Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 270-289, June 2021.

The debate over abortion tends to be framed as life versus choice. Yet, neither pole matches the actual experiences of women, especially women of colour and poor women. Using the hermeneutical circle from the perspective of Christian liberation theology, this article argues that beginning with the voices of those marginalized in the debate leads us to a broader conversation of reproductive justice, which requires an analysis of reproduction as a whole. The article focuses on what constrains the ability (...) of women and men to choose whether to have children, across the spectrum from contraception to abortion to fetus selection. (shrink)

The reproductive justice movement started by black women’s rights activists made its way into the academic literature as an intersectional approach to women’s reproductive autonomy. While there are many scholars who now employ the term ‘reproductive justice’ in their research, few have taken up the task of explaining what ‘justice’ entails in reproductive justice. In this paper I take up part of this work and attempt to clarify the relevant kind of freedom (...) an adequate theory of reproductive justice would postulate. To do so, I compare two approaches to reproductive freedom: an approach based on freedom as non‐interference and an approach based on freedom as non‐domination. I then argue that the non‐domination approach better fits the ideals of the reproductive justice movement as set forth by its founders and should be treated as one of the necessary conditions in any non‐ideal account of reproductive justice. Towards the end, I single out epistemic non‐domination as crucial in shaping the narrative around reproductive justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Liberating Sexuality: Justice Between the Sheets by Miguel A. De La TorreSimeiqi HeLiberating Sexuality: Justice Between the Sheets Miguel A. De La Torre SAINT LOUIS: CHALICE PRESS, 2016. 232 pp. $27.99What lies at the heart of Miguel De La Torre's provocative and refreshing collection of essays Liberating Sexuality is his lifelong commitment to a justice-based society. He is deeply concerned with "how oppressive social structures, (...) [End Page 191] rooted in a two-thousand-year-old misunderstanding of Christian sexuality, prevent us from a more just social order" (vii).De La Torre rigorously engages with the biblical literature and considers it a vital ground for ethical reflection. He first returns to Genesis and successfully argues that "God blesses sex and declares it good" (4). He closely examines the story of the first man and woman and proposes the concept of "cleave to" in Genesis 2:24–25 as the guiding definition for a healthy marriage in our modern society. By revisiting and creatively retelling the stories of women in the Bible—Lot's wife, Sarah, Dinah, Rebekah, and Tamar—he restores the humanity and dignity of women and calls for our responsibility to dismantle the patriarchal structures that foster sexual abuse. He also provides alternative interpretations of the troubling biblical texts for LGBTQ communities to consider. After thoroughly surveying the biblical justification of patriarchy and the subjugation of women in the Hebrew Bible, he proposes that "the entire Bible should be read through the lens of the Gospel message, specifically passages like John 10:10" (13). Though a creative attempt to liberate the sacred text from oppression, this approach requires caution, as there may be possible anti-Semitic ramifications for reading the Hebrew Bible through a New Testament lens.One of the major contributions of De La Torre to the field of sexual ethics is the proposal of "orthoeros" through a liberative method that seriously considers liberation theology and goes beyond the inadequate approaches of both conservatives' sexual legalism and liberals' permissiveness toward sexual ethics. "Orthoeros" promotes a "familial relationship based on mutual giving and vulnerability" (21) and is made up of five biblically based principles: safe, consensual, faithful, mutually pleasing, and intimate.As an ethicist who is invested in the public discourse, De La Torre actively and boldly engages with issues of various sexual practices. He critiques Fifty Shades of Grey and envisions an ethical, Christian-based sadomasochism by employing "orthoeros" principles. He also examines the historical reasons against masturbation and argues for its constructive role in the sexuality of Christians.Deeply disturbed by the prevailing injustice that corrupts our society, De La Torre focuses much of the volume on exposing the sources and the detrimental effects of sexism, heterosexism, and racism. He reveals misogynist legislation by mapping out the "war on women," specifically the issues of equal pay, rape, reproduction rights, and global sexism. He reflects on his own "sin of heterosexuality" of being a macho man, conquering, and celebrating cojones. He also examines the Euro-American history of owning black bodies and critiques the stereotyping of Latino bodies in Hollywood.Another major contribution of De La Torre is the indecent approach to justice-based praxis—an ethics para joder—that "screws" with the prevailing power structures by utilizing a nonviolent survival strategy based on love, designed to liberate the abused and the abusers from the death-dealing social structure. [End Page 192]Liberating Sexuality, situated at the intersection between Christian ethics, biblical hermeneutics, and cultural studies, is a successful interdisciplinary endeavor. The essays gathered here remain highly engaged with the public reality and should benefit both general readers and scholars. Furthermore, this volume provides much-needed guidance on how a sexual ethics should be implemented and is, hence, a vital resource for those engaged in the practices of ministry.Simeiqi HeDrew UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The reproductive justice framework shifted understandings and analyses of reproductive oppression beyond individual ‘choice’ by incorporating analyses of structural injustice, racism, and social and economic concerns. In this article, we build on understandings of the reproductive justice framework by integrating a postcolonial lens and bring the powerful conceptual tools of postcolonial feminist theory to bear on issues of reproductive oppression in India. We articulate the elements of such a postcolonial lens—the transnational operation of race, (...) Orientalism, the subjective experience of colonialism as well as the role of the nation-state and nationalism in shaping reproductive lives—and demonstrate how these elements, along with religion, caste, and right-wing Hindu fundamentalism, structure reproductive oppression in India. Through our discussion of the issues of sterilization, sex-selective abortion, and commercial surrogacy in India we reveal how the underlying coloniality of Malthusian ideas of controlling population to reduce poverty, Orientalist and racist tropes of moral and intellectual inferiority and sexual licentiousness, and the Orientalist and colonial framing of the “East” as backward, uncivilized, and dependent clearly shape reproductive issues in India. Offering a nuanced analysis of the heterogeneity of reproductive oppression within India, our discussion brings reproductive justice into conversation with a feminist postcolonial perspective to foreground the continued impact of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and settler colonialism on reproductive oppression. (shrink)

