In the interest of record-keeping and resource-gathering, we’ve compiled some recent bioethical (and bioethics adjacent) work related to the ongoing maelstrom in the U.S. government. We’ll aim to keep adding sources as they come out and encourage readers to include suggestions in the comments.
This installment of the Feminist Bioethics Scholar Spotlight series features Supriya Subramani, a lecturer at the University of Sydney in Australia who engages ethnographic and phenomenological methods to questions of morality, behavior, and attitudes in healthcare contexts. Dr. Subramani has a book forthcoming this month with Routledge entitled Passive Patient Culture in India: Disrespect in Law and Medicine. Read on to learn more about Dr. Subramani as she responds to our questions about how she relates to the field of bioethics, what she is currently working on and is excited about in her research, and what she does outside of her research, teaching, and scholarship. Her interview unpacks serious tensions internal to bioethics and those of us working within and sometimes against it, showing the value of feminist approaches to bioethics, but also the need for ongoing and critical reflection as we undertake feminist and bioethics related work, projects, and activism.
What drew you to bioethics?
I sit with this question, not as an easy point of arrival but as an ongoing reckoning now, especially when one imposes (or not) the labels as social scientist, bioethicist or philosopher. So, I will try to do a little of both here.
My journey into this disciplinary space began when I was hired as a project associate – a “data collector” – for a Wellcome Trust-funded research project: Medical Ideas, Tools, Ethics, and Pluralism in South India. Under the sub-project Patient Welfare and Patient Autonomy: Reflections on Biomedical Ethics in the Indian Context, I was introduced to discipline of bioethics by my Project Investigator, who was keen on the idea of “Indian Bioethics” with training in Western Philosophy (which I would find problematic given the romanticization which happens with upper-caste-class academics and distancing from everyday realities within Indian political context). As part of this project I encountered conversations with healthcare professionals, mostly doctors and surgeons, who confidently declared, “we value patient autonomy because we practice informed consent.” It was a claim wrapped in certainty, an ethical pronouncement that assumed its own completeness.
But I was not convinced, and when I got a five year University Grant Commission fellowship my doctoral work, I wanted to explore: what did they mean? What was at stake in these pronouncements? How is informed consent understood within law and healthcare spaces? I wanted to go beyond the professionals, beyond the formal language of ethics, and into the spaces where autonomy (or not) is not simply asserted or disregarded but lived–where patients and their families navigate hospitals, along with healthcare professional in both public and private, with varying degrees of lack of power and precarity. And as I listened, I began to see that informed consent or real/valid consent, a concept so readily taken for granted in law and medicine, was not just a procedural step but situated within a site of tension and struggle for respect, self-respect and recognition.
Over time, I let go of the idea that informed consent was the central problem to “solve.” It took me a while to find a language and vocabulary, to unlearn, due to my own educational training, lack of social capital and exposure. I refused to join the well-rehearsed conversation that treats it as a technical and ethics issue outside social and political context, an “old problem” for the North and a new one for the South to “catch up” on. Resisting the dominant trope of “data” vs. “theory” or “descriptive” vs “normative,” especially the notion that people who are not well-versed or trained in certain dominant ways, can only produce “data” and that our work cannot be conceptually, philosophically, or theoretically rich. Instead, I turned toward what was sustaining the very conditions in which respecting a person (patient), becomes an impossibility–the archetype of passive patient, the everyday indignities, the larger oppressive structures, the deeply hierarchical norms that shape Indian healthcare, and yet what agency means, and how true dignity can be a possibility. What does it mean to talk about self-respect, respect, and dignity when entire institutional cultures are built on disrespect and humiliation?
I am hoping my upcoming book Passive Patient Culture in India: Disrespect in Law and Medicine is not an offering to the North’s gaze or imperial bioethics, or to be dismissed as just “for Indian audience,” nor a contribution to elite “representation or romanticized bioethics” in the South that reproduces the same exclusions under different names. For me, it is an outcome of practice of unlearning and finding my voice to centering the experiences and voices which matters the most, which I had not succeeded in illustrating well before. I hope it becomes a challenge and opportunity to those within legal and health system to reflect on how we/they create and sustain oppressive conditions, knowingly or unknowingly, and contributes to a desire to contribute to self-respect movements and patient rights and dignity discourse in India, and elsewhere.
And so, I now sit with working and teaching within so-called bio/public health/global health ethics differently, I think. I resist its disciplinary parochialism, its gatekeeping practices, its desire to make ethics a bounded field rather than a lived, messy, contested practice. I think my own trajectory, spanning science, management, social work, youth work, training in critical qualitative inquiry, and marked by my shifting identities and experiences, has influenced my refusal to stay within boundaries, by an insistence on unlearning, by a need to center the voices of marginalized. With years of my life and work spent in India, having worked in Zurich and my ongoing working in Australia, I see beautifully and sadly the cracks within the system, again and again the same privilege and power, with different flavours, colors, and shades depending on historical, political and social context one lives in.
