- Bioethics Forum Essay
A Historic Intersex Awareness Day
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis year’s Intersex Awareness Day, October 26, marks a historic pivot. Last week, Boston Children’s Hospital revealed that its physicians would no longer perform certain nonconsensual infant genital surgeries on babies born with atypical genitals. They join the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, which made a similar announcement in July and even apologized to its former intersex patients. Intersex advocates have been working toward this goal for decades.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethicists as a Force for Institutional Change and Policies to Promote Equality
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn his recent JAMA article, Donald Berwick eloquently describes what he termed the “moral determinants of health,” by which he meant a strong sense of social solidarity in which people in the United States would “depend on each other for securing the basic circumstances of healthy lives,” reflecting a “moral law within.” Berwick’s work should serve as a call to action for bioethicists and clinical ethicists to consider what they can do to be forces of broad moral change in their institutions.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Bioethics and Black Lives: A Call for Bioethics to Speak Against Racial Injustice
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayGeorge Floyd could not breathe while his neck was trapped under the knee of a police officer for nearly nine minutes. Yet despite the impressive scholarship of bioethics on ventilation and other technologies that prolong human breathing capabilities, it is largely silent on the suffocating effects of racism. Bioethics must speak out against racial injustice.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Calling on Doctors to Take the Lead in Fighting for Gun Control
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Gun Violence, Shame, and Social Change
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe language of shame has been prominent in the aftermath of the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. In a March 23 essay in The New Yorker, filmmaker A.J. Schnack, who in 2015 began a video project, “Speaking Is Difficult,” to document initial reports of mass shootings, wrote abo...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Freedom’s Just Another Word for . . . Restriction?
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Footnote to a Footnote: On Roving Medicine
Read the PostBioethics Forum Essay“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” This insight from Margaret Mead functioned as the guiding inspiration for those of us who worked for years as the Intersex Society of North America. A footnote to a...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
So You’re a Scholar Who Wants to Make Things Happen
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayBecause for about the last decade I have been a medical humanist working to change the way physicians treat people born with socially-challenging bodies, I’m frequently asked about doing activism from an academic base. Activism-curious academics typically ask about how one goes from thinking about ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Federal Marriage Amendment and the New One Drop of Blood Rule
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs anti-miscegenation laws took hold in an effort to stop blacks and whites from marrying, by necessity courts had to start deciding who counted as white or black. The standard that ultimately emerged – namely the “one drop of blood” rule of blackness – dictated that any trace of black herita...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Something Is Actually Happening: Are Bioethicists Doing the Right Stuff?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThere’s a scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian that always reminds me of academia. It goes like this: The year is 32 A.D. and Brian, an unwitting doppelganger of Christ, is about to be crucified by the Romans. Judith, Brian’s lover and fellow member of the anti-Roman People’s...Read the Post