The global impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the backlash towards reproductive justice that it represents warrant a global feminist response informed by broad theoretical and geopolitical lenses. We consider how a solidaristic, transnational feminist movement might learn from Latin American feminist movements that have been successful in uniting broad coalitions in the fight for reproductive justice as situated within far-reaching political goals. The success of such a global movement must be decolonial and (...) must contend with the fact that overlapping realities of global inequality, severe poverty, extractivism, and western-backed violence are fundamentally implicated in reproductive justice. (shrink)

While the principles of reproductive justice are generally agreed upon in progressive reproductive political circles, other theoretical frameworks such as reparative justice can further foster the goals of the movement. In the literature, however, reparative justice has been insufficiently explored as it relates to reproductive injustice. My concern in this essay is therefore the development of conceptual architecture for understanding reproductive justice as reparative in nature. A reparative approach to reproductive ethics (...) importantly takes up the demand to situate reproduction within ongoing historical and sociopolitical contexts. It makes transparent the harms generated by an oppressive social order and the depths to which conditions must change for reproductive justice to emerge. To construct the relationship between reparative and reproductive justice, I employ Olúfemi Táíwò’s constructivist view of reparations as an ongoing, generative, and ultimately world-building project. For, if reproductive justice is about developing enabling conditions wherein folks can control their birthing options and parent in safe and healthy environments, then a constructivist reparative approach is necessary—one which takes seriously the accumulative harms of history and their relation to transforming social structures in the present. (shrink)

When we conceptualized this symposium, Roe v. Wade1 was still the law of the land, albeit precariously. We aimed to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary by exploring historical, legal, medical, and related dimensions of access to abortion as well as the challenges ahead to secure reproductive justice. With the leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on May 2, 2022, we shifted to mark the dawn of a new era. In the nearly (...) identical official opinion announced on June 24, 2022,2 Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority (6-3), overturned Roe and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.3. (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...

In 2010, Taffy Brodesser-Akner published an article entitled, “How Childbirth Caused my PTSD,” on Salon.com. Much to my surprise, her claims that she was seriously traumatized by childbirth encountered strong resistance and disbelief. In trying to understand the source of this resistance, I discovered a type of violence, which I refer to as “metaphysical violence,” that is often overlooked, yet prevalent, in what many people in the United States understand as normal childbirth practices and protocols. In this essay, I will (...) use María Lugones’s Pilgramages/Peregrinajes to offer a detailed account of what constitutes metaphysical violence, how it functions, and why it is so damaging to at least 9% of post-partum women who meet the criteria for PTSD and the 18% of post-partum women who show some sign of the disorder. Then, I will offer suggestions for how we can help women who may be victims of metaphysical violence during birth avoid some of the trauma it so often induces. (shrink)

In the wake of the Supreme Court Decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) argue that the unraveling of the constitutional right to abortion t...

The reception of Elaine Scarry’s landmark text, The Body in Pain, focuses in part on exploring how pain might be understood as beneficial or therapeutic. Childbirth is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of this kind of beneficial pain. This essay examines conceptualizations of labour pain in biomedical, natural childbirth and reproductive justice movements that explore the limits of Scarry’s description of pain as ‘unshareable’. Political struggles over pain in childbirth centre on the legibility of pain in labour. (...) Feminist and natural childbirth activists have developed an understanding of pain at birth as central to maternal subjectivity, where pain is a biopolitical force and its management a means of self-transformation. Alongside calls for reproductive justice, the essay considers how the visibility and expressivity of labour pain could contribute to what Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser term a new ‘natal politics’ that addresses concerns for the disproportionate injury and death experienced by Black birth givers. (shrink)

A literary, historical and philosophical discussion of attitudes to blindness by the sighted, and what the blind 'see'.

