Centering the Margins in Bioethics: A Social Justice Approach to the Ethics of Healthcare and Medicine

Centering the Margins in Bioethics: A Social Justice Approach to the Ethics of Healthcare and Medicine covers key fundamentals of ethics from a social justice perspective and emphasizes application to contemporary bioethical issues. It features a collection of scholarly readings that draw connections between critical concepts in ethics and crucial insights from antiracist, disability, feminist, and queer scholarship, centering the perspectives of marginalized communities. This results in a multidisciplinary intersectional framework that takes a historical, embedded, and dynamic approach to understanding social, biomedical, and ethical issues. The textbook is organized into four units. Unit I explores issues of race and racism, Indigeneity, and ethnicity in bioethics through readings that highlight the prevalence of white supremacy in healthcare and medicine, as well as its effects on patients and practices. In Unit II, students read articles about ableism in the physician-patient relationship, the intersection of race and disability, and more. Unit III contains readings that speak to gender disparities in behavioral and mental healthcare, the experiences of transgender individuals, and reproductive justice. The final unit discusses morality and mortality, facilitating discussions of the nature of death, the ethics of abortion, and physician-assisted suicide. Written to provide readers with actionable tools they can use to build more compassionate, inclusive, and humane systems, Centering the Margins in Bioethics is an ideal textbook for courses and programs in healthcare and medicine.