This chapter shows that feminist bioethics begins with critical engagement. Feminist bioethics as perspective centers the experiences of women – women's health, challenges that women primarily face within health care contexts, gaps in research that are only understood as gaps when one takes women seriously as women. The chapter highlights a few significant breakthroughs in feminist theory broadly that have informed feminist bioethics as perspective and as methodology – standpoint theory, relational autonomy, and (...) intersectionality – in order to show how an intentionally feminist lens can improve bioethics for everyone. Feminists understood that healthcare generally, and bioethics, in particular, were important sites for feminist thought. The traditional view of autonomy in bioethics is centered on the individual. The chapter also highlights an example of public practice, The Black Mamas Matter Alliance, that shows the important work of Black women's community advocacy as a blueprint for a public feminist bioethics. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers advocate expansion of philosophical methods to include empirical investigation into the concepts used by ordinary people in reasoning and action. We propose also including methods of qualitative social science, which we argue serve both moral and epistemic goals. Philosophical analytical tools applied to interdisciplinary research designs can provide ways to extract rich contextual information from subjects. We argue that this approach has important implications for bioethics; it provides both epistemic and moral reasons to use the experiences and (...) perspectives of diverse populations to better identify underlying concepts as well as to develop effective interventions within particular communities. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S21-S23, March‐April 2022.

Feminist bioethics is a relatively new field, the major works in which only started to appear in the late 1980s. At first feminist bioethicists focused mainly on issues of particular concern to women such as reproduction. Recently, papers have begun to appear that show that a feminist analysis can be brought to bear on any subject traditional bioethics discusses. So far, however, feminist bioethics has not been brought to bear on psychiatry. There have (...) been feminist critiques of psychiatry and feminist discussions of certain diagnostic categories that disproportionately affect women, but these are concerned with womens issues within psychiatry and how psychiatry has been used to oppress women. Certainly these are important, but what has been missing is a discussion of psychiatry in the sense that feminist bioethics suggests a general critique of psychiatry and the rethinking of the practice of psychiatry, regardless of whether the specific instances involved are womens issues. In this paper I look at what such a feminist bioethical intervention into psychiatry would look like. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics, edited by Wendy A. Rogers et al., presents a thorough, contemporary understanding of feminist bioethics, linking feminist efforts to other critical approaches in the field of bioethics. A more demanding standard for feminist scholarship is set by engaging gender at its intersections with race, class, sexuality, and ability––intersections that require bioethicists to attend to issues like incarceration and transmisogynistic violence that are less frequently tackled in the field. (...) Editors and contributors alike in this volume show that long‐standing feminist conceptual interventions, especially those regarding the significance of relationality and epistemic marginalization, provide key tools for a coalition of critical approaches to bioethics. (shrink)

The primary contribution of feminism to bioethics is to note how imbalances of power in the sex‐gender system play themselves out in medical practice and in the theory surrounding that practice. I trace the ten‐year history of feminist approaches to bioethics, arguing that while feminists have usefully critiqued medicine's biases in favor of men, they have unmasked sexism primarily in the arena of women's reproductive health, leaving other areas of health care sorely in need of feminist (...) scrutiny. I note as well that feminist bioethicists have contributed very little to bioethical theory. In the second part of the paper I suggest two future directions for feminist bioethics. The first is to expand its critique of gender bias beyond reproductive medicine, devoting attention to the same issues raised by advances in biomedical technology as are taken up by mainstream bioethicists. The second is to develop bioethical theory that is more responsive than are mainstream moral theories to the social practices that subordinate women and minority groups. (shrink)

Globalizing Feminist Bioethics is a collection of new essays on the topic of international bioethics that developed out of the Third World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics in 1996. Rosemarie Tong is the primary editor of this collection, in which she, Gwen Anderson, and Aida Santos look at such international issues as female genital cutting, fatal daughter syndrome, use of reproductive technologies, male responsibility, pediatrics, breast cancer, pregnancy, and drug testing.

