Abstract

The international context of the last fifty years of modern bioethics have been significant in establishing health-care ethics or bioethics as a common parlance - an ideology of our times, achieving near universal acceptance, with little dissent. Most international health organizations have developed important declarations that have become the credo of their daily practice and long-term commitments. However, in the last decade in particular, bioethicists and other health-care practitioners and scholars have worried about the persistence of health-care inequities and the inadequate realization of bioethics, particularly in low-to-middle income countries. Global bioethics, now well into the new millennium, has entered a regulatory crisis: it needs to confront not just global bioethical commitments around major scientific revolutions such as genomics, but further, a regulatory crisis about the persisting national public law silences and health inequities, especially in low-to-middle income countries.