Antimicrobial Resistance is a threat to individual and to population health and to future generations, requiring “collective sacrifices” in order to preserve antibiotic efficacy. ‘Who should make the sacrifices?’ and ‘Who will most likely make them?’ are ethical concerns posited as potentially manageable through Antimicrobial Stewardship. Antimicrobial stewardship almost inevitably involves a form of clinical cost-benefit analysis that assesses the possible effects of antibiotics to treat a diagnosed infection in a particular patient. However, this process rarely accounts properly for patients (...) – above and beyond assessments of potential (non)compliance or adherence to care regimes. Drawing on a vignette of a pregnant woman of colour and migrant diagnosed with Mycoplasma genitalium, a sexually transmissible bacterium, this article draws out some of the ethical, speculative, and practical tensions and complexities involved in Antimicrobial Stewardship. We argue that patients also engage in a form of cost-benefit analysis influenced by experiences of reproductive and social (in)justice and comprising speculative variables - to anticipate future possibilities. These processes have the potential to have effects above and beyond the specific infection antimicrobial stewardship was activated to address. We contend that efforts to practice and research antimicrobial stewardship should accommodate and incorporate these variables and acknowledge the structures they emerge with(in), even if their components remain unknown. This would involve recognising that antimicrobial stewardship is intricately connected to other social justice issues such as immigration policy, economic justice, access to appropriate medical care, racism, etc. (shrink)

The use of genome embryo editing tools in reproduction is often touted as a way to ensure the birth of healthy and genetically related children. Many would agree that this is a worthy goal. The purpose of this paper is to argue that, if we are concerned with justice, accepting such goal as morally appropriate commits one to rejecting the development of embryo editing for reproductive purposes. This is so because safer and more effective means exist that can (...) allow many more prospective parents to achieve the same valued goal and that offer additional benefits. (shrink)

In Brazil, abortion is only allowed in cases of rape, serious risk to a woman's life or fetal anecephaly. Legal abortion services cover less than 4% of the Brazilian territory and only 1,800 procedures are performed, in average, per year. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, almost half of the already few Brazilian abortion clinics shut down and women had to travel even longer distances, reaching abortion services at later gestational ages. In this paper, we describe three bottom‐up advocacy strategies that emerged (...) from difficulties deepened during the COVID‐19 pandemic at a single abortion service in Brazil, amidst anti‐gender policies from the federal government. Telemedicine abortion, outpatient surgical abortion and the provision of abortion after 20 weeks' gestation are important strategies that may reduce inequalities that impact the most vulnerable populations, such as black and indigenous women, children, adolescents and women experiencing domestic violence. (shrink)

Using a feminist hermeneutic, Autumn Reinhardt-Simpson attempts to set out in this article how a third- or fourth-wave intersectional reading of the stories of Hagar and Sarah and Leah, Rachel, and their maids can become a source of both truth and healing within feminist activist communities today, particularly those working for reproductive justice. Reinhardt-Simpson identifies several issues within the stories such as societal acceptance of women who seek power only within patriarchal constructs or to benefit the aims of (...) patriarchy, as well as issues that divide women both then and today such as class, race, and status and the way that women relate to each other within a patriarchal structure. Reinhardt-Simpson concludes that a liberatory reading of these stories can point us toward reconciliation with our sisters. (shrink)

When we encounter extremist rhetoric, we often find it dumbfounding, incredible, or straightforwardly unintelligible. For this reason, it can be tempting to dismiss or ignore it, at least where it is safe to do so. The problem discussed in this paper is that such dismissals may be, at least in certain circumstances, epistemically unjust. Specifically, it appears that recent work on the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice compels us to accept two unpalatable conclusions: first, that this failure of intelligibility when we (...) encounter extremist rhetoric may be a manifestation of a hermeneutical injustice; and second, that remedying this injustice requires that we ought to become more engaged with and receptive of extremist worldviews. Whilst some theorists might interpret this as a reductio of this framework of epistemic in/justice, we push back against this conclusion. First, we argue that with a suitably amended conception of hermeneutical justice—one that is sensitive to the contextual nature of our hermeneutical responsibilities, and to the difference between understanding a worldview and accepting it—we can bite the bullet and accept that certain extremists are subject to hermeneutical injustice, but without committing ourselves to any unpalatable conclusions about how we ought to remedy these injustices. Second, we argue that bringing the framework of hermeneutical in/justice to bear upon the experience of certain extremists actually provides a new and useful perspective on one of the causes of extremism, and how it might be undermined. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's original presentation of Hermeneutical Injustice left open theoretical choice points leading to criticisms and subsequent clarifications with the resulting dialectic appearing largely verbal. The absence of perspicuous exposition of hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice might suggest scenarios exhibiting some – but not all – such hallmarks are within its purview when they are not. The lack of clear hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice, moreover, obscures both the extent to which Fricker's proposed remedy Hermeneutical Justice – roughly, virtuous communicative practices (...) – adequately addresses the injustice, and the accuracy of criticisms suggesting that Hermeneutical Justice is insufficient to the task. In what follows, after briefly defending necessary and sufficient conditions for what I take to be the best candidate interpretation of Hermeneutical Injustice, I build on recent work on moral responsibility to construct and defend a rigorous explication of Hermeneutical Justice. (shrink)

