It was an afternoon in the early stages of the pandemic when Lisa Richardson and I ran into each other at the hospital coffee line. Standing six feet apart and decked out in masks, scrub caps, and face shields, we were almost unrecognizable to one another and to ourselves. The pandemic was of course top of mind, but our conversation quickly turned to what was being articulated about the pandemic and why it was being heralded as a "disaster for feminism". (...) As Audre Lorde reminds us, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives," and we were beginning to see how many issues intersected in the pandemic moment. The United Nations was calling... (shrink)

This section of the journal consists of reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic by feminist bioethicists. We wanted to have a record in IJFAB of the ways in which feminist bioethicists/feminist bioethics were and are affected by the pandemic and also record how our community sees feminist approaches to bioethics as providing resources for understanding and addressing ethical themes raised by the pandemic. The contributions we received cover a wide range of personal, professional, and theoretical issues and approach them in different (...) ways. We are deeply grateful to the authors for sharing their experiences, and hope that our readers find their contributions engaging and... (shrink)

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers reported a surprising trend in disease outcomes: men were more likely to require hospitalization and die from COVID-19 than women. Researchers looked to sex-linked biology to explain these disparities, hypothesizing innate sex differences in immune function, suggesting the use of estrogens or androgen-suppressants as therapy, and even pushing for sex-specific vaccine strategies. Leading bioethicists like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel at the University of Pennsylvania recently described the sex disparity in COVID-19 outcomes as "the unsolved mystery" (...) of the... (shrink)

UK maternity policy makes great fanfare about providing person-centered care, built around what the pregnant woman or birthing person needs. Maternity Voices Partnerships involving healthcare professionals and women are supposed to guide policy and practice at the local level. UK consent law prioritizes the pregnant person's own conception of the risks and factors that are material to her care. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how tenuous a hold these laudable principles actually have when the going gets tough.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many daughters, sisters, aunts, wives, and mothers found themselves with additional caretaking duties, and many were also vulnerable and unsafe in different constellations of relationships. Lockdown exacerbated this vulnerability. It also heightened stress, as vulnerable women were required to be constantly alert and risk aware in their reconfigured worlds. This not only included women in unsafe intimate relationships but also digital vulnerability for women as life moved online, economic risk for casually employed women unable to work (...) from home, and even increased exposure to misogyny for female political leaders navigating polarizing and volatile political communities. Whilst... (shrink)

My best friend Bernard died a few weeks ago after a long illness. We worked in adjacent offices teaching philosophy at our public state college for eighteen years. Bernard could simultaneously discuss Descartes's Third Meditation and cook you the perfect souffle while tossing scraps to his miniature poodle. He was a man of deep understanding, empathy, and humor. All who knew him were blessed.But the fact that I was Bernard's colleague, and nominally his chair, means my private grief is public.One (...) of the qualities that made grieving a loved one during COVID-19 uniquely terrible was its total privacy. For many months, what should have been final hospice visits, or hours of sitting Shiva, or boisterous wakes and the... (shrink)

I am a feminist bioethicist whose work focuses on the ethics of eating. Though COVID-19 is not a foodborne illness, it has had significant impacts on eating around the world, including increases in food insecurity, dining restrictions and closures of restaurants, interruptions in supply chains, and rising food prices. Many people have been eating at home more often—some alone, others with members of their households—and emotional or stress eating is on the rise.A feminist perspective is indispensable for understanding and responding (...) appropriately to these changes. The costs of these changes have not been distributed equally, and drawing attention to how disproportionate harm tracks gendered and intersectional... (shrink)

I was an undergraduate studying bioethics in Toronto during the SARS pandemic in what seem like, in retrospect, much simpler times. Now, living in Texas, I'm finishing my PhD degree in the medical humanities. This current pandemic has provided me with an education in trust, scientific expertise, provider burnout, and social justice. It has invigorated my research examining how moral tensions in the therapeutic relationship are heightened when physicians write about patient care. Still, the inevitable comparisons, not just with being (...) in school back then but also with student life before the pandemic, bring... (shrink)

From my point of view, the pandemic worsened the rigidity of epistemic injustices. I work as a philosophical counselor, and I research bioethics. For me, bioethics, in line with what Potter wrote, is a discipline that cannot be separated from individual problems. I believe that we cannot think of a sustainable life on this planet if we first do not learn how to live a sustainable one.During this pandemic, my work as a philosophical counselor consisted mostly of helping my clients (...) to live sustainable lives by not buying into rigid categories that underlined heavy social injustices. I supported them in holding on to their narratives against, more or less implied, guidelines that would have made their world... (shrink)

