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George Floyd

Bioethics Forum Essay

Black Women Can’t Breathe

Years before George Floyd begged to be released from under the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin, Barbara Dawson, a 57-year-old Black woman, died begging a police officer, John Tadlock, not to remove her oxygen mask. Her death occurred right outside the Calhoun Liberty Hospital in Blountstown, Florida, shortly before Christmas in 2015.
Read Black Women Can’t Breathe
Bioethics Forum Essay

When Less-Lethal Weapons Are Lethal: Medicine’s Role in Police Brutality

Police consider tear gas, stun guns, and other "less-lethal" weapons essential to public safety. But, too often, it’s their use that threatens safety. It’s time to explore medicine’s complicity in perpetuating brutality that disproportionately impacts nonwhite communities, especially Black Americans.
Read When Less-Lethal Weapons Are Lethal: Medicine’s Role in Police Brutality
Bioethics Forum Essay

Ethicists as a Force for Institutional Change and Policies to Promote Equality

In 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 Ethicists as a Force for Institutional Change and Policies to Promote Equality
Bioethics Forum Essay

Committing to Fight Racism

We have reached a very sad, painful moment in the United States. It feels like a cascade of calamities, one compounding the next. An infectious disease pandemic that we cannot yet cure has precipitated an economic crisis. An episode of police brutality against a black man has added the name George Floyd to a long list of victims of unfair policing practices in black communities. Bioethicists have not been doing enough in our professional capacities to actively denounce or address the persistent problems of structural racism. We invite our fellow bioethics colleagues to join us in candid, uncomfortable conversations about what we can and should be doing differently.
Read Committing to Fight Racism
Bioethics Forum Essay

Bioethics and Black Lives: A Call for Bioethics to Speak Against Racial Injustice

George 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 Bioethics and Black Lives: A Call for Bioethics to Speak Against Racial Injustice
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