The Canadian province of Quebec recently amended its Health Insurance Act to cover the costs of In Vitro Fertilization . The province of Ontario recently de-insured IVF. Both provinces cited cost-effectiveness as their grounds, but the question as to whether a public health insurance system ought to cover IVF raises the deeper question of how we should understand reproduction at the social level, and whether its costs should be a matter of individual or collective responsibility. In this article I examine (...) three strategies for justifying collective provisions in a liberal society and assess whether public reproductive assistance can be defended on any of these accounts. I begin by considering, and rejecting, rights-based and needs-based approaches. I go on to argue that instead we ought to address assisted reproduction from the perspective of the contractarian insurance-based model for public health coverage, according to which we select items for inclusion based on their unpredictability in nature and cost. I argue that infertility qualifies as an unpredictable incident against which rational agents would choose to insure under ideal conditions and that assisted reproduction is thereby a matter of collective responsibility, but only in cases of medical necessity or inability to pay. The policy I endorse by appeal to this approach is a means-tested system of coverage resembling neither Ontario nor Quebec's, and I conclude that it constitutes a promising alternative worthy of serious consideration by bioethicists, political philosophers, and policy-makers alike. (shrink)

Reproductive tourism is a manifestation of a larger, more inclusive trend toward globalization of capitalist cultural and material economies. This paper discusses the development of cross-border assisted reproduction within the globalized economy, transnational and local structural processes that influence the trade, social relations intersecting it, and implications for the healthcare systems affected. I focus on prevailing gender structures embedded in the cross-border trade and their intersection with other social and economic structures that reflect and impact globalization. I apply a (...) social connection model of responsibility for unjust outcomes and consider strategies to counter structural injustices embedded in this industry. The concluding section discusses policy reforms and proposals for collaborative action to preclude further injustices and extend full human rights to all. (shrink)

Infertility is an unpredictable but widespread condition. While high‐income countries grapple with when, or how to cover the costs of assisted reproductive technology (ART), such as in‐vitro fertilisation (IVF), these services are generally only available to wealthy persons at private facilities in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). Although the principle of non‐interference with normal individual reproductive rights is robust, whether it is also the responsibility of collective society to provide the means (when ART applies) to achieve pregnancy, is (...) controversial. Recently, a low‐cost model was developed at a South African public institution. The target population for this model was “helpless and marginalised, childless couples”, but a new threat has arisen, namely, infertile couples who could conceivably afford private care. In the allocation of this scarce resource, we argue for a prioritarian response that first addresses the worst‐off, in order to even out unequal access imposed by sharp differences in income. (shrink)

An intergenerational justice perspective requires that we look at the condition of the existing generation of children and those to be born in the future. Many millions of the existing generation of children are now in trouble and at high risk of never fulfilling their human potential. These children are in turn unlikely, if they live to produce children, to be capable of providing the nurturing parenting that the next generation will need.The article’s starting premises are that we should (...) count child interests as of equivalent value to adult interests and that we do owe justice not just to the existing generation of children but to the next generations as well. Justice to the next generations means encouraging the creation of children who will have a good chance to enjoy the pleasures of life, children who will be born healthy and will be brought up by nurturing parents. Given these premises, there is much wrong with current reality and related policy.We now encourage the reproduction of more children than we can care for, provide limited child welfare enabling poor parents to better care for their children, and discourage adoption both domestic and international. We should reverse these policies. We should change the pronatalist and anti-contraception policies that encourage the reproduction of children who won’t likely be born healthy or receive nurturing care. We should provide child welfare so that poor parents who want to keep and raise their children can do so. We should encourage adoption, both domestic and international. (shrink)

