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Please consider signing up here to receive news alerts relating to IJFAB. You will receive emails with peeks inside new issues, tables of contents, calls for papers, editorial announcements, open access articles, and special offers. (It is possible to unsubscribe at any time by clicking “Unsubscribe” in the footer of the emails.)
The reader is forgiven for some small disappointment in learning that I am not going to definitively answer the question in the title of this piece. The scope of a blog entry simply can’t handle it. However, I will consider a number of issues that bear on the answer to that question, including the type of work action and the reasons for the work action. This is a general issue, but particularly timely as health care providers around the world are currently conducting various kinds of work actions related to the Ebola epidemic. Let us begin first with a few such examples from around the world, and then move on to a discussion of ethical issues in work actions by health care providers more generally.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In April of 2012, trade unions of health and social protection workers in Belgrade, Serbia, organized a one-hour “warning strike” in response to a state proposal to reduce the salaries of all healthcare employees by 10 percent. In this image, a dense crowd or professionally dressed individuals marches down a major tree-lined street. All the people who can be seen are light-skinned; both men and women are present. Street car tracks can be seen in the road surface disappearing under the feet of the crowd. Signs are not legible to this author as they are written in Cyrillic alphabet. However, the very large banners and small signs alike bear a common symbol: a blue square with rounded corners; in the middle of the right side of the square is a white circle within which is a red cross. The red cross and the color blue are traditional international symbols of modern medicine. Some signs bear the date “April 25, 2012” in European format: 25.4.12. At the bottom of this blog entry, you can find a description of more recent strikes in Serbia over similar austerity measures, as well as other examples of health care provider work actions in Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America. IMAGE CREDIT: b92.
I had initially refrained from dignifying Ms. Kardashian’s, as far as I can see, pointless publicity stunt with any further attention than it has already received. After all, there really isn’t a lot of nuance to explore. But this is just funny enough to pass along, presciently published, it should be noted, in Fey’s 2011 Bossypants:
I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful.
Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyoncé and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.
UPDATE: For those interested in a refreshingly deflationary take on this non-event, as well as some useful reflections about all the vapid hullabaloo surrounding it, read this at Huff Post. (I have to say, to me the only thing at all remarkable about the whole affair is the staggering narcissism on display with the suggestion that photos of her naked body could in any way even approach “breaking the Internet.” I mean, huh? The Internet survived your sex tape, Kim, which consumes a lot more bandwidth, by the way; be assured, it will survive this as well.)
Canada is imposing quarantine measures on travelers from “Ebola countries,” and more missteps from a frightened world. Here is the story. I have nothing to add right now, other than to remind readers of the AIDS crisis several decades ago. Have we learned nothing? I look forward to your thoughts.
The Institute of Medicine has long acknowledged that transgender patients have difficulty accessing care due to a combination of stigma and lack of coverage. Want to do something to help trans folk get health care from the insurance plans they already pay for? Read this and write a letter to HHS on civil rights protections for people with plans operating under the ACA. Trans folk are fully folk; trans rights are civil rights.
(For more discussion of this issue, you may refer to these previous posts on the IJFAB Blog: “Denying the Patient In Front Of You: Recent Studies of Transgender Patients’ Experiences in the ER Confirms Prior Results about Poor Treatment of Transgender Persons in Clinical Settings” and “Transitions in Law: What Struggles Over Policy Changes Affecting Transgender Persons Reveal.”)
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds is reviewed by Joan C. Tronto at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Her conclusion:
In all, though, this is a remarkably rich and important collection that will soon become essential reading in contemporary feminist and moral philosophy.
Interested readers should also recall IJFAB‘s special issue 5.2 on vulnerability guest edited by the same group of scholars. The editors’ essay, “Why Bioethics Needs a Concept of Vulnerability” is available to read for free even to those without a subscription.
“Obama Administration Allows Fertility Clinics to Sell US Citizenship” cries one website.[1] At issue is, allegedly, not only infertility clinics making big bucks selling U.S. citizenship for babies gestated by American citizens, but access to the entire U.S. benefits system—including education, health, welfare, and retirement services—for them and their foreign parents who have never even lived here. Horrifying.
Shall we dig a little deeper? Here’s the policy: U.S. women whose children are born in a jurisdiction that recognizes them as a legal parent may now transmit citizenship to them, even if their relationship is solely gestational (“biological,”), not genetic.[2] In some jurisdictions, this happens automatically; in others, she must take steps to achieve this outcome.
On the face of it, this policy change seems like a good idea. First, it recognizes gestation as a key element in pregnancy and parenthood, eroding—even if only somewhat—the insistence that only genetic relationships matter. Secondly, it changes policy to recognize technological developments that have already happened: women are bearing babies with whom they have no genetic relationship. In most cases they are doing this to form their own families. In others, they are doing it to help others, often for pay. In either case, their children’s legal status needs to be ensured. Of course, in most cases, no one questions a child’s status since medical records are, in theory, private. However, recent politics shows why legal clarity might be crucial. And, regardless of one’s take on surrogacy, until and unless it is more stringently regulated (or banned) where it is now legal, like the U.S., the status of the children it produces needs clarification as well to prevent babies from being stateless and help ensure that parents and babies can live together.
Utterly bizarre. You can read about it at The Washington Post or find the poll here, at Time. (Spoiler alert: the list also includes blandly inoffensive words such as “basic” and “kale,” as well as a few collections of letters that do not appear in any standard dictionary.)
Utterly bizarre. You can read about it at The Washington Post or find the poll here, at Time. (Spoiler alert: the list also includes blandly inoffensive words such as “basic” and “kale,” as well as a few collections of letters that do not appear in any standard dictionary.)
Who would have thought it? Susan B. Levin (Smith College), that’s who. She makes the case at the OUP Blog.
PJW Note: This post originally appeared on October 28, 2013. Yet, as a recent Op-ed in The New York Times, “Pregnant, and No Civil Rights,” clearly demonstrates, the problems Reiheld addresses have only gotten worse. With over 2,000 hits in the past three days, her argument clearly resonates with many of us confronting in the current political climate in the U.S. I move to the top for the attention of any readers who missed it the first time around, or for any who would simply like to be refreshed with a clear argument undercutting so much recent pregnancy legislation.
Alicia Beltran is 28. As Erick Eckholm of The New York Times reports, Beltran was taken from her home in handcuffs, having honestly answered a prenatal visit question about addiction by mentioning her previous struggle with a pill addiction. Urine tests proved she was not using the pills, yet she was taken before a family court commissioner. She asked for a lawyer, was ignored, and was told that the court had already appointed a legal guardian for the fetus. Despite being in recovery, she was ordered to spend 78 days in a drug treatment center against her will. She lives in Wisconsin, one of four states with laws that give authorities the, well, authority to confine pregnant women for substance abuse on the grounds that they would otherwise harm the fetuses they carry. These states—Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota—are part of a disturbing trend of state laws which treat women less as citizens with full legal and moral rights, and more as humanoid fetal containers for the course of the pregnancy.
Alicia Beltran. Image Credit: Darren Hauck for The New York Times.
“This is what happens when laws give officials the authority to treat fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as if they are already completely separate from the pregnant woman,” said Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women in New York, of Ms. Beltran’s arrest and confinement.