I think my lack of training to core disciplines or bioethics and openness to explore the concepts and ideas beyond discipline, meeting many liked-minded people who centre value commitments with integrity and openness to engage with questions, ideas and concepts, has opened me up to amazing unlearning spaces and approaches. Also, this distance from conventional bioethics, from its rigid disciplinary training, from its tools and methods that often obscure more than they reveal, has allowed me in the process of finding my own voice. With its own anxieties.
I remain skeptical of bioethics as an institution, as a discipline that polices its own boundaries and for those who continue to work for its legitimacy. And yet, within that skepticism, I find something worth holding onto–a space to engage in discourse that matters to us, to society, in a way that refuses abstraction, that refuses neutrality, that refuses to erase the realities of those who bear the weight of injustice.
Are there any particular problematic tropes in bioethics that you’d like to call out?
One of the most troubling tropes in bioethics, and increasingly in feminist and decolonial spaces, is the tendency to claim a commitment to justice while reproducing the very hierarchies these spaces critique. I have become particularly wary of institutions and individuals who invoke the language of decolonization and critical theory, rarely cite minoritized scholars if at all, and often actively take ideas from them without proper acknowledgment or citation (a pattern I have experienced personally and have heard echoed in countless stories from India and elsewhere). These same institutions and individuals assume that diversity alone accomplishes the work of anti-racism or decolonization, without working on structures which creates and sustain these conditions.
There is a growing pattern where a narrow tick box exercise of diversity, even though now it has been increasingly targeted (which is a topic demanding its own attention!), including through positionality statements in conferences and journal articles, or bringing diverse scholars on projects, serves as a performative nod to decoloniality, rather than a substantive engagement with its radical demands. Especially when we think of settler colonial contexts, like Australia, the conversation then becomes a reckoning with ongoing colonial and imperial legacies and how as settlers we need to reflect on our complicity and ask what does mean for us to do “bioethics” in these spaces where land is fundamental for self-determination and sovereignty becomes central.
What concerns me most is how these decolonial claims often gain legitimacy through individuals who are closer to whiteness and power. This proximity allows us/them to survive and thrive in academic spaces sometimes, while more marginalized scholars remain on the periphery, our voices co-opted (or we co-opt) but not meaningfully engaged with. The question we need to ask is whether these practices genuinely contribute to dismantling colonial structures, or whether they merely perpetuate coloniality and imperial ways of producing knowledge. And how much of us, who categorize as minoritized, are also playing this game to survive and without thinking about the cost it takes.
As I’ve briefly argued in my recent work on reflexivity, we must take a hard look at our disciplines and the ways we ride new waves to retain money, power, and privilege under the guise of theorization and knowledge production. We need to scrutinize how our disciplines function under the guise of priority setting – particularly how funding is distributed, which topics are deemed important, and who gets to lead these conversations. The answer is not simply funneling more resources to a select few in the South or funding a handful of Black and Brown scholars in elite institutions, without engaging with complicity with each other and discomfort this work demands, for politics of feeling good for our privileged/often white souls. Instead, it requires addressing the deep, systemic injustices that shape whose knowledge is valued and whose struggles are rendered invisible. We cannot naively assume that placing a few marginalized scholars in positions of visibility will work like magic. Real change demands that we interrogate our own privilege, complicity, and power in the survival games of academia–and that we hold ourselves accountable beyond moments of convenience.
As a mid-career scholar (just five months short of being eligible for early-career status under the institution’s criteria) still navigating my voice and space within this community, I long for more genuine conversations and for scholars, peers, and leadership who are willing to take a stand when it truly matters–not selectively, not only when the broader climate makes it safe to do so. Not to practice Time-lagged Solidarity! The ongoing genocide and dehumanization of Palestinians have made this even more apparent. The silence–or worse, the deliberate distancing and disciplining–of many bioethicists and academics, and institutional silence, in this moment is deeply disheartening. It raises fundamental questions about the moral compass of a field that claims to be concerned with justice.
