The Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade has played a subtle but critical role in the history of bioethics in America. Would American bioethics discourse be changed with the end of a constitutionally protected right to abortion?

Bioethics is an integral part of the liberal international order intentionally developed after World War II. Following the Russian war on Ukraine there is every reason to believe that the set of norms and institutions that preserved peace in Europe through the first Cold War will be revised according to new assumptions that will structure international relations in a second Cold War.

Bioethics in the Margins is a new podcast that addresses fundamental moral issues facing society that don’t get the attention they deserve.

The field of bioethics has a moral responsibility to respond to the continued racial and health inequities confronting Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Along with several colleagues, we formed an antiracism task force to interrogate that moral responsibility. Here are key takeaways from a recent panel discussion that we organized.

Robert M. Veatch, a bioethics pioneer and the first research associate at The Hastings Center, died on November 9. An overarching theme was his commitment to human rights.

The procurement of human plasma as a potential therapy for Covid-19 is one of the latest examples of bioethics nationalism, defined by Jonathan Moreno in this blog as “distinct bioethics standards [which] are formally proclaimed as a matter of right by a sovereign state.” The race for a Covid cure pushes at the weak seams in the international liberal order in much the same way that Covid appears to be pushing at health care systems.

Albert R. Jonsen, a pioneer of medicine and a founder of the field of medical ethics, died peacefully in his home on October 21 at 89. We first met in 1973, when I was a medical student and I was interested in medical ethics. He gave me the best career advice I have ever received. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Finish your medical training first. If you don’t have the same credentials as the doctors, and share their world, they won’t listen.”

With all of the tumult surrounding the coronavirus and the upcoming presidential election, few people likely noticed that three important figures in bioethics, medical history, and medical sociology recently died within a month of one another. But for those of us who work in these fields, the deaths...

Covid isn’t merely overshadowing the drug overdose crisis—it’s directly worsening it.

The global crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic and the rush to create and distribute a vaccine widely hoped to be a “silver bullet” that can facilitate a return to “normalcy” threatens to upend seven decades of assumptions about bioethical norms.