Search

Recent calls to address racism in bioethics reflect a sense of urgency to mitigate the lethal effects of a lack of action. While the field was catalyzed largely in response to pivotal events deeply rooted in racism and other structures of oppression embedded in research and health care, it has failed to center racial justice in its scholarship, pedagogy, advocacy, and practice, and neglected to integrate anti-racism as a central consideration. Academic bioethics programs play a key role in determining the field's norms and practices, including methodologies, funding priorities, and professional networks that bear on equity, inclusion, and epistemic justice. This article describes recommendations from the Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force commissioned by the Association of Bioethics Program Directors to prioritize and strengthen anti-racist practices in bioethics programmatic endeavors and to evaluate and develop specific goals to advance REDI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceiving of agricultural labor as different from other work and assuming that agricultural workers differ from other workers obscure the real need for information about farmworkers. Improvement in farmworker health status in the long term can only result from informed policies based on solid research. (SLD)

This essay takes as its starting point the claim that addressing anti‐Black racism is essential to the work of bioethics in the United States. The essay examines whether and how racism has been addressed in the field's central reference work, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, throughout its four editions—in 1978, 1995, 2004, and 2014. With consideration of each edition's stated purpose and editorial framing, we find that the subject of racism is obscured by the Encyclopedia's inattention to African American approaches to bioethics, to racism as a bioethics issue, and specifically, to racism as a matter of justice. This essay suggests questions for guiding reflection necessary for giving racism its due in the field of bioethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-standing and deeply embedded institutional racism, notably anti-Black racism in U.S. health care, has provided a solid footing for the health inequities by race evident in the COVID-19 pandemic. Inequities in susceptibility, exposure, infection, hospitalization, and treatment reflect and reinforce this racism and cause incalculable and preventable suffering in and loss of Black lives. This Article identifies multiple expressions of racism evident in the crisis standards of care (CSC) created by states and health care institutions to guide the ethical allocation of scarce critical care resources including ventilators. Contextualized within the broad landscape of health inequities pre-COVID-19 as well as during the pandemic, this Article analyzes two manifestations of racism in CSC: 1) the scarce participation of Black health care and public health professionals as well as Black communities in CSC creation, and 2) the ostensible "objectivity" and "race irrelevancy" of features of CSC. This ethical analysis leads to a proposal for dismantling racism in CSC by embracing antiracism as health equity at the outset of CSC policy-making. An initial exploration of the nature of health equity and related policies and practices in this COVID-19 era support a concluding outline of distinctive "first steps" toward antiracist pro-health equity CSC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undocumented, insured immigrants, who forfeit their health insurance, will pay taxes to help fund a health care system they are not part of, if Pres Bill Clinton's health care reform package is not modified to recognize the needs of these people. This denies the package the universality it claims to possess.

The concept of 'community' as well as actual historical communities have received little critical attention in theories of justice for health care or in health policy. In this dissertation, I [...]