to maintain professionalism, counselors consult with colleagues, the Ethical Decision Making model, the American Counseling Association (ACA) Code of Ethics, and obtain legal advice before deciding what steps they should take with specific ethical dilemmas. The present case describes an ethical dilemma that refers to a counselor who is informed by a 17 year old student that she is 6 weeks into pregnancy. The client specifically states that she is not willing to inform her mother of the issue at hand because she does not know if she wants to keep the child.
However, the client specifically told the counselor that she was not willing to tell her mother of her current issue because she did not know if she wanted to keep the child or have an abortion. This case is controversial for the counselor because he has two daughters that he does not wishes will encounter the issues his clients are facing. In other words, the counselor has a prebuilt bias regarding what his client should or not do. The case also becomes more complicated because the student is a minor and the counselor is concern about whether he has to a legal obligation to inform her
This code states that the primary responsibility of the counselor is to respect the dignity of the client while promoting welfare. The client explained to the counselor that recently she has been experiencing a lot of stress at home because of mistrust and disobedience issues between her and her mother. It is necessary for the counselor to look at this code because informing the mother of what happened in the counseling session can lead to adding more stress on the client. This code is also a reminder of code A.4.a, Avoiding Harm, which states that counselors act to avoid harming their clients. If the counselor in this scenario does not respect the dignity of the client and informs her mother, he might be causing more harm to his client instead of promoting welfare. He might lead her to develop more mistrust issues towards counselors for not keeping her issue confidential. Another possible outcome could be that the client will become more disobedient because she is unable to trust individuals at her home or in her school