Ending the Debate Whether State-Mandated Pregnancies are Matters of Bioethics Concern.

Abstract

This issue of the American Journal of Bioethics shines a light on abortion, recognizing that reproductive freedom as understood for the past fifty years no longer exists in the United States. Some may wonder whether the debate about abortion taking shape in the United States is a matter of concern for bioethics, after all whether abortion is criminalized in this country or any other lacks the more obvious, traditional hallmark of bioethical concern, namely obvious coercive experimentation where vital information is withheld from vulnerable subjects. However, it would be a mistake to confine our understanding of bioethics to rogue experimentations committed by unethical doctors or fasten the progress of bioethics to frameworks that emerged during the Nuremberg trials or later in the United States after the infamous United States Pubic Health Service study at Tuskegee of syphilis in untreated Black men came to light.