Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, on the Margins

This volume considers the place of feminist bioethics within the broader international bioethics community. Since its emergence two decades ago, the feminist perspective on bioethics has existed at the periphery of the discipline's mainstream. Concerns over reproduction and women's health issues-along with the concept that prevailing bioethical thought was fundamentally gendered-were largely subsumed by such overarching issues as the protection of research subjects and by theoretical and methodological frameworks derived from Kantian philosophy and practice-oriented principalism. Now feminist bioethics belongs to both the mainstream and the margins. The essays collected here explore the relation of feminist bioethics to mainstream bioethical thought and practice. The first section looks at the current trajectory of feminist bioethics, its contributions to the mainstream, and how different types of feminism can inform and strengthen feminist bioethics. In the second section, contributors address autonomy, universalism, and trust to probe how feminist perspectives have altered bioethical theory. The third section examines such challenging issues as cancer genetics, childbirth, rape, and prenatal selection to demonstrate the effect of feminist bioethics on mainstream methodology. Contributors to the fourth section reflect on the relationship between feminist bioethical thought and the viewpoints of racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities, including people with disabilities. Philosophically grounded, methodologically sound, and theoretically rigorous, this paradigm-challenging collection ponders the most dynamic areas of feminist inquiry into bioethical thought and practice and sketches future directions for this rapidly growing field.

Table of Contents:
List of Contributors Preface Acknowledgments Part I. Introduction to Feminist Bioethics Chapter 1. The Expanding Landscape: Recent Directions in Feminist Bioethics Chapter 2. "It Is Her Problem, Not Ours": Contributions of Feminist Bioethics to the Mainstream Chapter 3. Broadening the Feminism in Feminist Bioethics Part II. Theory in Feminist Bioethics Chapter 4. Conceptions of Autonomy and Conceptions of the Body in Bioethics Chapter 5. Trust, Method, and Moral Progress in Feminist Bioethics Chapter 6. The Right to Life: Rethinking Universalism in Bioethics Part III. From Theory to Method Chapter 7. Bodies, Connectedness, and Knowledge: A Contextual Approach to Hereditary Cancer Genetics Chapter 8. Stories of Innocence and Experience: Bodily Narrative and Rape Chapter 9. Where's the Harm? Challenging Bioethical Support of Prenatal Selection for Sexual Orientation Chapter 10. Toward a Methodology for Technocratic Transformation: Feminist Bioethics, Midwifery, and Women's Health in the Twenty-first Century Part IV. Understanding Difference: Making and Breaking Connections within and between the Margins Chapter 11. The Difference Difference Makes: Public Health and the Complexities of Racial and Ethnic Differences Chapter 12. Feminist Bioethics and Indigenous Research Reform in Australia: Is an Alliance across Gender, Racial, and Cultural Borders a Useful Strategy for Promoting Change? Chapter 13. China's Birth Control Program through Feminist Lenses Chapter 14. A Feminist Standpoint on Disability: Our Bodies, Ourselves Conclusion. Reassessment and Renewal Index

About the Author :
Jackie Leach Scully, Ph.D., is a reader in social and bioethics at Newcastle University, where she is the director of research with the Policy, Ethics, and Life Sciences Research Centre. She is an honorary senior lecturer in the University of Sydney's Faculty of Medicine. Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, M.D.C.M., is medical and executive director of the Malta House of Care in Hartford, Connecticut. Petya Fitzpatrick, M.A., is a health care researcher with the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University.

Review :
The bite-sized accessible chapters would be useful in undergraduate or graduate courses as a source of readings, research, and presentation topics. Choice This collection successfully demonstrates that feminist bioethics has pushed bioethical questions beyond the doctor-patient relationship, and the articles in this volume serve as evidence of the influence feminist bioethics has on mainstream bioethics. -- Stephanie Jenkins Signs