Bioethics, like many other disciplines, needs to reckon with the uncomfortable truth that it is not exempt from the structures of power and exclusion it critiques. If it fails to do so, it risks becoming yet another space where critical language is co-opted, stripped of its radical potential, and used to sustain the very inequities it claims to resist. My hope is to be part of a community and collective within these academic spaces, where we can flourish and create spaces that allow us to find our voices–voices that can free us all and lead to liberation in ways that stay true to our values. This is especially important for those who are willing to sit with discomfort, work through challenges to find meaning, and engage in work that truly matters for communities whose voices are often unheard and oneself. I feel privileged to be in this moment and to have the opportunity to write this, which is not perfect or easy often, and certainly costs sometimes. I hope to continue being part and search for this academic community, the so-called discipline of bioethics and elsewhere as I sit at margins of different fields, where I can practice alongside those who show ways to subvert and transform these academic spaces.
What next directions in your research are you most excited about?
I am excited to continue exploring reflexivity – not just as a concept, but as a practice of unlearning and relearning. My current book project, Practicing Reflexivity, is where I’m trying to work through some of these ideas, drawing from my own experiences of questioning methods, disciplines, and the ways we engage with knowing and politics of it.
My ongoing work on othering and belonging, particularly within migrant health ethics discourse, has been a way to connect the dots across my earlier projects. Recently, building on my work on the ethics of belonging, I’ve been experimenting with ways to move beyond traditional academic outputs and translate the theorization of it to practice. One approach has been through Theatre of the Oppressed, where theory is not just written about but enacted in everyday conversations within diverse communities. This process has made me reflect more on why we do research, who it is for, and why we often limit knowledge to journal articles when there are many other ways to create impact.
Another project I’m particularly excited about is my ethnographic research on chronic pain among rural women in India, which I’m finally able to start. This has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and now that it’s coming together, I feel both excitement and a sense of lifetime responsibility, which any research should be. While I have been preparing for this, I also know that much of what I will learn will come from being in there, from listening, and from allowing myself to be challenged and resist in ways I can’t yet predict.
For now, excited to the uncertainties that come with these works. I expect to be surprised, to unlearn, and to rethink some of my own assumptions. And that, in itself, is something I look forward to.
What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re NOT doing bioethics, that you feel comfortable sharing?
These days, when I am not rage writing, and working through with some exhaustion at the site of violence and hypocrisy, I’m usually unwinding with a good thriller, fantasy, or drama – because nothing says relaxation like morally complex characters making questionable life choices. I also love reading black feminist scholarship and Kannada literature (working on it still), going for walks with my partner, and dancing. Fun fact: I used to be a mini-celebrity thanks to a reality TV show stint and several state and national dance competitions. Now, my dance floor is mostly my living room, where I am both the performer and the audience, and sometimes my partner!
Beyond that, I enjoy long hikes, one-on-one conversations, and hosting people at home. Moving across countries has been both a privilege and a logistical and emotional workout–it takes effort to keep up with the things I love. During much of my childhood, especially at my grandparents’ place, I loved walking up the hills and playing in rivers and streams with my cousins and aunties, and I still miss it. My love for hiking grew when I was in Zurich – being surrounded by mountains, breathing in fresh air, and gazing at the open sky brought me pure joy. The freedom to take solo trips without constantly watching for snakes or worrying about safety gave me a sense of independence, something I missed in India.
Since moving to Sydney, I’ve channeled some of my energy into inviting people over, cooking, and having long, and sometimes looking for ways connect and belong in a community. And when I’m not doing that, you’ll probably find me wandering along waterfronts, nearby beach or sometimes near national parks.
Thanks so much for sharing so much of yourself, your work, and your other interests with us, Supriya!
Shown here, an image of our interviewee, Supriya Subramani, smiling and looking at the camera, her dark brown hear pulled back, wearing dark rimmed eyeglasses, a blue v-neck t-shirt, with the straps of a backpack on top, standing amidst a green field scattered with rocks, and large snow-capped mountains in the background through the clouds.
There is no shortage of social media quite literally making the news, whether as a topic of newscoverage or as people’s sources of news information, despite being rife with misinformation. How (or if) scholars should be on social media is not a new question, but it has taken on new urgency in the rapidly evolving social media ecosystem. One study called “The Vibes Are Off: Did Elon Musk Push Academics Off Twitter” answers its query in the affirmative. Meanwhile, there has been some growth of “academic Bluesky” as one of various alternatives for researchers across disciplines, as well as journalists, activists, and organizations forming new social media communities and norms.
We’ve been interested in the approach taken by Nathan Nobis, Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College, to social media as a forum for public philosophy. Rather than engaging in social media only to talk with other academics, Nobis often dives right into controversial feminist and bioethical topics with a wide range of interlocutors. Editors of the IJFAB Blog approached Nobis to share insight into this process and what we can learn from it for doing feminist bioethics online. Nobis generously shared the essay that follows, which is all the more essential as we see more moves from social media platforms to do away with fact checking and to defer to users for accountability. Nobis’s account of feminist philosophical fact-checking is a timely and worthwhile read!
