Abortion and the Intersection of Ethics, Activism, and Politics.

Abstract

Katie Watson describes her article in this special issue as “a call to bioethicists to recognize the ways we may have undervalued the moral status of women in our analytic frameworks, and to deliberately integrate women into every analysis of abortion ethics,” (Watson 2022) and Watson raises important questions about the proper role for bioethics as a field, and bioethicists working within it, regarding abortion. Watson makes two central claims with which I broadly agree. Yet each demand further refinement and complicate any straightforward call to action. One is that arguments about the “idea of abortion” sideline attention to abortion experience in ethical debate. The other is that identifying abortion access as a health disparity is a potentially fruitful framework for bioethics scholarship and advocacy related to abortion. The second claim also tacitly implies two additional premises: that abortion is morally permissible, and that advocacy is within the scope of bioethics. I concur that centering abortion experience is crucial to abortion ethics, that abortion is not only morally permissible but access to it is an urgent matter of justice and equity, and that bioethics has an advocacy role. Watson’s paper bundling these normative, political, and advocacy objectives into a single bioethical project illustrates the potential for a more expansive bioethics, as well as risks and tradeoffs that come with it. My remarks explore three inter-related challenges Watson’s paper presents when working across ethics, activism, and politics: establishing normative premises (and not moving too quickly past their justification), the standing of experience, and balancing potentially conflicting goals and strategies. NORMATIVE GROUNDING