A Second Chance at Health

Mass incarceration and the aging prison population in the United States is an ethical crisis, understudied in empirical bioethics research. In this article, I share one woman’s narrative to illustrate how older Black women describe accessing healthcare while incarcerated and identify sites for bioethical exploration. I argue that, due to the punitive nature of prison healthcare interactions, wherein women are seen as inmates first and patients second, healthcare providers are caught in a trap of competing ethical commitments to their patients and the state. As the prison population ages, these challenges will become more acute. Feminist bioethics has a critical role to play in imagining new possibilities for accessing, giving, and receiving care in the carceral context.

Feminist Bioethics

This chapter offers an account of the central issues and themes in feminist philosophical engagements with bioethics. After outlining the history and goals of feminist bioethics, I discuss how feminist ontology and epistemology have generated the distinguishing features of feminist bioethical approaches, including both the substantive topics addressed and the particular ethical areas highlighted. Among these areas are: attention to power dynamics and social context; the use of empirical information to inform ethical theory; a focus on relationality, care, and embodiment; and an acknowledgement of minority viewpoints that are often excluded from mainstream bioethics. In taking these distinctive approaches, feminist bioethics has also made major theoretical contributions to moral philosophy: here I discuss (i) the ethics of care and (ii) relational autonomy. Finally, I consider the extent to which feminist work has changed or entered the mainstream, and look to current and future directions in feminist bioethics.

Integrating intersectionality into autonomy: Reflections on feminist bioethics and egg freezing

The field of bioethics struggles with the complexity of diversity and power differences. ‘Intersectionality in Clinical Medicine: The Need for a Conceptual Framework’ (Wilson et al., 2019) and its accompanying commentaries, though inventive and thought-provoking, overlook key principles of biomedical ethics. In this paper, I reflect on the debate and consider how an intersectional approach could inform normative theorizing. Traditional principlist reasoning leads to serious problems when we are trying to deal with the complexities of intersectionality, and this is especially true if we look at the principle of autonomy. I develop the idea that intersectionality is more in line with feminist inquiry in bioethics that attempts to reconfigure autonomy. However, feminist critiques of autonomy often remain less than thoroughly engaged with intersectionality. The case of social egg freezing is used to further support this claim. By foregrounding an intersectional approach to the existing relational autonomy claims in this debate, the complicated relational and justice concerns of reproduction are better brought into focus.

Notificação compulsória de casos de violência doméstica sob a ótica da bioética feminista | Compulsory notification of cases of domestic violence under the optics of feminist bioethics

A Bioética constitui uma proposta de compreensão de situações embasadas por dilemas morais a partir da reflexão dos fenômenos relacionados à própria existência humana. É nesse paradigma que se insere a Bioética feminista, propondo uma visão voltada aos processos de assujeitação social e dominação masculina dos sujeitos cujas condutas são problematizadas. Tomando-se esta corrente teórica como base e considerando-se a decisão do Supremo Tribunal Federal na ADI nº 4.424 – que considerou as ações referentes à lesão corporal em violência doméstica de natureza pública incondicionada, propõe-se, através de uma revisão bibliográfica, analisar a ampliação do alcance da exigência de notificação compulsória dos casos de suspeita de violência doméstica por profissionais de saúde aos órgãos do Sistema de Justiça. Concluiu-se ser cabível e necessária a notificação compulsória, tendo em vista que as autonomias dessas mulheres estão maculadas pela vulnerabilidade característica das vítimas deste tipo de crime, que possuem sua autoestima e consequentemente seu poder de autodeterminação afetados pelo ciclo reiterado de violências ao qual estão submetidas.

Women’s Healthcare Through a Feminist Ethics Lens

This chapter provides the book’s rationale, reviews themes that are central to the book, and presents an overview of its chapters. The collection aims to bring insights from healthcare providers, clinical ethicists, scholars, and community together as a way of broadening feminist bioethics and being responsive to ethical issues in women’s healthcare. A starting premise is that gender is central to the evaluation of healthcare and healthcare practices. Several feminist themes that are pertinent to the ethics analyses throughout the book are described. These include relational components of moral life, justice and oppression, women-centered care, implications of sex and gender distinctions, and examining issues through an ethics lens. The overview of chapters highlights the specific gaps in the literature each one fills, along with how they fit together as a collection.