Feminist Philosophical Fact-Checking
By Nathan Nobis
Things have been bad, for many people, and many beings, for a very long time: injustice, unfairness, wrongdoing, evil, callousness, and apathy are not new to this world. But, the world does especially seem to be falling apart lately! And it looks like it might get even worse, much, much worse!
What can just about any philosophical person who thinks of themselves as a feminist of any kind—or anyone who agrees with many goals that are often considered feminist—do in response to the problems of the world? Among many other things, they can do philosophy, online, on various social media platforms, to tryto help steer the world in better directions, at least a little.
Now “doing philosophy” with these goals in mind can mean many different things to different people: there are many different ways to be engaged in “public philosophy.” Here though I’ll briefly describe some what I have been doing for at least a few years, which could be described as a type of “philosophical fact-checking” that basically amounts to this:
when people and organizations make importantly problematic claims about philosophical and ethical issues that one has expertise in, provide responses and resources that correct that misinformation.
So:
when people make claims that are importantly ambiguous, or they say something that depends on overlooking important differences in the meanings of words, say so and explain why that’s important: for example, one person might be saying or hearing one claim on one meaning of the word—and that claim might be true, given that meaning—whereas someone else might be saying or hearing something different, since they have a different meaning in mind—and that claim might be false, given that meaning;
when people say things that aren’t true, say that what they are saying isn’t true and why it’s not true; tell them what the truth is and why they should accept that instead;
when people say something, or give arguments, that depend on false or dubious unstated assumptions, say what those assumptions are and why they are false; tell them what better assumptions are and why those assumptions are better: in other words, the skill of being able to see and state arguments in “standard form” is very useful:
when people say things that they’ve got no good reason to believe, say that and explain why there’s no good reason to believe that; explain what is reasonable to believe and why;
when people give arguments that simply assume their conclusion—question-begging or circular arguments—observe that and explain why these are always bad arguments;
when people give false or otherwise bad explanations, observe that and give the better (overlooked, ignored) explanation(s), and explain why it’s a better explanation(s);
when people give bad arguments, say so and why at least one of their premises or assumptions is false and/or why they don’t support their conclusion; tell them what better arguments are and why they are better.
These are all distinctly philosophical ways of engaging people in that the focus is on clear communication and understanding what’s said, what’s true and false, and what’s reasonable to believe, given a deeper understanding of the arguments on the issue. This is all quite different from common ways of engagement online about controversial issues, which too often involve responses like these:
name-calling, insults, responding with emojis and LOLs, boldly asserting claims without giving any reasons at all, asserting claims with demonstrably bad reasons, giving arguments that just beg the question or outright assume their view, unproductively accusing people of appealing to fallacies, gish galloping, asking bad rhetorical questions, appealing to mere soundbites, and using many other of forms of engagement that display intellectual and moral vice.
Now “philosophical fact checking” won’t solve the problems of the world—indeed, it can seem like it doesn’t make a drop in the bucket, in terms of broader impact. But it can, and likely will, make some positive difference for the broader world. And, people doing it will probably benefit from doing this too in various ways, and enjoy it. So it may be worth trying, and may be better than “doing nothing” or otherwise just keeping your head down, focusing on your own personal interests and/or seeking only more definitely-achievable narrow, local accomplishments.
How do I know this? Well, I have been doing this kind of thing for at least a few years with some success—maybe a lot of success, depending on how “impact” in public philosophy could be measured. I do this with a variety of topics that people discuss online, especially with bad arguments about euthanasia and assisted suicide, ethics and animals issues, and some debates about religious belief, but my focus has been abortion, since that’s an acute issue that maybe better widespread understanding could help with: I have long thought that if people had even a few good class sessions on the topic that could make a big difference for the better.
My short backstory is this: in 2019, one thing led to another and my co-author, Kristina Grob, and I released an open-access introductory book on abortion and ethics, entitled Thinking Critically About Abortion: Why Most Abortions Aren’t Wrong and All Abortions Should be Legal, which is freely available for download at AbortionArguments.com, is reposted in many other spots online, and is available in paperback for $5.38. It is also available in Spanish, Italian, and French, all (except the French) freely available and in paperback; this happened because people found the book online, offering to translate it. While exact numbers of book downloads are impossible to track, the book’s web page recently hit 450,000 views: most days, the page has at least a few hundred views, sometimes thousands: for an academic-ish book on ethics, that’s likely quite good.
