Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference(Feminist Constructions)

Jackie Leach Scully argues that bioethics cannot avoid the task of considering the moral meaning of disability in humans - beyond simply regulating reproductive choices or new areas of biomedical research. By focusing on the experiential and empirical reality of impairment, and drawing on recent work in disability studies, Scully brings new attention to complex ethical questions surrounding disability. Impairment is variously considered as a set of social relations and practices, as experienced embodiment, and as an emancipatory movement, as well as a biomedical phenomenon. In this way, disability is joined to the general late-twentieth century trend of attending to difference as a significant and central axis of subjectivity and social life.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Chapter One: Bioethics and Embodied Difference Chapter 2 Chapter Two: Conceptualizing Disability Chapter 3 Chapter Three: Exploring Moral Understandings Chapter 4 Chapter Four: Different by Choice? Chapter 5 Chapter Five: Thinking Through the Variant Body Chapter 6 Chapter Six: Narratives of Disability: Models and Mentors Chapter 7 Chapter Seven: Political Recognition and Misrecognition Chapter 8: All Clues and (some) Solutions

About the Author :
Jackie Leach Scully is senior lecturer at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, and a member of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre, Newcastle University, UK. She has been active in the disability movement in Britain and Europe since the early 1980s.

Review :
Disability Bioethics brings together important insights from disability studies, feminist theory, and bioethics to create an integrated, original analysis into a range of ethical questions that arise in the context of medical approaches to disabilities. Scully's expertise in diverse approaches to philosophy, biology, and feminist thought ensure careful and critical engagement with multiple approaches to the complex questions that surround the place of disabilities and people who are disabled in society, in medicine, and in science. The book moves questions concerning disabilities from the margins to the center of bioethics and makes clear how important it is that we understand how deeply assumptions about disability run in many current debates. Challenging the superficial treatment of ethical issues concerning disability that is prevalent in bioethics, Scully adopts the perspective of feminist disability ethics to show how important it is to begin bioethics from the reality of disabled lives. In her wise, clear, and careful book, Jackie Leach Scully takes her place among the leaders of a second wave of disbility theory. The detailed and reflective description of disability as a factor in shaping moral identity, and the consideration in the concluding chapters of the formation of groups with similar limitations as political or cultural communities, make this a unique and creative contribution to the moral issues of life with disabilities. This book will be valuable to professionals and individuals dealing practically with living in "different bodies." Very thorough bibliography and index. Highly recommended. This book operates at the intersection of three debates: bioethics; biomedicine; and disability/Deaf studies. It is an excellent introduction for bioethicists and others who are unfamiliar with the challenge posed by disability studies. Not least because she is unafraid to deploy autobiography as part of her intellectual toolbox, Scully's personality comes through the pages of this book: accessible, thoughtful, with a dry wit. Scully is one of the deeper thinkers in contemporary disability studies, eschewing radical rhetoric in favor of detailed readings and carefully constructed arguments. Both provocative and sound - a thoughtful exploration of the way(s) in which understanding disability illuminates our broad understanding of human biology and its processes, by a scholar with expertise in both fields.