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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) | |
Abortion restrictions are particularly good for black women—at least in the United States. This claim will likely strike many as outlandish. And numerous commentaries on abortion restrictions have suggested otherwise: many authors have lamented the effects of abortion restrictions on women, and black women in particular—these restrictions are bad for them, these authors say. However, abortion restrictions are clearly good for black women. This is because if someone is prevented from performing a morally wrong action, it’s good for her. For (...) example, it’s good for Sarah if she’s prevented from driving home drunk. However, since abortion is morally wrong, it follows that it’s good for women when they are prevented from getting an abortion. And since black women get abortions at disproportionately high rates, abortion restrictions are good in particular for black women. Indeed, this is an example of a positive effect of intersectionality. [lightly updated in light of it being rescinded.]. (shrink) No categories | |
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) | |
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... | |
The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision not only upended constitutional protections for abortion in the United States but also bolstered legislative and cultural int... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
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... | |
Adoption is often framed as an alternative to abortion. However, many women feel that pregnancy and birth made them a mother and that this new identity is not erased by the fact they are not raising that child. This article argues that involuntary adoption occurs when legislative coercion deprives a pregnant person of a realistic abortion option, forcing them into this position of being a parent who is not parenting. The article also argues that the moral seriousness of motherhood begins (...) at conception, not because embryos are the moral equivalent of babies, but because that's when the pregnant person becomes a “potential mother” who must make a new set of decisions in response to her status. The reversal of Roe v. Wade has made narrative insight into the dynamics of pre-Roe adoption critical. Therefore, this article offers the stories of a 1969 birth mother's journey from being a teenager who relinquished her birth daughter to becoming a physician working in abortion care and of a 1965 adoptee's effort to reach out to her birthparents at age fifty-four as texts for ethical analysis. (shrink) |
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