This book led to articles on abortion and ethics atSalon, at (the now defunct)Areomagazine, and theAmerican Journal of Bioethics blog, contributed to an Iranian animator making a neat video from my1000-Word Philosophyarticle on abortion, and I’ve written a bunch of blog posts about the issues, made lots of videos for TikTok and YouTube, and much much more, all inspired by observations gained from engaging people online and observing their (mis)understandings of the issues. Most of the people and organizations I engage with would be considered “anti-abortion extremists” who, well, tend to have a poor understanding of the issues: they are passionate about the topics, of course, but pretty clearly have not learned about the issues in any systematic, comprehensive, and fair-and-balanced ways, which is bad. But in engaging them extensively, I have learned a lot about how they understand the issues and engage them.
In 2022, I published some observations and reflections on how they tend to understand the issues in an American Journal of Bioethics response article entitled “Yes, all bioethicists should engage abortion ethics, but who would be interested in what they have to say?” Here were my main observations: “. . both sides often offer “bumper sticker” slogans in favor of their position that are just question-begging assumptions of their own views. Beyond that, anti-abortion advocates:
tend to not realize, and actively deny, that people sometimes mean different things by [“human” and] “human beings” and “when life begins”;
tend to be ignorant of the fact that what makes anyone (or anything) have moral rights, or be otherwise wrong to kill, is a hard, theoretical question, and the best candidates for better explanations here do not include simply that the being is biologically human or even that the being is a biologically human organism;
tend to not think about whether or how theright to lifecould be a right to someone else’s body, and related issues.”
So, I have been making and sharing materials (blog posts, accessible articles, videos) that engage these types of misunderstanding: if I see something, I often say something, and I usually include a link that provides a fuller explanation of the mistake and/or better ways to think about the issue.
Believe it or not, anti-abortion advocates often don’t like this: they don’t like being told that they are misunderstanding something and being corrected in other ways! They also often don’t like that I usually do not provide each person I engage with with a detailed, custom, personalized explanation to them, since it would be extremely inefficient to “reinvent the wheel” every time a common error comes up. (Are these people also annoyed by books and articles, wondering why the author didn’t contact them to provide them a custom explanation?).
Is this “pro-choice activism”? Not really, since I’m critical of the pro-choice political movement for not engaging the ethics of abortion, arguing that was unwise and frequently observe that they too often appeal to bad arguments and misunderstandings, which can’t help anything. That same article also identified common errors in pro-choice engagement: “[again,] both sides [including pro-choice people and organizations] often offer ‘bumper sticker’ slogans in favor of their position that are just question-begging assumptions of their own views… and pro-choice advocates:
often mistakenly assume that the case against abortion is merely religious: they do not know abortion foes often see abortion as a “human rights” violation, which is a misunderstanding that results, in part, from human rights advocates poorly stating their views;
too often deny that fetuses are “alive” or “life” and “human” and so appear ignorant since fetuses clearly are that in a biological sense;
often mistakenly assume that anyone’s lacking a (moral or legal)right to anyone else’s body simply settles the issue;
I described my efforts as not any “pro-choice cheerleading” or any form of partisan hackery, unless it’s partisanship towards the cognitive values that philosophy prizes, such as seeking understanding, seeking truth, having reasons, engaging objections, seeking out the strongest versions of arguments, and so on.
So, why do any of this? Why engage often “challenging” people on controversial ethical and philosophical issues? Here are some likely benefits:
you will learn more about what “ordinary people” really think and how they often engage issues. Academics are sometimes (often?) stuck in an “ivory tower” higher-level, abstract understanding of issues that differs from how ordinary people often see things. Interacting with ordinary people will help you gain that understanding that’s necessary to better meet people “where they are at,” so to speak, so you can then help them understand issues in deeper ways: this is especially important for effective teaching.
on more positive notes, you can present better arguments on issues; you can model giving reasons for one’s views and carefully and concisely developing those reasons; you can inform people, teach people, about important things that have been said about topics: you have studied the issues—they generally have not—so they can learn from you, and some will;
you can model better ways of engagement with a more “just the facts with a focus on what’s true, false, reasonable, unreasonable, etc.” approach and you at least try hard to reject the common name-calling and other forms of irresponsible and negative online engagement and model: you might not be perfect at that, but you can try!
