The Disability Bioethics Reader

The Disability Bioethics Reader is the first introduction to the field of bioethics presented through the lens of critical disability studies and the philosophy of disability.

Introductory and advanced textbooks in bioethics focus almost entirely on issues that disproportionately affect disabled people and that centrally deal with becoming or being disabled. However, such textbooks typically omit critical philosophical reflection on disability. Directly addressing this omission, this volume includes 36 chapters, most appearing here for the first time, that cover key areas pertaining to disability bioethics, such as:

• state-of-the-field analyses of modern medicine, bioethics, and disability theory
• health, disease, and the philosophy of medicine
• issues at the edge- and end-of-life, including physician-aid-in-dying, brain death, and minimally conscious states
• enhancement and biomedical technology
• invisible disabilities, chronic pain, and chronic illness
• implicit bias and epistemic injustice in health care
• disability, quality of life, and well-being
• race, disability, and healthcare justice
• connections between disability theory and aging, trans, and fat studies
• prenatal testing, abortion, and reproductive justice.

The Disability Bioethics Reader, unlike traditional bioethics textbooks, also engages with decades of empirical and theoretical scholarship in disability studies―scholarship that spans the social sciences and humanities―and gives serious consideration to the history of disability activism.

Joel Michael Reynolds is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center, and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program. Reynolds is author of The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (University of Minnesota Press), the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability, and co-founder of the Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society book series from Oxford University Press.

Christine Wieseler is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Wieseler is author of articles published in Hypatia, IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and Social Philosophy Today as well as chapters in two edited book collections.