Hennepin County is the largest metropolitan area in Minnesota and includes the city of Minneapolis and surrounding suburbs. On Tuesday, March 24, 2020, the weekly local shelter count identified 1,494 individuals accessing homeless shelters within Minneapolis—205 children with adults, 112 adults with children, 56 youth without an adult, 971 individual adults, and 115 adults accessing emergency hotel placement in response to COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the shelter system, a recent local point-in-time count logged 732 individuals sleeping on transit, in encampments, in (...) abandoned buildings, or otherwise outdoors. This total of 2,226 Hennepin County residents identified who lacked residence in the late winter of 2020 is... (shrink)

In May of 2020, reports of so-called "long-COVID" began to surface. Long COVID is a collection of post-COVID-19 physical, cognitive and psychological symptoms, such as depression, brain fog, fatigue, and dizziness. As long-COVID is considered a "new" disease, it is not always covered by health insurance or government programs, moreover it is a set of constantly evolving symptoms.While severe cases of COVID-19 itself tend to be mostly in males over fifty-years-old, those individuals affected by long-COVID tend to be mainly female (...) and younger in age. Data supporting the existence of the long-COVID syndrome... (shrink)

Metagnosis, as a text, is an exercise in metanarration: Throughout the book, Danielle Spencer pulls together medical and medicalized storytelling and self-identification accounts to make sense of a plot device that had remained unnamed. "Metagnosis," as coined by Spencer, refers to the dynamic process of learning later in life that one has a medical condition or that part of oneself can now be medicalized. For example, Spencer recounts how "discovering" her lack of stereopsis as an adult affected her understanding of (...) medicine and of her own identity. In a broader sense, metagnosis refers to learning any information that causes one to question one's self-understanding and, indeed, our understanding of knowledge in... (shrink)

With unexpectedly good timing, I published a monograph on vaccine hesitancy in March 2021, just as COVID vaccine rollouts were reaching full steam in high income countries, including my own. My years of research and writing were near completion when the SARS-CoV-2 virus was first identified; my focus was on parents' hesitancy over routine childhood vaccinations. Vaccine hesitancy in industrialized nations has been intensely studied by social and behavioral scientists and was the subject of considerable media commentary and popular science (...) writing up until COVID vaccine hesitancy redirected that energy. Past knowledge informs current understanding, and I proposed a shift in characterizing... (shrink)

Time plays in different ways in relation to pandemics. Since the early 2000s, for instance, a sense of urgency has been cultivated in anticipation of the "next pandemic"—a rather generative framework that set in place a body of knowledges, practices, resources, and infrastructures unevenly distributed around the world in preparation for a health crisis that was always just around the corner. The omnipresence of the pandemic-to-come created a time of preparedness, of an ongoing expectation of a threat projected into the (...) near future. When the pandemic finally became present, response schemes developed within the realms of biosecurity and of global public health triggered off the time of... (shrink)

Our paper was written to highlight the need for mitigating vulnerability in COVID-19 tracing technology. As the pandemic was unravelling in mid 2020 and infection rates were rising steeply across the globe, we were following the news on emerging response measures and their social impact. We were alarmed by media reports regarding racial profiling and criminalization related to the implementation of physical distancing measures. Media reports documenting the fining of predominantly Black and Hispanic people in New York City, the closures (...) of Roma settlements in Spain, Slovakia, or Romania, or the disproportionate patrolling of migrant neighborhoods in Sydney, Australia, made it obvious that... (shrink)

Two years after the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the world, a few waves and surges of the pandemic have moved across various regions. While the effects of COVID-19 are being felt globally, the pandemic continues to disproportionately affect lower-income countries, exacerbating existing global health disparities. As the pandemic lingers, the true total and intergenerational impact may not be known for months and years to come, particularly for LICs that have endured the effects for longer and may not have accurate (...) and comparable data due to limited resources for data collection and analysis.As various high-income countries implement vaccination requirements, approve and encourage booster doses, and... (shrink)

Our 2021 article, "Dying Well in Nursing Homes During COVID-19 and Beyond: The Need for a Relational and Familial Ethic," addresses the response to the COVID-19 pandemic within nursing homes and the impact it had on the lives of residents, care providers, and families. We acknowledge that, at the height of the pandemic, when infection and death rates were soaring in these facilities, extreme "lockdown" measures may have been justified; but these measures resulted in significant relational costs. The collateral damage (...) caused by these lockdown measures included extreme isolation, loss of community, and experiences of confusion, depression, and mental decline for the elderly residents that... (shrink)