you will likely find both “fans” and friends from all over the globe who will appreciate your attempts at bringing a more “rational” approach to the issues. I want to mention someone I met online and befriended who runs this “Defending Feminism” page: she used to engage people in ways similar to what I do, and she developed her own online resources to do just that. Amusingly, an anti-abortion activist once Tweeted that she thought this person and I were the same person, since our efforts at educating people online were often similar;
you can develop a stronger “spiritual practice”(I am serious!) of learning how to better engage with difficult people: if what they say bothers you, it’s fair and good to wonder if you really must be bothered, come to understand that you don’t have to be bothered—what’s it to you what some “rando” says?—and develop a more “zen” or “stoic” attitude about many things. And if and when that gets old, you can always “mute” or “block” someone if it seems that engaging with them is pointless or harmful;
I suppose another “spiritual practice” involves developing a type of hope or faith that your efforts are making some positive difference, even if it’s unclear what that really is or will be. Anyone who is active in philosophical fact checking should not assume that their inability to change the minds of people who might be very committed to not learning about issues is having no positive impact: other people are likely quietly watching the interaction and hopefully benefiting from it: keep them in mind;
finally, don’t be afraid to try, and to try new things and experiment. Nobody gets much training in how to address the problems of our world and make the world a better place. But few thoughtful and sincere efforts at doing that are genuine failures. So feel free to change and adapt to try to find what you find effective and satisfying and makes some of the impact you hope for: you can do it! Or, at least, you can try!
I want to conclude (somewhat uncharacteristically for me) with some well-known quotes:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
―Margaret Mead
“You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.”
—Pirkei Avot 2:16
Again, our world is in crisis in various ways, and it’s up to caring people to use their talents to do at least some of what they can to help make the world a better place. Insofar as many of the world’s problems are rooted in different philosophical perspectives, it behooves people with training and experience in helping people better understand and engage philosophical issues to do just that. We can do that by teaching classes, engaging in peer-level research, by engaging the general public online, and by attempting all sorts of educational outreach. All are needed, and all are good ways for each of us to do our part.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
―Howard Thurman
Thanks so much for this timely and interesting essay, Professor Nobis (who is shown here wearing a purple V-neck tshirt, smiling and looking at the camera, while walking outside with green trees and sidewalks behind him).
As we transition into a new year around the globe, a few things on our agenda for the new year, and a question to feminist approaches to bioethics readers, thinkers, students, activists, and scholars: what is on yours?
IJFAB Blog in 2024
This past year we built a team of four to edit the blog and will keep that going for 2025. We’ve been posting about the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics content (which you can go back and check out at our various blog posts on journal articles), new leadership of the FAB gab Podcast, reflections on global health and crises including the genocide in Gaza and restrictions on access to trans health care, and the tough conversations and decisions around the World Congress of Bioethics/FAB Congress in Qatar, among other things.
Feminist Bioethics & The Blog in 2025
The blog will keep going with a new feature started in 2024: our Scholar Spotlight Series. We’d love to feature you or your favorite feminist bioethicists in the new year! We’re interested in scholars from all over the world, doing work that is feminist and bioethics broadly construed from the wide range of disciplines and methods that are feminist and bioethics approaches. Check out the link for more information on how to nominate yourself or anyone else (and please do – we really want to hear from you).
Are you reading recent books related to feminist approaches to bioethics? Do you have *thoughts* about them that you want to write up in a book review? Keep an eye on the blog for posts about new works in feminist approaches to bioethics for which the IJFAB Book Review Editor is seeking reviewers or, if you don’t see the title you want to review listed, reach out to pitch it.
Want to talk about your own feminist approaches to bioethics scholarship, how it relates to a topic or event in the news, or have a more public-facing conversation about feminist bioethics? Write for the blog! We’ll happily work with you on guest posts for the blog to get your content out there, so get in touch. This is an opportunity for students and emerging scholars up through established academics and we can work with you to provide the level of editorial support that feels right for you. The year ahead is bound to provide plenty of topics related to feminism and bioethics (to say the least…) and we’ll keep this space going to foster hard, important, and timely conversations.
Finally, the blog will get a bit of a new look this year. We are in the progress of migrating it to a new platform – but don’t worry, we’ll make sure we’re still here and you can find us! We’ll keep you posted as we’re ready to go live with our revamped site.
The Hastings Center Report: Series on Health and Incarceration
Incarceration has been intertwined with bioethics since the field’s founding: early protections of research subjects focused on incarcerated people as an especially vulnerable population deserving of heightened attention. But despite the clear impacts of carceral systems on public and individual health, bioethics has only begun to provide normative analyses of these systems and their effects. Although significant scholarship on the intersection of health and incarceration exists in related disciplines, especially public health, integrating these issues into mainstream bioethics is necessary to inform clinical ethics practice in health care systems serving currently and formerly incarcerated people. On the theoretical side, the urgent task is to evaluate challenges that incarceration may pose to existing theoretical frameworks and ethical priorities within the field of bioethics itself. Virtually any issue that arises in clinical and public health settings beyond prison walls, from population aging to the integration of AI-driven technology, also appears within them. But while the issues may be familiar, the unique constraints of the correctional system and the marginalization of incarcerated and previously incarcerated people demand redoubled attention to the specificities of this setting.