The value turn in epistemology generated a particularly influential new position - virtue epistemology. It is an increasingly influential epistemological normative approach that opts for the intellectual virtues of the epistemic agent, rather than the truth-value of the proposition, as the central epistemic value. In the first part of this article we will attempt to briefly explain the value turn and outline the basic aspects of virtue epistemology, underlining the diversity of epistemic attitudes associated with this approach and their positive (...) impact on expanding epistemological horizons. The second part will be focused on the virtues of epistemic responsibility and epistemic justice as particularly appropriate for evaluating social processes such as, for example, testimony and conversational practices in general. In the third section we will show how the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic communicational act can be more efficiently analyzed and evaluated from the perspective of the virtue of epistemic justice, than from the traditional epistemic approach based on a monist concept of truth. The fourth and fifth section synthesize the discussion by introducing the concept of hermeneutic psychotherapy as a therapeutically and epistemically favorable framework for evaluating communicational acts in psychotherapy. nema. (shrink)

I propose that Hannah Arendt’s hermeneutical philosophy can make important contributions to ongoing debates in the study of epistemic injustice. Building on Kristie Dotson’s concern that Miranda Fricker’s formulation of hermeneutical injustice is needlessly restrictive, I argue that Arendt’s concept of ‘thinking’ challenges us to imagine a form of hermeneutical virtue that is rigorously self-critical. The self-destructive tendency of Arendtian thinking may help to guard against the specific danger that Dotson identifies - namely, that an overly rigid approach to hermeneutical (...) injustice and hermeneutical virtue can itself generate situations of epistemic injustice. Despite important differences that emerge, it is productive to bring together Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical virtue and Arendt’s concept of self-undermining thinking in order to reveal the ways in which these two corrective strategies might enrich and pose important challenges for the other. (shrink)

Noninvasive prenatal testing promises to enhance women's reproductive autonomy by providing genetic information about the fetus, especially in the detection of genetic impairments like Down syndrome. In practice, however, NIPT provides opportunities for intensified manipulation and control over women's reproductive decisions. Applying Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice to prenatal screening, this article analyzes how medical professionals impair reproductive decision-making by perpetuating testimonial injustice. They do so by discrediting positive parental testimony about what it is like to (...) raise a child with DS. We argue that this testimonial injustice constitutes a twofold harm: people with DS and their family members who claim that parenting a child with DS may be a rewarding and joyous experience are harmed when they are systematically silenced, disbelieved, and/or denied epistemic credibility by medical professionals, and pregnant women are harmed since they might make poorly informed choices without access to all relevant information. The broader implication of the analysis is that epistemic justice is a precondition of reproductive autonomy. We conclude by calling for federal oversight of the acquisition and dissemination of information that prospective parents receive following a positive diagnosis of DS to ensure that it is comprehensive and up to date. (shrink)

