•  103
    Some accounts of the fiduciary relationship place trust and autonomy at odds with one another, so that trusting a fiduciary to act on one’s behalf reduces one’s ability to be autonomous. In this chapter, we critique this view of the fiduciary relationship (particularly bilateral instances of this relationship) using contemporary work on autonomy and ‘relational autonomy’. Theories of relational autonomy emphasize the role that interpersonal trust and social relationships play in supporting or ha…Read more
  •  18
    Fiduciary Duties and Commercial Surrogacy
    Dissertation, University of Western Ontario. 2017.
    Since the 1980’s, surrogacy has become a popular reproductive alternative for individuals experiencing infertility. The ethical and legal analyses of surrogacy have been rich and varied. Some bioethicists have charged the commercial surrogacy industry with the exploitation of global southern women or with the impermissible commodification of children and women’s reproductive capacities. Others have praised the potential for economic empowerment and bodily autonomy that surrogacy may accord to wo…Read more
  •  50
    Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 10 (1): 256-259. 2017.
    Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bio-economy presents an impressive and informative exploration of a form of labor that is rarely acknowledged as labor at all: the work performed by surrogates, tissue providers, and research subjects. Authors Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby refer to this type of work as clinical labor, which they describe as a form of embodied service work that relies on “in vivo, biological processing and the utilization of the worker’s livi…Read more
  •  21
    We propose the ‘patient-worker’ as a theoretical construct that responds to moral problems that arise with the globalization of healthcare and medical research. The patient-worker model recognizes that some participants in global medical industries are workers and are owed worker's rights. Further, these participants are patient-like insofar as they are beneficiaries of fiduciary relationships with healthcare professionals. We apply the patient-worker model to human subjects research and commerc…Read more