The Hastings Center Report, a bioethics journal, invites contributions to a new series on Health and Incarceration co-edited by Dr. Mercer Gary, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Drexel and HC Presidential Fellow, and Dr. Jennifer James, Assistant Professor of Social and Behavior Sciences at UCSF. The peer-reviewed series may include original articles (max 7,500 words), as well as essays (max 3500 words), case studies (max 2000 words), and first-person narratives of direct service providers (max 2000 words). Authors are encouraged to consider normative questions concerning the appropriate goals and practice of prison medicine, health impacts of incarceration, and access to health care services and continuity of care following incarceration. Pieces should attend to issues of racial, gender, and disability justice endemic in carceral healthcare and authors from groups under-represented in bioethics are strongly encouraged to submit. We will prioritize ethical analysis from currently and previously incarcerated people. Researchers from disciplines outside of bioethics are invited to submit normative research written for a general scholarly audience.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words by January 31st, 2025 for consideration for inclusion in the series in 2025. Contact Mercer Gary at mercer.gary@drexel.edu with any questions.
The latest issue of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics is out now – from October 2024. It includes original essays, commentaries, and an author meets critic section on Microaggressions in Medicine, a book previously featured on the blog. Read on for summaries of this issue and links to each essay.
The development and regulation of hormonal contraception has been problematic—with concerns and safety of patients often being disregarded. Better birth control prescribing may lie in genetic testing. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing aimed at “personalizing the pill” exists, but regulations and clinical guidelines must adapt to meet the diverse needs of patients. This article analyzes emerging socio-ethical-legal tensions as hormonal contraceptives enter the pharmacogenomic era. Using a narrative lens, the author concludes that further patient-centered research—grounded in the voices of distinct populations—should inform policy so as to better serve birth control users and avoid the historical injustices with respect to hormonal contraception.
This article is concerned with “all-or-nothing” approaches to female genital cosmetic surgeries, those that overemphasize either women’s autonomy to defend total accessibility or the oppressive social context affecting women to defend the total banning of the procedures. By contrast, the author takes both phenomena into consideration. The author argues identifying patterns of false consciousness and weighing those against harm done to a patient provides a moral basis for a doctor to possibly deny their consent at face value. This also requires a shift in understanding the doctor–patient relationship as a first step toward a feminist model for women’s healthcare.
The regulation of assisted reproduction technologies (ART) in China exhibits fragmentation, obsolescence, and a lower normative standing. Amid China’s demographic challenges, discernible indications suggest a possible shift in stance towards the stringent regulation of ART. The present study furnishes an elucidation of extant ART regulations, delineates the developmental trajectory of reproductive rights within the Chinese legal framework, scrutinizes societal perspectives endorsing emancipated reproductive autonomy for women, and culminates by underscoring the necessity to acknowledge and uphold autonomous and substantive reproductive rights throughout the process of reform. By comprehending and anticipating Chinese ART regulations, this article seeks to cultivate public discourse and enrich judicious decision-making among pertinent stakeholders.
Abortion is among the most widely disagreed upon topics in bioethics and healthcare. Consider how abortion is taught to medical students: while some medical schools incorporate abortion into their standard curriculum, others omit it entirely. In this article, the author argues these discrepancies go against society’s interest in producing physicians with comprehensive medical knowledge—especially for common procedures like abortions. The author thus argues all US medical schools have a moral obligation to provide abortion education and clinical training opportunities to their students. For the sake of argumentation, the author attempts to justify this claim remaining morally neutral on abortion.
Abortion is now “banned” in fourteen US states. Fetal personhood—the notion that fetuses should be considered equal persons—has been invoked in many anti-abortion laws. Yet none of the states actually ban abortion completely. Some states allow exceptions in cases of rape or incest, and at the very least, every state so far permits abortion if the pregnancy threatens the life of the pregnant person. However, it is impossible to uphold the validity of these exceptions while maintaining a position of legal equality between fetuses and pregnant people. The authors argue that this logical inconsistency should persuade supporters of near-total abortion bans to abandon their position entirely.
The author’s goal in this article is to develop an argument for why women should have a right to abortion-as-termination even if some form of ectogenesis is created. First, the author shows why ectogenesis as an alternative to abortion does not protect women’s bodily autonomy because women are being forced to submit to coerced medical treatment and perform reproductive labor for others. Second, the author considers a further implication of her argument: If abortion-as-termination is kept, how far into gestation should this right extend? Third, and finally, the author considers whether people have the right to refuse genetic parenthood.
Remember that IJFAB seeks reviewers for recent works in feminist bioethics. More on latest titles seeking reviewers and how to contact the review editor here.
