Bioethics in Action

Description

Speaking from and to the growing movement among academics to become involved with 'socially-engaged' work, this volume presents first-person case studies of attempts to fix serious ethical problems in medical practice and research. It highlights the critical difference between the pundit approach to bioethics and the interventional approach - the talkers and the doers - and points to how abused and damaged the doers often end up. Chapters cover a diverse set of topics, including the troubling influence of for-profit businesses on public health policy, the politics of exposing histories of unjust medical research, the challenges of patient rights' work in sexuality and reproduction, collaborations between NGOs and academics, methods for changing entrenched yet harmful medical practices, engaging public policy through educating governmental leaders, and whistleblowing. The trending interest in the interplay of academia and advocacy and the growing importance of 'socially-engaged' work by academics make this a timely and much-needed resource.

Francoise Baylis is an internationally renowned bioethics expert whose innovative work, at the intersection of policy and practice, has stretched the very boundaries of the field. Her ethics research focuses primarily on women's reproductive health and genetic technologies. Baylis believes bioethicists need to exercise their moral imagination and find creative ways to make the powerful care. She is a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. In 2017, she was awarded the Canadian Bioethics Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Alice Dreger is an historian of science, medicine, and sexuality, a patient advocate, mainstream writer, and public intellectual. Her most recent book, Galileo's Middle Finger, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, has won praise in the New Yorker, New York Times, Nature, Science, and beyond. An award-winning writer, Dreger has published in many major venues including WIRED, Slate, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, and her TED talk, 'Is Anatomy Destiny?' has been viewed over a million times. The Chronicle of Higher Education has called Dreger a 'star scholar'.

'It is difficult to imagine an ethicist who would not find a keen interest in one, or more likely most, of the chapters in this book. Similarly, anyone with an interest in medical law will find the topics here stirring. I use the word 'stirring' consciously - as this is what the book aims to do and does it well.' Ewa Posner, Medical Law Review