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
Did you know that World Bioethics Day was established in 2015? It is celebrated every October 19th. This year’s theme is “Non-Discrimination and Non-Stigmatization” – a topic ripe for, and in many ways reflecting, feminist approaches to bioethics.
(How) are you or your organizations acknowledging the day? Let us know in the comments!
People research trans feminist bioethics who do archival work should check out this great new opportunity, funded by the Mellon Foundation.
From project co-director Hil Malatino: The project, “Widening the Arc of Trans History: Archival Research for Public Storytelling,” will support a cohort of 8-10 scholars over a period of 3 years as they work in trans-related archives and draft articles and first book projects rooted in that work.The cohort will be supported by a team of co-directors (myself, Myrl Beam, and Sam Tenorio) and will receive four fully funded weeks of archival research in trans-related archives, a $1000 stipend for each year of participation, $5000 towards a development editor for a first book project, access to workshops and seminars on archival methods, trans archives, publishing, public storytelling, and non-fiction craft, as well as ongoing support for writing and revision.You can learn more about the project and apply here – https://bit.ly/TransHistoryApplicationThe deadline is January 12, 2025.
On the blog we’ve previously shared a sneak preview of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) plans for the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) Affinity Group. The upcoming session features one of the blog co-editors! Now we’re providing a bit more overview of not only the session (as well as how ASBH members who are not going to be in-person this year in St. Louis can join it) but also about the new FAB Affinity Group co-chairs who are leading the group for a three year term 2024-2026 and plans they have in store for group during this time. In lieu of a scholar spotlight this month, we’re feature two scholars and the FAB Affinity Group.
Read on to learn more directly from the co-chairs who wrote this guest post below.
The Co-Chairs Introduce Themselves
As the new co-chairs of ASBH’s Feminist Approaches to Bioethics affinity group, we (Lindsey Grubbs and Devora Shapiro) are excited to preview our session at the 2024 ASBH conference in St. Louis, and to share a bit about our plans for the next three years.
Devora Shapiro is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. She is a philosopher and clinical medical ethicist with research areas including medical trauma and medical gaslighting, intersectional approaches to diagnosis and treatment, experiential knowledge and medical practice, and clinical ethics topics such as ethically engaging “complex” patients. Her work has been published in The Hastings Center Report, The Journal of Clinical Ethics, CHEST, andInternational Journal for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics.
Plans for the 2024 ASBH Conference in St. Louis
We are excited to kick off our term as co-chairs with an absolutely fabulous affinity group session at this year’s ASBH conference, which will take place from 1-2 PM CST on Friday, September 20th. The session will take the form of a panel of short talks at the intersection of feminist and disability bioethics. Noting the large degree of shared membership between FAB and the disability ethics affinity group, the intellectual connections between the approaches, and the strengths of our members in this area, we believe a panel on this topic will be of interest to FAB members. We have a great group of speakers: Kara Ayers will speak on “Reproductive Justice at the Intersection: Feminist and Disability Ethics,” Alison Reiheld will present “’This world isn’t big enough for the both of us’: Fatness, disability, and making spaces,” and Jada Wiggleton-Little will deliver “Normalizing Bodies in Pain.” We plan to advertise the session widely and hope to attract a few new potential members. A zoom option will be available for members who are unable to attend the conference in person – if you’re an ASBH FAB member, you should have received an email about this, and will get a reminder prior to the conference!
Looking Ahead for the FAB Affinity Group
In addition to events at ASBH, we plan to hold 2-3 zoom events per year in order to build community and share thoughts on teaching and research. One of the first things that we did when we assumed leadership of the affinity group was to distribute a survey to get to know our members and assess their interests for the coming years. We learned a lot, both about the wide range of members’ research interests and professional roles, and about the kinds of events that people would like to see. According to our survey, the most popular format for these events is a discussion with authors of recent significant publications (garnering 88% of votes), followed by works-in-progress flash talks (68%) and themed research panels (64%). We intend to organize events of each of these types over the course of the next year.
We look forward to creating spaces, both digitally and at ASBH, for continued connection and the sharing of ideas. We have also established a listserv for the group that members will need to opt into, which we hope people will use to plan conference panels, share recent publications, and build feminist community (again, check out your recent email for an enrollment link and look out for reminders!). Over the next three years, we also hope to continue to plan events that intersect with the interests of other affinity groups, building connections that can help to strengthen coalitions of bioethicists who prioritize issues of justice and equity.
Lisa Brünig, Mirjam Faissner, Regina Müller, & Stefanie Weigold, “A Feminist Bioethics Conference in Qatar? Critical Viewpoints and an Impulse for Further Discussion”: A commentary on the recent FAB/WCB from the German Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics and Bioethics focusing on the potential for LGBTQ+ participation in the conference and the potential for anti-Muslim bias in assessments of the conference location.