During the first wave of the pandemic, nursing homes in Quebec were hit particularly hard. The media was replete with images of residents inside the homes holding their hands to glass windows as their loved ones pressed theirs from the outside. Because families were not allowed to visit, Zoom sessions were introduced in order to mitigate the isolation of residents. As I participated in these sessions, I came to realize how the absence of touch affects relationships. In my mind's eye, (...) I saw my arms and hands extending out while the person I was trying to touch was receding into the background, engulfed by the pandemic. This reminded me of Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" inspired by Paul... (shrink)

My mother died within the first few months of the pandemic. Her sudden and rapid decline from Alzheimer's disease is difficult to separate from the COVID-19 restrictions put in place by her nursing home just two months prior. We went from visiting her daily to not at all, then to a strictly enforced twenty-minute hospice visit to say goodbye. After her passing, and still amidst the pandemic, I could not write. The conventional methods and outputs of bioethics inquiry felt impossible.Making (...) art is the only thing that felt possible then. Perhaps that's the function of art, to make things feel more possible. I began by collecting materials from work—package inserts, empty prescription bottles and gelatin capsules—to... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. The depth and breadth of changes are still unfolding. What is the place of feminist bioethics in this new world? It's important to point out that COVID-19 is only one of a few major catastrophes we are facing as humans. The ongoing and worsening effects of climate change, along with the paltry efforts of politicians to address it, are an urgent concern. Humanitarian crises caused by climate change, by COVID-19, or crises unrelated to (...) either but surely worsened by both, are also... (shrink)

At a book event in March last year—one year into the pandemic and four months after mass immunization programs began—Goldenberg voiced her concerns about the timing of her book's launch into the world. This anxiety is echoed in the preface of the book itself, where she notes that the emergence of a global pandemic as she completed five years of work threatened to introduce a whole new set of issues that might fundamentally alter the book's arguments. Goldenberg's concern is understandable: (...) since the publication of her book, it is undeniable that public trust in vaccines and the experts who advocate for them have been constant topics of debate.This engagingly... (shrink)

At the Inserm Ethics Committee's annual conference in October 2021, the "Gender and Health Research" working group presented a study comparing the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in France and the United States. This comparison highlights the dysfunction of public policies in the United States regarding equitable access to healthcare for women and minorities, in contrast to France where the public authorities have taken exceptional measures, notably to guarantee access to abortion and care for victims of violence.In France, during the (...) first lockdown, statistics from the national toll-free number "Sexualities, Contraception, Abortion" revealed that reports of difficulties related to abortion or contraception access... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a transition in my scholarly life. Specifically, I shifted from being a postdoctoral fellow in an anthropology department at a traditional university to a tenure track position as an assistant professor at an institute for bioethics and health humanities within an academic health center. This development has been instructive, partly because I have begun learning about how the political economies of academic medicine and the traditional university differ, align, and respectively shape institutional research cultures. My (...) primary research interests are focused on ethical and socio-technical issues in infectious disease research and control, including in initiatives that are... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic is not the first pandemic that many of us have faced in our lives. The HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to affect women, racialized people, and LGBTQ2S+ people around the world today, and there are significantly fewer resources to address, and less political will and news coverage of, this other pandemic.1 Although many see COVID-19 as an unprecedented public health crisis that is challenging our societies and our relationships with each other in unique ways, I argue that we actually (...) have a lot to learn from our responses to HIV/AIDS and that feminist bioethicists can help us understand how the present situation is actually an extension of several underlying medical and social issues and... (shrink)

The overdose epidemic continues to accelerate, with deaths from overdose increasing from approximately 78,000 pre-pandemic to nearly 100,000 presently. While much of the focus in mainstream media has been on overdoses from opioids, women are overdosing on a variety of drugs. The gendered dimensions of the overdose epidemic have been largely ignored even though this crisis has been building for decades. From 1997 to 2017, the overall death rate for women ages 30–64 from overdoses has increased 260 percent. The largest (...) increases in this group were women between the ages of 55 and 64. Factors such as the sexual division of labor, greater financial insecurity, intimate partner violence, and significant burdens from... (shrink)

As COVID-19 swept across the globe, ethicists everywhere took up a call to arms to advise and guide the medical profession through an unprecedented event. "Fairness" quickly became the word de jour in this pandemic. But when it comes to health "fair" is a four-letter word. It is of no surprise to feminist bioethicists, but fairness, equality, and equity are not equivalent. As we have seen revealed again and again over the last two years, the social and structural determinants that (...) contribute to good health are not fairly distributed amongst the population. Instead, where we live and work, how much money we have, our education, gender, and ethnicity all contribute to how accessible healthcare services are, our... (shrink)