This article will examine the Catholic concept of global justice within a health care framework as it relates to women's needs for delivery doctors in the developing world and women's demands for assisted reproduction in the developed world. I will first discuss justice as a theory, situating it within Catholic social teachings. The Catholic perspective on global justice in health care demands that everyone have access to basic needs before elective treatments are offered to the wealthy. After (...) exploring specific discrepancies in global health care justice, I will point to the need for delivery doctors in the developing world to provide basic assistance to women who hazard many pregnancies as a priority before offering assisted reproduction to women in the developed world. The wide disparities between maternal health in the developing world and elective fertility treatments in the developed world are clearly unjust within Catholic social teachings. I conclude this article by offering policy suggestions for moving closer to health care justice via doctor distribution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada by Martha PaynterRebecca Simmons (bio)Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada by Martha Paynter Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing, 2022Martha Paynter's Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada is a bold, ambitious work that seeks to not only catalog Canada's meandering and often backtracking path toward reproductive justice, (...) but to act as a manifesto for Paynter's own ideas and goals for reproductive justice. The book takes the form of an anthology of stories, divided into chapters, that are grouped according to a certain right; for example, the right to bodily autonomy. This format effectively guides the reader from abortion to abolition. Paynter adroitly starts the book with white feminist favorites such as bodily autonomy and not having children. Then she logically progresses to more radical ideas such as parenting in prison and the total abolition of prisons. The stories in this book are accompanied by warm, colorful illustrations by Julia Hunt. These drawings help the reader visualize the person behind the story and the very real life that was affected by reproductive law and/or social norms. Paynter holds a PhD in nursing, and it is from this background that she writes, seeking to educate nurses and other healthcare professionals alongside a broader readership garnered through her clear, approachable writing style.Chapter 1 introduces the reader to many of the book's key themes by considering the right and need to have bodily autonomy, and the multiple ways this manifests itself in ordinary (and less-ordinary) life. Paynter considers the disparate stories of five women, all fighting in some way for bodily autonomy. The stories cover events of gender-based gun violence, sexual assault, transgender rights in prison, the legalization of sex work, police violence, and institutional racism. Each story recounted by Paynter catalogs tragedies and injustices with blunt and brutal honesty—perhaps to an unnecessary extent. Every horrific fact is laid bare for the readers as they uncover the intricacies of gender-based, imperialist, and racist violence. Paynter has chosen these stories to display the multitude of ways in which people—especially Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and minoritized genders—can be willfully wronged by the state and [End Page 209] the criminal justice system, such that the reader must begin to confront the fact that these structures don't seem to exist to benefit or protect the most marginalized in society.Chapter 2 approaches the right not to have children through a number of stories related to contraception, abortion, and family planning. Paynter sketches some of the key points in Canada's journey toward the decriminalization of abortion, from paradoxical trailblazers, such as Dr. Emily Stowe in the 1800s, to the viral memefied content of art protestor iamkarats. While the unequivocal legality of abortion in Canada suggests incredible progressiveness and support for women's rights, Paynter paints a more complex picture through her chosen narratives. Crucially, the inequitable geographical access to abortion, in particular, throughout the huge landmass of Canada suggests that the right to not have children in Canada is not universal. Moreover, Paynter suggests that access is also bounded by financial constraints, finite public funding, and the limited availability of inclusive clinics that prioritize healthcare for LGBTQ2S+ people.Chapter 3 considers the topic of having children; in particular, the right to reproductive technologies and freedom from forced sterilization. Paynter quickly makes clear that while many white feminists might see having and not having children as diametrically opposed, they are two equally essential parts of reproductive justice. Paynter draws attention to the Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928 that was only overturned in 1972. She describes it as part of the "genocidal colonial project" (84), a collection of laws and policies aimed at fulfilling eugenicist, neoimperial ideals of increasing production of the white "race" and promoting the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, Paynter argues that evidence of forced sterilization of Indigenous peoples, and other physical violence and neglect, persists to the present day and must be stopped and reparations made for previous harms. Paynter then considers the complex, often-debated case of commercialized surrogacy, which she defines... (shrink)

Respect for autonomy is a central value in reproductive ethics, but it can be a challenge to fulfill and is sometimes an outright puzzle to understand. If a woman requests the transfer of two, three, or four embryos during fertility treatment, is that request truly autonomous, and do clinicians disrespect her if they question that decision or refuse to carry it out? Add a commitment to justice to the mix, and the challenge can become more complex still. Is (...) it unfair for insurance policies to exclude from coverage the costs of giving fertility to those who lack it or restoring fertility in those who have lost it? What does “just reproduction” look like in the face of multifarious understandings of both justice and autonomy and in light of increasingly complex and costly reproductive technologies? In today's dialogue about reproduction, medicine, and ethics in the United States, old ethical issues—such as whether women ought to be allowed to access pregnancy termination—are more contested than they have been in decades, while new technologies—like those used to edit the genes of human embryos—suggest that our species could face unprecedented questions about who should exist. As we considered the discussions accompanying these issues and contemplated a special report responding to them, we found ourselves consistently circling back to two ethical commitments: respect for autonomy and the pursuit of justice. As one of the nine essays in this collection asks, why should certain women receive help to establish a pregnancy while others are thrown in jail when they miscarry or their child is stillborn? Respect for autonomy is required where individuals have the ability to make fully informed and voluntary choices. Yet does respecting autonomy require acceding to all the choices of patients or consumers of medical care? We consider these and related questions in this special report from the Hastings Center Report. (shrink)

Post-Dobbs abortion restrictions impact access and choice in the context of reproductive genetic medicine, raising serious reproductive justice concerns. The consequences of these restrictions are particularly acute and far-reaching for individuals with genetic conditions and their families.

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and hermeneutical gaps are misrepresented if (...) they are uniformly predicated of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed “white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social positionality. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and remedies for this injustice are widely debated. This article adds to the existing debate by arguing that theories of recog- nition can fruitfully contribute to Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and can provide a framework for structural remedy. By pairing Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice with theories of recognition, I bring forward a modest claim and a more radical claim. The first concerns a shift in our vocabulary; recognition theory can give a name (...) to the seriousness of the long-term effects of hermeneutical injustice. The second claim is more radical: thinking of hermeneutical injustice as preventing what I call “self-recogni- tion” provides a structural remedy to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice. Because hermeneutical injustice is first and foremost a structural injustice, I contend that every virtue theory of hermeneutical justice should be complemented by structural remedies in terms of recognition. Finally, what I argue sheds light on the seriousness of cases of exclusion of and discrimination against women in academia and helps to draw our attention to new ways to combat such problems. (shrink)