The primary contribution of feminism to bioethics is to note how imbalances of power in the sex‐gender system play themselves out in medical practice and in the theory surrounding that practice. I trace the ten‐year history of feminist approaches to bioethics, arguing that while feminists have usefully critiqued medicine's biases in favor of men, they have unmasked sexism primarily in the arena of women's reproductive health, leaving other areas of health care sorely in need of feminist (...) scrutiny. I note as well that feminist bioethicists have contributed very little to bioethical theory. In the second part of the paper I suggest two future directions for feminist bioethics. The first is to expand its critique of gender bias beyond reproductive medicine, devoting attention to the same issues raised by advances in biomedical technology as are taken up by mainstream bioethicists. The second is to develop bioethical theory that is more responsive than are mainstream moral theories to the social practices that subordinate women and minority groups. (shrink)

Philosophically grounded, methodologically sound, and theoretically rigorous, this paradigm-challenging collection ponders the most dynamic areas of feminist inquiry into bioethical thought and practice and sketches future directions for this rapidly growing field.

Synthetic biology (synbio) involves designing and creating new living systems to serve human ends, using techniques including molecular biology, genomics, and engineering. Existing bioethical analyses of synbio focus largely on balancing benefits against harms, the dual-use dilemma, and metaphysical questions about creating and commercializing synthetic organisms. We argue that these approaches fail to consider key feminist concerns. We ground our normative claims in two case studies, focusing on the public good, who holds and wields power, and synbio research projects’ (...) particularity and context. Attention to feminist concerns is essential for synbio to realize its potential in ethically justifiable ways. (shrink)

:The end of the last century was a particularly vibrant period for feminist bioethics. Almost two decades on, we reflect on the legacy of the feminist critique of bioethics and investigate the extent to which it has been successful and what requires more attention yet. We do this by examining the past, present, and future: we draw out three feminist concerns that emerged in this period—abstraction, individualism, and power—and consider three feminist responses—relationality, particularity, and (...) justice—and we finish with some thoughts about the future. (shrink)

Overview of feminist bioethics for the journal of the Ewha Women's College, Seoul, South Korea.

This chapter contains section titled: Where We've Been Where We're Going Feminist Epistemology Counterstories Acknowledgments Notes References.

ABSTRACT A brief discussion of how relational autonomy, phenomenological theories of embodiment and narrative approaches to clinical ethics can open up the space for more subtle feminist ethical reflection about genetic termination.

: Although a wide variety of feminist approaches to bioethics presently share a common feminist methodology (sometimes referred to as "raising the woman question"), they do not all share the same feminist politics, ontology, epistemology, and ethics. As a result of their philosophical differences, feminist bioethicists do not always agree on which biomedical principles, practices, and policies are best suited to serving women's interests. In other words, some feminist bioethicists insist that so-called "assisted reproduction" (...) enhances women's procreative liberty, while others claim that it does nothing of the sort. Although such disagreement among feminist bioethicists reassures the general public that the feminist "program" for bioethics is not ideologically monolithic, it also confuses the public, especially women. In order to overcome this confusion, feminist bioethicists should work toward developing the kind of shared theoretical base that will foster frequent consensus on the biomedical principles, practices, and policies most likely to serve the interests of most women in the U.S. today. (shrink)

Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick, Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, on the Margins, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, reviewed by Robyn Bluhm.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. The depth and breadth of changes are still unfolding. What is the place of feminist bioethics in this new world? It's important to point out that COVID-19 is only one of a few major catastrophes we are facing as humans. The ongoing and worsening effects of climate change, along with the paltry efforts of politicians to address it, are an urgent concern. Humanitarian crises caused by climate change, by COVID-19, or crises (...) unrelated to either but surely worsened by both, are also... (shrink)

Feminist bioethics poses a challenge to bioethics by exposing the masculine marking of its supposedly generic human subject, as well as the fact that the tradition does not view womens rights as human rights. This essay traces the way in which this invisible gendering of the universal renders the other gender invisible and silent. It shows how this attenuation of the human in man is a source of sickness, both cultural and individual. Finally, it suggests several ways (...) in which images drawn from womens experience and womens bodies might contribute to a constructive rethinking of basic ethical concepts. (shrink)

Due to globalization, gender, class, and health issues are emerging that require the attention of feminist bioethicists globally. In this paper, I argue that although the basic questions that Western feminist bioethicists address, as well as their work in general, are relevant to health care issues in developing countries like Kenya, they must heighten their focus on unjust global policies that adversely impacted on health care provision in Kenya and led to further oppression of women (women who are (...) already oppressed by the structures of the society), especially in terms of health care. (shrink)