In March of 2019, with a modicum of superiority and significant financial strain, I made the decision to buy a Peloton bike. I was in good company; many other Americans reacted to social distancing measures and citywide closures by investing in personal exercise equipment, and I imagine at least some did for the same reasons as I did: namely, to avoid the pitfalls of pandemic-related weight gain aka Stay in Shape. I entered into my own personal "emergency maintenance" mode, unwilling (...) to allow the possibility that a global catastrophe might impact my body's size. The pressure only augmented as the pandemic dragged on, with the phrase "Quarantine 15" coined to describe the inevitable effects of our new sedentary... (shrink)

The burden of COVID-19 has been widely unequal across the provinces and territories of Canada. At last count, infection rates vary from 4,003 per 100,000 people in Nunavut to 12,253 per 100,000 people in the North West Territories. The death rate from COVID-19 varies from 0 per 100,000 in PEI to 158 per 100,000 in Quebec. Each province and territory established different public health measures at different times, sometimes lifting them briefly only to have to reestablish them quickly. Each province (...) and territory has also managed the question of who will be required to be vaccinated, and how that requirement will be monitored, very differently. The gendered... (shrink)

Divya is a surrogate mother from India. Aaliyah, an African-American teenager, has just terminated her pregnancy. Samantha, on the other hand, is childless and looking for ways to adopt. What connects these three women? Other than being sites for reproduction, one tends to think nothing else brings them together. This fantastic book shows us otherwise by revealing the interconnection of three reproductive lifecycles through neoliberalism and its biopolitical impact on their "choices". Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson have thematically married twelve (...) impactful and unique essays that bring the stories of actual and fictional women to life.To understand how the... (shrink)

The pandemic years have taught bioethicists a lot about the experience of working on an issue at the same time as being directly affected by it. Under normal circumstances, if we can remember what those were, we are very often thinking and writing about a situation of moral difficulty that we know, and can only know, as outsiders. We...

The current global pandemic will continue to challenge bioethics for decades to come. Not only did it bring about new issues of social justice, it deepened stratification of health along existing unfair structures. Further and most grimly, it can be argued the pandemic was an ethics test the global community failed. Especially to those of us invested in ethics professionally, this calls for critical reflection.Obviously, the strains of the pandemic have been very unevenly distributed. As a feminist and queer bioethicist (...) recently into her doctorship, I have had the privilege of observing the pandemic from a Northern European point of view, from Finland to be exact. Our privileges stem from makings of the... (shrink)

Crisis standards of care are a significant change in the standard level of medical care that can be given compared to normal healthcare operations. CSC are implemented when a healthcare facility is overrun due to catastrophic events like earthquakes, or in the case of SARS-CoV-2, a global pandemic. Especially in disasters, resources like hospital beds, pharmaceuticals, and staff become stretched thin, and facilities must adapt their allocation strategies for distributing scarce resources. Inevitably, a question arises: How do we allocate scarce (...) resources justly? During the coronavirus pandemic, bioethicists, healthcare practitioners, and policymakers have asked this question. A recurring worry among them... (shrink)

This poem was written during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 when many were feeling the painful impact of sudden isolation. During this time, mental health crises were increasingly attended to by local emergency services who may or may not have had relevant training to respond appropriately to vulnerable persons. The outcomes of these 911 calls concerned me, loaded as they can be with bias and...

In the United States, "freedom" became the catchphrase of those who argue against authoritative experts and institutions pushing for restrictions, masking requirements, social distancing, and vaccine mandates. Anti-vax parents argue for the family's freedom to do as they see fit in raising their children. Masks, whether for children or adults, are often equated with "muzzles" trying to limit the freedom of others to express themselves. The consequence of such views of freedom came at the cost of the health and lives (...) of others, particularly in states where the government blocked public health mandates and restrictions. However, those who reject vaccines do not see themselves as against good health, indeed they often... (shrink)

At this point, I think it is fair to say that most of us know someone—a family member, a coworker, a friend, a student—who is resisting getting a vaccine against COVID-19. Frankly, this amazes me. I was recently discussing this with a friend—"Rebecca"—when to my utter shock, she confessed to me that she "does not trust the vaccine" and is not planning to get one until there is more certainty of its efficacy and safety. While there are many things that (...) stood out to be in this conversation, what stood out to me was a particular comment she made; she said to me: "The thing is, I'm a skeptic, and you're not."I admit, this comment threw me for a loop. How could I, a feminist bioethicist who has dedicated a good chunk of... (shrink)