IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

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 inequalities. Therefore, I find that feminist approaches to bioethics certainly provide valuable resources for not only understanding but also addressing the many ethical issues raised by different pandemics and other public health crises.

Feminist bioethicists like Susan Sherwin and Katie Stockdale have highlighted how relational concepts can demonstrate that public health issues, like pandemics, always have social and political dimensions (Sherwin 2008; Sherwin and Stockdale 2017). They explain that feminist bioethicists have used relational versions of concepts like equality, justice, and especially autonomy to contribute to the field of bioethics by incorporating social justice and discussions of privilege and oppression in their analyses. This is especially important during pandemics because marginalized groups are often disproportionately impacted, which is the case for women, racialized people, and LGBTQ2S+ people with both the COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS pandemics in different parts of the world today. In my research on the ethics of HIV/AIDS, I use relational concepts, such as trust and solidarity, in order to understand the social and political effects of new HIV treatment and prevention strategies, like preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and undetectable equals untransmittable (U=U), on gay, bisexual, queer, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) in North America and their personal relationships and communities.² Some of these new developments [End Page 175] have changed how MSM have sex, how they trust each other in their sexual and romantic relationships, how they trust their healthcare providers, and how they build solidarity in their communities.

A similar approach is relevant when thinking about COVID-19 and the myriad ways it changes how we relate to each other. In many cases, we have to trust each other to prevent coronavirus transmission by wearing masks, getting tested, and being vaccinated, and we have to trust healthcare providers, government officials, and researchers with different treatment and prevention strategies and public health policies. This can change our relationships with friends, family members, coworkers, roommates, doctors, nurses, representatives, and other community members. It is these relationships that are necessary for building broad political solidarity in order to respond successfully to the many medical and social challenges of any pandemic. The history of other public health crises and other pandemics, including HIV/AIDS, demonstrate the importance of using relational concepts to improve our responses to COVID-19 and feminist bioethics shows us how to do this.