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics is an outstanding resource for anyone with an interest in feminist bioethics, with chapters covering topics from justice and power to the climate crisis. Comprising 42 chapters by emerging and established scholars, the volume is divided into six parts: Foundations of Feminist Bioethics Identity and Identifications Science, Technology and Research Health and Social Care Reproduction and Making Families Widening the Scope of Feminist Bioethics The volume is (...) essential reading for anyone with an interest in bioethics or feminist philosophy, and will prove an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, and advanced students. (shrink)

In May of 2020, reports of so-called "long-COVID" began to surface. Long COVID is a collection of post-COVID-19 physical, cognitive and psychological symptoms, such as depression, brain fog, fatigue, and dizziness. As long-COVID is considered a "new" disease, it is not always covered by health insurance or government programs, moreover it is a set of constantly evolving symptoms.While severe cases of COVID-19 itself tend to be mostly in males over fifty-years-old, those individuals affected by long-COVID tend to be mainly female (...) and younger in age. Data supporting the existence of the long-COVID syndrome... (shrink)

Doctors Pratt and de Vries propose a well-structured and courageous approach to analyse and repair an insufficiently recognised discussion about epistemologies and knowledge production in bioethics.1 The authors invite researchers, scholars, public health experts and bioethicists from the global North to reflect about their lack of imagination regarding different sources of narratives produced by the global South. There is a critical analysis of injustices and an urgent call for global bioethicists to reorient their field and focus on the analysis (...) and development of ethical interventions to achieve a comprehensive epistemic justice for global health ethics. Feminist bioethicists from the global South already argued about the importance of the voices and biographies of the people and groups in the communities to reframe the bioethical reasoning regarding the meaning of individual’s needs during public health and humanitarian emergencies.2 Over a decade ago, Diniz and Guilhem described the role and goal of feminist bioethics in Latin America, shaped in an oppressive context promoted and created by …. (shrink)

Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, on the Margins is a collection of essays that “reflect on the positioning of feminist bioethics” (xi). The volume editors suggest that the discipline of feminist bioethics, twenty years after it began, faces tension between becoming incorporated into mainstream bioethics, which would mean that it has greater influence on bioethics as a whole, and remaining “on the margins,” where it can perhaps better continue its critical project of (...) drawing attention to the ways in which “dominant ways of doing bioethics” are gendered and “thus contribute to culturally inscribed oppressive practices” (3). The volume includes papers with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches and .. (shrink)

Given previously successful interventions that already have shaken up the convention, it is puzzling that the feminist critique of bioethics should be slow to embrace the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is highly appropriate to bioethics, there is much that might augment (...) the adequacy of our approach. Many of these resources have been developed productively by feminist thinkers to reflect not simply the differential lived experience of women, but also to mobilize a specifically feminist slant to theory itself. The encouragement to read Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze results not in a turn back to the masculinist masters, but to a fuller appreciation of just how distinctive a feminist reworking can be. The most exciting feminist theorists are less concerned with an “authentic” representation of an existing oeuvre than in showing how it can be extended, distorted if necessary, and applied to areas far beyond its originally intended scope. In turning to the problem of heart transplantation, I hope to demonstrate such a move at work in a specific material context. (shrink)

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

In 1999, Susan Wolf diagnosed what was missing in bioethics: “an analysis that places race, ethnicity, and gender at the center.” Since then, not enough progress has been made in “decentering” whiteness in bioethics. The use of assisted reproductive technologies in the United States, and the bioethical discussion surrounding it, provides a window into the problem. Recent surveys of ART usage show racial disparities in access to ART and treatment outcomes. A personal testimony about egg freezing suggests a (...) perceptual blindness when white experience is taken to be the norm. Nevertheless, bioethics, including feminist bioethics, has largely framed ART within the parameters of “normative whiteness.” This paper will argue that feminist bioethics needs to put race at the center of analysis and will suggest pathways for doing so. Decentering whiteness requires a consideration of epistemic limits and privilege, a reevaluation of the goals of feminism, and an embrace of empathy in service of a more responsive and flexible worldview. (shrink)

