As we stand on the precipice of a world without Roe v. Wade and its constitutional protection for the right to terminate a pregnancy, new arguments, approaches, and conceptual frames for understand...

On 24 July 2022, the landmark decision Roe v. Wade (1973), that secured a right to abortion for decades, was overruled by the US Supreme Court. The Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation severely restricts access to legal abortion care in the USA, since it will give the states the power to ban abortion. It has been claimed that overruling Roe will have disproportionate impacts on women of color and that restricting access to abortion contributes to or (...) amounts to structural racism. In this paper, we consider whether restricting abortion access as a consequence of overruling Roe could be understood as discrimination against women of color (and women in general). We argue that banning abortion is indirectly discriminatory against women of color and directly (but neither indirectly, nor structurally) discriminatory against women in general. (shrink)

Katie Watson (2022) writes that “If the Supreme Court shifts the question of legality in whole or in part to state legislatures, the ethics of abortion will become an even more intense subject of debate in public, academic, and clinical realms. Therefore, this is the moment for all bioethicists to strengthen our teaching, thinking, and writing in abortion ethics” (emphasis added). . . Persuading broader audiences that ethicists might be able to help advance pro-choice causes is thereby essential to implementing (...) Watson’s suggestion that bioethicists get more engaged. What good ethicists might do depends on others taking advantage of what they have to offer: that this would need to happen is my focus here. (shrink)

Katie Watson describes her article in this special issue as “a call to bioethicists to recognize the ways we may have undervalued the moral status of women in our analytic frameworks, and to delibe...

Mass media play a significant role in shaping public opinion. News coverage of abortion reflects narratives about reproductive health, ethics, and women, and may potentially reinforce negative soci...

Public debates about abortion emphasize choice. Privately, when people face that decision, how much choice do they feel they have?We are part of a team who provide abortions at the oldest public ho...

In this open peer commentary, we concur with the three target articles’ analysis and positions on abortion in the special issue on Roe v. Wade as the exercise of reproductive liberty essential for the bioethical commitment to patient autonomy and self-determination. Our proposed OPC augments that analysis by explicating more fully the concept crucial to Roe of fetal personhood. We explain that the development and use of predictive reproductive technologies over the fifty years since Roe has changed the literal image, (...) and thereby the epistemological landscape, through which a prospective parent comes to know the fetus. The logic of Roe required a legal and ethical denial of fetal personhood to prioritize maternal autonomy over claims to fetal moral personhood. Our claim is that such a denial may be more complicated today. The fetal person genetic testing and reproductive imaging now presents to prospective parents has become an increasingly individualized, distinct medicalized picture of a developing person with which a parent can either identify or differentiate. In contrast, the fetal person of Roe was an abstract and vague figure stripped of most human particulars, a pregnancy rather than the specific individualized human entity reproductive technology now presents as a person to prospective parents. We discuss the implications of this shift and call for a more capacious analysis of reproductive ethics that works towards both reproductive and disability justice. (shrink)

Many ethics faculty in medical schools do not include abortion in their required curriculum. On the face of it, this is a singular failure since abortion is certainly an important ethical issue. Th...

This paper argues that abortion access is an important subject for bioethics scholarship and reflects on the relationship between legal frameworks and access to care. The author uses the example of the United Kingdom to examine the benefits and limitations of abortion-permissive legal frameworks in terms of access. These are legal frameworks that enable the provision of abortion but subject to restrictions. An abortion-permissive regime—first in Great Britain and then in Northern Ireland—has gone some way to improving access to care (...) over time. However, aspects of the regime (that lead to its description as permissive rather than supportive of abortion) have the potential to endanger abortion access in the future and so legal reform is necessary. (shrink)

Paltrow, Harris and Marshall argue that understanding Roe v. Wade as a decision that only protects the right to terminate a pregnancy misconstrues its larger implications. The striking down of Roe...

Watson begins with two questions: “Should the need for abortion care be considered a health disparity? and, “If yes, would framing it this way increase the ability of poor women and women of color...

The impending U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has appropriately engendered critical thought and speculation as to what a post-Roe America would look lik...

In “The Ethics of Access: Reframing the Need for Abortion Care as a Health Disparity,” Watson considers the advantages of framing the need for abortion as an issue of health disparities. Dra...

Bioethicists enter into conflict routinely, artfully applying knowledge of ethics, law, medicine and psychology to high stakes human interactions in health care settings, as facilitators and collab...

This issue of the American Journal of Bioethics shines a light on abortion, recognizing that reproductive freedom as understood for the past fifty years no longer exists in the United States. Some...

Philosophers of science deploy mathematical models to describe epistemic communities, or groups of people creating and sharing knowledge for individual and collective purposes. These models capture...

In March of 2021, a woman named Ashley Caswell was arrested in Etowah County, Alabama after testing positive for methamphetamine (Levin 2023). Ms. Caswell was two months pregnant and was arrested f...

Paltrow, Harris, and Marshall argue that the reversal of Roe will impact all pregnant persons, not only those who wish to terminate a pregnancy. I agree that these consequences ar...