During the question period following my presentation at Syracuse University, one interlocutor asserted that I had confused the direction of causation between prenatal testing and bioethics. Prospective parents, he said, do not, as he understood me to suggest, avail themselves of prenatal testing because bioethicists tell them to do so. Rather, the technology has developed, […]
Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews C Dalrymple-Fraser
Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the one hundred and fourth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with […]
Reproducing Eugenic Injustice: Virtual Presentation to Hypatia 40th Anniversary Conference, Sept. 9, 2023
Hello! I’d like to begin by giving a description of what appears on the screen. I’m a white woman with short hair. I’m wearing large plastic glasses and long earrings. Behind me, to my right, there’s a clock on the wall and a window with curtains. Behind me, to my left, there’s a ceiling fan. […]
Disability through Continental Frameworks: Lessons for Bioethics, Lecture by Melinda Hall, Hybrid, Jun., 23, 2023
When: June 23, from 2.00 pm until 3.30 pm (CET) Where: Live in Antwerp: Antwerp University, room S.R.012 (Rodestraat 14), city campusAttendance is free, no registration necessary. Online: If you want to attend online, enroll by sending an email to emma.moormann@uantwerpen.be. You will receive the link to the event shortly before the lecture. Abstract:Melinda Hall will discuss the import of […]
Toward an Abolitionist Genealogy of Bioethics
In recent years, philosophers have increasingly engaged with each other in passionate discussions about academic freedom in the discipline of philosophy and academia more widely, as well as participated in heated debates with members of the broader public about freedom of speech in society generally. The topics around which the most impassioned discussions and debates […]
MAiD in Canada and How To Educate Yourselves About It
At the end of the month, I will speak to the Carnegie Mellon/Pitt M.A.P group about MAiD (euthanasia/medically assisted suicide). My presentation will address (among other things): the role of bioethicists in the production of an eugenic culture in philosophy in general and in Canadian philosophy in particular, drawing out the connections between the current […]
Bioethics (De)Mystified: A Foucauldian Argument For Why Bioethics Must Be Abolished
In “Bioethics as a Technology of Government,” the fifth chapter of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I assert that bioethics emerged as a technology of government to resolve the problem that the production of disability poses for the neoliberal management of societies (Tremain 2017, pp. 159-202). In particular, disability is constituted as a problem […]
Whose Academic Freedom? (Feminist) Bioethics, MAiD, and the Professionalization of Ableist Exceptionism
Since the last months of 2020, I have written numerous posts about MAiD and Bill C-7 at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY in order to inform its international readership about these events in Canada and to explain the links between the events, the disproportionate influence of bioethics in Canadian philosophy, and the eugenic culture in Canadian philosophy that […]
Feminist Reflections on MAiD and Compassion
The charge of fallacious slippery-slope reasoning that Jocelyn Downie, Udo Schüklenk, and other proponents of medically assisted suicide (MAiD) routinely direct at critics of the practice relies on an outdated juridical conception of power that has conditioned Western philosophy and on outmoded ideas about the self-originating character of the neoliberal subject’s freedom and autonomy that […]
Why Do Disability Bioethicists and Feminist Bioethicists Sustain the Status Quo of the Apparatus of Disability?
This past weekend, I wrote a comment on a Twitter thread according to which disability bioethicists extend the biopolitical normalization of the apparatus of disability rather than challenge it, sustaining the status quo. It would have been more astute for me to have written, as I have in a few places (including here), that disability […]
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