This book aims to develop the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, the theoretical account of interpretive (as opposed to explanatory) understanding--the account of meanings and contexts rather than causes and predictions--usually restricted to the domain of literary and textual analysis, in new directions by exploiting its potential as an instrument of critique. It refutes commonly held claims that hermeneutic analyses are necessarily relativistic, Eurocentric, or critically impotent and demonstrates how hermeneutic procedures can inform analyses of urgent current and cross-cultural issues (...) such as the biology of race, female genital excision, and the so-called "culture of poverty" thesis. Lorenzo Simpson demonstrates that a robust methodology of philosophical hermeneutics is well positioned to intervene in critical political and social issues in global ethics and justice in concert with critical theory's emancipatory aims. (shrink)

Previously proposed strategies for tackling hermeneutical injustices take for granted the interests people have in certain things about them being intelligible to them and/or to others, and seek to enable them to satisfy these interests. Strategies of this sort I call interests-as-given strategies. I propose that some hermeneutical injustices can instead be tackled by doing away with certain of these interests, and so with the possibility of their unfair non-satisfaction. Strategies of this sort I call interests-in-question strategies. As a case (...) study in when such an interests-in-question strategy ought to be pursued, I look at how to tackle hermeneutical injustices arising in the context of gender-affirming healthcare as provided to adults by the National Health Service in the UK. I argue that considerations of trust, privacy, and respect all support pursuing such a strategy. One way to do so, I suggest, would be by replacing the existing gatekeeping model with an informed consent model for the provision of gender-affirming healthcare. Considerations of hermeneutical justice can hence be added to the already-impressive case for undertaking this shift. (shrink)

The Dobbs opinion emphasizes that the state’s interest in the fetus extends to “all stages of development.” This essay briefly explores whether state legislators, agencies, and courts could use the “all stages of development” language to expand reproductive surveillance by using novel developments in consumer health technologies to augment those efforts.

While sexual violence should not be the prerequisite for legal abortion, expanding definitions of abuse to include reproductive coercion can open avenues of access to abortion following the Dobbs decision. Understanding the increased danger and compounding challenges of intimate partner violence can inform legislative initiatives, healthcare responses, and movements for reproductive justice.

In this paper we use the contemporary example of trans youth panics to introduce the notion of hermeneutical backlash, in which defenders of an established, unjust hermeneutical regime actively work to undermine and discredit hermeneutical liberation. We argue that the strategies and tropes of the trans youth panic illustrate a general propaganda vulnerability of epistemic liberation movements, and so are troubling for reasons that go beyond their application to trans youth. This exploration of a few specific cases of hermeneutical liberation (...) and hermeneutical backlash calls attention to the need for further theoretical work on the dynamics of struggles for hermeneutical justice. (shrink)

This paper interprets the British legislative process that initiated the first comprehensive national regulation of embryo research and fertility services and examines subsequent efforts to restrain the assisted reproduction industry. After describing and evaluating British regulatory measures, I consider successive failures to control the assisted reproduction industry in the US. I discuss disparities between UK and US regulatory initiatives and their bearing on regulation in other countries. Then I turn to the political and social structures in which the assisted reproduction (...) industry is embedded. I argue that regulatory bodies are seldom neutral arbiters. They tend to respond most readily to special interests and neglect strategies that could more effectively meet the health needs of the people they represent. Neither national nor international bodies have aggressively pursued policies to harness the industry, reduce infertility rates, or meet the needs of people whose fertility is threatened by substandard healthcare and environmental neglect. In conclusion, I consider recent initiatives by activist groups to mount an alternative response to the industry's current practices and build a transnational reproductive justice movement. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Tommie Shelby's (2016) analysis of procreation in poor black communities. I identify three conceptual frames within which Shelby situates his analysis—feminization, choice-as-control, and moralization. I argue that these frames should be rejected on conceptual, empirical, and moral grounds. As I show, this framing engenders a flawed understanding of poor black women's procreative lives. I propose an alternative framework for reconceiving the relationship between poverty and procreative justice, one oriented around reproductive flourishing instead of reproductive (...) responsibility. More generally, the paper develops a methodological challenge for nonideal moral and political philosophy, especially concerning the obligations of the oppressed. Specifically, I argue that in the absence of descriptive and conceptual accountability, the moral gaze of the philosopher risks preserving, rather than destabilizing, oppressive ideologies. (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court declared procreation to be a fundamental right in the early twentieth century in a case involving Oklahoma's Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act, an act that permitted unconsented sterilization of individuals convicted of certain crimes. The right that the Court articulated in that case is a negative right: it requires that the government not place unjustified roadblocks in the way of people seeking to procreate, but it does not require the government to take positive steps to help people (...) procreate if they wish to. I argue that a positive legal right is morally necessary in the United States, given the profound significance of procreation, the current barriers to access to care, and the related issues of individual and societal justice. I assume at the outset that the right to procreate should be expansive enough to include a right to noncoital reproduction. The absence of a positive right to procreate reflects not just constitutional tradition but also a governmental and societal commitment to a longstanding set of reproductive hierarchies by which those who fall outside of the traditional framing of family too frequently find their procreative dreams hindered. Reconceiving procreative rights to include a positive right would create greater opportunities to argue and lobby for increased access to technologies that are out of reach for many. (shrink)