Most people working in bioethics will be familiar with Susan Sherwin's contributions to the field. There is much to be said about the value and importance of Sue's contributions to feminist theory and practice, but in this reflective piece I am going to focus on the experience of teaching Sue's work. This is for three reasons: the first is that I was hired into the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie just as Sue retired and I teach many of the (...) courses she developed, so her philosophical legacy and teaching are intimately related for me. Second, in my observations of Sue's interactions with graduate students (she... (shrink)

I am a feminist bioethicist whose work focuses on the ethics of eating. Though COVID-19 is not a foodborne illness, it has had significant impacts on eating around the world, including increases in food insecurity, dining restrictions and closures of restaurants, interruptions in supply chains, and rising food prices. Many people have been eating at home more often—some alone, others with members of their households—and emotional or stress eating is on the rise.A feminist perspective is indispensable for understanding (...) and responding appropriately to these changes. The costs of these changes have not been distributed equally, and drawing attention to how disproportionate harm tracks gendered and intersectional... (shrink)

Two key themes structure the work of French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon: the processes of individuation and the nature of technical objects. Moreover, these two themes are also at the heart of contemporary debates within Ethics and Bioethics. Indeed, the question of the individual is a key concern in both Virtue Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care, while the hyper-technical reality of the present stage of medical technology is a key reason for both the urgency for and (...) the success of the field of Bioethics. And yet, despite its potential for thinking about these issues, Simondon’s philosophy remains largely unknown. Rather than exploring Simondon’s complex ontology for itself, the aim of this paper is to establish what contribution his work can make in Ethics and Bioethics on two essential questions: the relational structure of the self and the nature of the human-technology relation. I argue that Simondon’s re-conceptualization of the individual harmonizes with perspectives in Feminist Bioethics and points toward what I call an “open” Virtue Ethics that takes relations to be essential. In order to establish this connection, I explore at length the relational approach to Feminist Bioethics offered by Susan Sherwin’s work. I argue that a Simondonian account of technology and of the individual furthers the relational understanding of the self, offers a characterization of Virtue Ethics that is in harmony with the Ethics of Care, and clarifies a notion of responsibility that is implicated in the complex reality of the modern technological milieu. (shrink)

Dear IJFAB Readers,This tenth anniversary issue of IJFAB will be the last to appear under the Stony Brook masthead. In 2007, on the day of the blizzard that came to be known as the St. Patrick’s Day Snowstorm, the “protoeditorial board” met at Stony Brook Manhattan to begin creating IJFAB. We were guided in this endeavor by the late, great Anne Donchin, a cofounder of FAB as well as a beloved mentor and friend. As a philosopher, Anne held that concepts (...) imply practical commitments or creeds. She had a very clear idea of the creed of FAB, and she meant, through her gentle but firm guidance, to see that IJFAB adhered to it.1First, IJFAB was always to maintain an international or transnational perspective. Urgent... (shrink)

The anthology, Feminist Bioethics, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick, examines how feminist bioethics theoretically and methodologically challenges mainstream bioethics, and whether these approaches are useful for exploring difference in other contexts. It offers critical conceptual analyses of "autonomy", "universality", and "trust", and covers topics such as testing for hereditary cancer, prenatal selection for sexual orientation, midwifery, public health, disability, Indigenous research reform in Australia, and China's one child policy.

This essay examines dominant notions of reproductive identity in feminist bioethics from a queer-crip perspective by considering the “reproductive situation” in Germany of people who are classified as disabled and people who are classified as queer. I analyze the ways in which such people are excluded from the understandings of reproductive identity that figure prominently in German feminist bioethics, and argue that feminist bioethics in Germany, which has become a well-established part of important bioethical (...) institutions, reflects many, if not most, of the neo-eugenic developments that characterize more recognizably mainstream bioethics. I also show that feminist bioethics constitutes the reproductive subject as nondisabled, intelligibly gendered, and heterosexual. (shrink)

The article examines the ethics and politics of international gestational surrogacy contracts through a three-dimensional framework that combines political accounts of framework precariousness, accounts of norm incompatibility in contracting scenarios, and feminist accounts of domination. This framework, which can be applied to a host of contemporary bioethical controversies, articulates the ways in which individuals' medical experiences are shaped and determined by social structures that lie beyond their field of control, thus pushing feminist bioethics toward closer collaboration with (...) legal and political theory. (shrink)