Abstract

Sue Sherwin was among the first feminist bioethicists to insist that bioethics needed to become much more richly contextual and relational than traditional approaches to the discipline were ready to acknowledge. Targeting clinical bioethics and its central notion of patient autonomy, feminist bioethics focused on how broader social inequalities were likely to manifest themselves within clinical encounters among patients, family members, and healthcare professionals. The general idea was that by attending to how more general social inequalities might be affecting clinical encounters, an explicitly feminist bioethics could play a crucial role in developing institutional pathways for empowering patients to make more...