A growing number of infertile couples and other individuals desiring children are seeking to fulfill their desire for parenthood transnationally through the use of donor gametes and a surrogate. The number of “fertility tourists” from developed countries to low-income countries is growing phenomenally. Indian women, too, are participating as (re)producers in these “biocrossings,” turning India into the surrogacy outsourcing capital of the world in the globalized bioeconomy of assisted reproduction. I argue for a ban on commercial egg donation and surrogacy (...) and a social-justice approach that would hold the state responsible for providing basic social goods to low-income households. I also argue for a gender-justice approach so that women would not be compelled to adopt surrogacy as a strategy for survival and upward social mobility. (shrink)

The structure of our ethical experience depends, crucially, on a fundamental distinction between what we are responsible for doing or deciding and what is given to us. As such, the boundary between chance and choice is the spine of our conventional morality, and any serious shift in that boundary is thoroughly dislocating. Against this background, I analyze the way in which techniques of prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD) pose such a fundamental challenge to our conventional ideas of justice and moral (...) responsibility. After a short description of the situation, I first examine the influential luck egalitarian theory of justice, which is based on the distinction between choice and luck or, more specifically, between option luck and brute luck, and the way in which it would approach PGD (section II), followed by an analysis of the conceptual incoherencies (in section III) and moral problems (in section IV) that come with such an approach. Put shortly, the case of PGD shows that the luck egalitarian approach fails to express equal respect for the individual choices of people. The paradox of the matter is that by overemphasizing the fact of choice as such, without regard for the social framework in which they are being made, or for the fundamental and existential nature of particular choices—like choosing to have children and not to undergo PGD or not to abort a handicapped fetus—such choices actually become impossible. (shrink)

In this paper, I am arguing for hermeneutic responsibility in political judgment, as it can be attributed to Arendt’s work. Political judgment is reflective judgment relying on representation by imagination and therefore only has exemplary validity. Along the line of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, I point out her argument for a different generality in politics than the generality of concepts. This generality of political judgment always refers back to the particular. Only by this reference to the particular, namely (...) to facts and situations of direct interaction, can the spectator, who undertakes the political judgment, create the public realm where action takes place. However, this task attributed to the spectator also implies the task of reshaping the public realm. These acts of giving an account of and reconsidering all over again facts handed over by narration and testimony imply the hermeneutic responsibility to unceasingly retrieve factual truth which is rooted in direct interaction. (shrink)

This paper comes out of a panel honoring the work of Anne Donchin (1940-2014), which took place at the 2016 Congress of the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) in Edinburgh. My general aim is to highlight the contributions Anne made to feminist bioethics, and to feminist reproductive ethics in particular. My more specific aim, however, is to have a kind of conversation with Anne, through her work, about whether reproductive justice could demand insurance coverage (...) for in vitro fertilization. I quote liberally from Anne’s work for this purpose, but also to shower the reader with her words, reminding those of us who knew her well what a wonderful colleague she was. (shrink)

This chapter covers all the main topics of feminist philosophy, from knowledge and being to good life, justice, and power. The relation between hermeneutical and feminist investigations is constructive and deconstructive: on the one hand, feminist scholars have developed hermeneutical methods further and, on the other hand, they have questioned the very foundations of these methods. The first feminist hermeneuticians and historians of philosophy aimed primarily at reconsidering the works of canonical philosophers and at bringing to light the forgotten (...) and neglected works of individual female thinkers. Feminists have started to search for female or feminine traditions, that is, for topics, problems, and/or ways of thinking that are shared by several generations of women philosophers. The primary self‐constitution and self‐identification of philosophers as subjects of language is governed by the hierarchical opposition. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that metaethical expressivism requires taking on some substantive commitments in the theory of meaning. Those commitments, however, do not require abandoning orthodox views in compositional semantics. Instead, they should be understood as bearing on one aspect of the metasemantic project, viz. that of interpreting a compositional semantic theory---what I call 'semantic hermeneutics'. I spell out the nature of this project and distinguish it from that of explaining why words have the meanings that they do. I (...) conclude by outlining a hermeneutics for orthodox compositional semantics that does justice to the expressivist's distinctive views in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)