Mass incarceration and the aging prison population in the United States is an ethical crisis, understudied in empirical bioethics research. In this article, I share one woman’s narrative to illustrate how older Black women describe accessing healthcare while incarcerated and identify sites for bioethical exploration. I argue that, due to the punitive nature of prison healthcare interactions, wherein women are seen as inmates first and patients second, healthcare providers are caught in a trap of competing ethical commitments to their patients (...) and the state. As the prison population ages, these challenges will become more acute. Feminist bioethics has a critical role to play in imagining new possibilities for accessing, giving, and receiving care in the carceral context. (shrink)

This paper considers an area of research in clinical psychology that focuses on the resilience of members of marginalized groups who have experienced traumas directly related to their social identities. The paper describes these as social group-based traumas and outlines three effects of social group-based traumas that can make the experiences of them, as well as experiences of recovery following them, distinct from those involved in other kinds of traumas. In cases where resilience frameworks are useful for understanding such recoveries, (...) the paper proposes three methodological strategies for designing research to address the characteristics of social group-based trauma. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow has recently claimed that unless there are reasons to think the sexed nature of human beings is normatively significant, current trends in bioethical reasoning force the conclusion that “we may do well to move toward a ‘post sex’ humanity” (American Journal of Bioethics 10: 7 (2010)). This commentary uses basic methodological principles from feminist ethics to argue that he has, in fact, given no reasons to think that a 'post sex' humanity is any more valuable than gender diverse (...) one, and no reason to think that sexual dimorphism has normative significance as a brute biological fact. (shrink)

Recent global events demonstrate that analytical frameworks to aid professionals in healthcare ethics must consider the pervasive role of social structures in the emergence of bioethical issues. To address this, the authors propose a new sociologically informed approach to healthcare ethics that they term “social bioethics.” Their approach is animated by the interpretive social sciences to highlight how social structures operate vis-à-vis the everyday practices and moral reasoning of individuals, a phenomenon known as social discourse. As an exemplar, the authors (...) use social bioethics to reframe common ethical issues in psychiatric services and discuss potential implications. Lastly, the authors discuss how social bioethics illuminates the ways healthcare ethics consultants in both policy and clinical decision-making participate in and shape broader social, political, and economic systems, which then cyclically informs the design and delivery of healthcare. (shrink)