As book review editor, my first thought this morning is to recommend the following:
This book by Mariame Kaba (and the accompanying workbook) are available from Haymarket Books. Mariame has also been a guest on the Movement Memos podcast run by Kelly Hayes which is also well worth a listen.
This book on Mutual Aid would also seem to be essential reading by Dean Spade, available from Verso.
I also think there are lots of uplifting lessons to be learned in Constellations of Care by Cindy Baruch Milstein telling the stories of multiple feminist groups across the world creating their own spaces – discussions include both the challenges and things that are positive.
Comment and share what books and resources you think are helpful in thinking about the world we live in and how we address the various issues facing us globally.
We have a number of books we’d like to see reviewed for the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and we are always open to suggestions from authors or reviewers about other options not listed here. To become a reviewer for one of the books below, or make any other suggestions, please reach out to our Book Review Editor – Emma Tumilty (emtumilt@utmb.edu)
“Exploring Transgender Law and Politics” by Catharine A. MacKinnon, Finn Mackay, Mischa Shuman, and Sandra Fredman in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Today is World Bioethics Day and the global theme is “non-discrimination and non-stigmatization.” The ongoing genocide in Gaza is an extreme example of discrimination and stigmatization, a health crisis, and a global injustice. We’re using today to add to our previous health and news roundups on the crisis in Gaza and issue an invitation for blog readers to contribute their recommendations for essential bioethics reading on the subject, or to author a post of their own for the blog.
As of mid-October 2024, just over a year since the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas, according to reporting by Common Dreams, “Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 150,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 10,000 people who are missing and feared dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings, according to Gazan and international officials. Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced, and at least hundreds of thousands of others have been starved or sickened. Thousands more people have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank of Palestine and in Lebanon, where Hezbollah fighters have launched thousands of rockets and other projectiles at Israel, killing and wounding hundreds.”
Writing after the start of the war in Ukraine and prior to the current conflict in Gaza, Henk ten Have suggests in the Hastings Center Report that: “In bioethics, the issue of war has not been treated as a major concern. The field can do more… Bioethics should focus on strategies to prevent war, encouraging the collective action of health professionals.”
In a scoping review in Bioethical Inquiry, Sualeha Shekhani and Aamir Jafarey sought to identify bioethical contributions related to Gaza since October 7, 2023 through March 30, 2024 in the scholarly and grey literature, focusing on top bioethics journals and related blogs as well as a subset of high impact medical journals. Their review, entitled “Amid Explosions in Gaza, The Silence from the Bioethics Community is Deafening,” found “only fifteen articles have been published in bioethics-related publications included in this scoping review related to the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
Just after this review, two essays ran in the “grey” literature in the Hastings Center Bioethics Forumand Bioethics Today and, more recently, on the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog. But as each of these contributions point out, bioethics engagement remains scant. Notably, a PubMed search for “Gaza” from 2023-present shows over 500 relevant publications (see below), though “Gaza” and “Bioethics” yields only 7 results.
What Should Bioethics Do?
Calls for more bioethics engagement with genocide, war, and the crisis in Gaza specifically often also recognize potential constraints on engagement related to relevant expertise, knowledge, and power. Feminist theory offers important contributions for considering the very concepts of knowledge and power: who is recognized as a knower, what knowledge and perspectives are understood as essential, and which are noticed to be missing.
The idea of standpoint and the positionality of scholars are topics in feminist theory and research ethics applicable to discussions of academic production, knowledge, and power. In a BMJ Global Health essay on “health justice in Palestine,” one author discloses as a “competing interest” that they are “Palestinian, lives in Palestine and has friends and family across Palestine including Gaza. He, therefore, has an interest in his people not being subjected to genocide.” Feminist approaches can help evaluate whether this authorial position is a potential “competing interest” as disclosed, or a source of expertise. It can also unpack broader questions of how power and oppression shape the positions that are normalized or seen as neutral and those that are marginalized or seen as subjective.
Specifically focusing on bioethics, exploring how knowledge and power impact health, medicine, and ethics is a matter for feminist approaches to bioethics. So too are questions of which health and humanitarian crises receive media and bioethical attention and which do not. The World Bioethics Day theme of “non-discrimination and non-stigmatization” also calls attention to how discrimination and stigma impact which crises garner international attention, and which remain under reported conflicts.
We would like to hear from you about your interest in attending FAB in 2026. It will be held in Johannesburg prior to IAB as it has in the past. FAB will run 6/7th July and IAB 8-10th July.
To that end we’ve created a short survey, that should only take 3-5mins to complete. If you could please, provide your input, it would be greatly appreciated: https://forms.gle/bCDcVFTnVFdQxkBr9
