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4Degendering Parents on Birth CertificatesPerspectives in Biology and Medicine 66 (4): 579-594. 2023.Abstractabstract:Birth certificates typically designate parents as "mothers" or "fathers," although some US states offer nongendered designations. The authors argue that gendered characterizations offer scant legal or moral value and that states should move to degender parental status on birth certificates but retain that information in registrations of birth. Registrations of birth identify the person giving birth to a child, when, and where, and they report demographic and health information u…Read more
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11Supervaluation of pregnant women is reductive of womenJournal of Medical Ethics 50 (1): 29-30. 2023.Robinson argues that by certain threshold criteria, pregnant women qualify for a higher moral status by reason of their pregnancies. While her intention is to make this a status upgrade for women, we worry that it may result in a status downgrade for women as a class, by presupposing and reinforcing women’s value in relation to their reproductive labour. Historically, central to feminist analysis is resistance to reductive accounts of women in relation to their reproductivity. For example, de Be…Read more
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9Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies (edited book)2000, Fitzroy Dearborn. 2013 Routledge.. 2000.The Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Literature identifies key resources for topics important to the theory and practice of lesbian and gay politics, literature, religion, and more. The book contains hundreds of entries that summarize key issues at stake and then identify (mostly) book-length analysis of this topics. The topics range from activism, to age of consent, to legal history as well as individual entries on key authors and regional areas.
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215What is gay and lesbian philosophy?Metaphilosophy 39 (4-5): 433-471. 2008.Abstract: This essay explores recent trends and major issues related to gay and lesbian philosophy in ethics (including issues concerning the morality of homosexuality, the natural function of sex, and outing and coming out); religion (covering past and present debates about the status of homosexuality and how biblical and qur'anic passages have been interpreted by both sides of the debate); the law (especially a discussion of the debates surrounding sodomy laws, same-sex marriage and its impact…Read more
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9Theorizing the Meaning of Health in Abortion LawAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (8): 77-79. 2022.Paltrow, Harris and Marshall argue that understanding Roe v. Wade as a decision that only protects the right to terminate a pregnancy misconstrues its larger implications. The striking down of Roe...
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11Theorizing Religion in Its Meanings for BioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (12): 47-49. 2020.H. Tristram Engelhardt has said that “in the 1960s and 1970s... religious bioethics fell into the shadow of established secular bioethics. I don't think that religious bioethics has ever really...
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16The meaning of synthetic gametes for gay and lesbian people and bioethics tooJournal of Medical Ethics 40 (11): 762-765. 2014.
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25Gestation as motheringBioethics 34 (9): 960-968. 2020.Some commentators maintain that gestational surrogates are not ‘mothers’ in a way capable of grounding a claim to motherhood. These commentators find that the practices that constitute motherhood do not extend to gestational surrogates. We argue that gestational surrogates should be construed as mothers of the children they bear, even if they fully intend to surrender those children at birth to the care of others. These women stand in a certain relationship to the expected children: they live in…Read more
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43The Vatican on gender theory and the responsibilities of medicineBioethics 33 (9): 981-983. 2019.
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16Biogenetic ties and parent‐child relationships: The misplaced critiqueBioethics 33 (9): 1029-1034. 2019.According to an almost axiomatic standard in bioethics, moral commitment should ground parents’ relationship with their children, rather than biogenetic relatedness. This standard has been used lately to express skepticism about extending existing assisted reproductive treatments (ARTs) to same‐sex couples and to research into novel fertility interventions for those couples, but this skepticism is misplaced on several grounds. As a matter of access and equity, same‐sex couples seem presumptively…Read more
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20First Come, First Served in the Intensive Care Unit: Always?Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 27 (1): 52-61. 2018.
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18Extending Health Insurance for Body Modifications for Gender TransitionsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 18 (12): 19-21. 2018.
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25Pathways to genetic parenthood for same-sex couplesJournal of Medical Ethics 44 (12): 823-824. 2018.Researchers are pursuing various ways to synthesise human male and female gametes, which would be useful for people facing infertility. Some people are unable to conceive children with their partner because one of them is infertile in the sense of having an anatomical or physiological deficit. Other people—in same sex couples—may not be individually infertile but situationally infertile in relation to one another. Segers et al have described a pathway towards synthetic gametes that would rely on…Read more
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29The Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1): 111-113. 1981.
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Richard D. Mohr, Gays/Justice. A Study in Society, Ethics, and Law (review)Philosophy in Review 8 409-411. 1988.
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25So not mothers: responsibility for surrogate orphansJournal of Medical Ethics 44 (8): 551-554. 2018.The law ordinarily recognises the woman who gives birth as the mother of a child, but in certain jurisdictions, it will recognise the commissioning couple as the legal parents of a child born to a commercial surrogate. Some commissioning parents have, however, effectively abandoned the children they commission, and in such cases, commercial surrogates may find themselves facing unexpected maternal responsibility for children they had fully intended to give up. Any assumption that commercial surr…Read more
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8Perspective: Dead Sperm Donors or World Hunger: Are Bioethicists Studying the Right Stuff?Hastings Center Report 35 (2). 2005.
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14Perspective: The Ethics of Multiple Vital Organ TransplantsHastings Center Report 32 (2): 47. 2002.
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41Sex before the State: Civic Sex, Reproductive Innovations, and Gendered Parental IdentityCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 26 (2): 267-277. 2017.
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16Bioethics, children, and the environmentBioethics 32 (1): 3-9. 2017.Queer perspectives have typically emerged from sexual minorities as a way of repudiating flawed views of sexuality, mischaracterized relationships, and objectionable social treatment of people with atypical sexuality or gender expression. In this vein, one commentator offers a queer critique of the conceptualization of children in regard to their value for people's identities and relationships. According to this account, children are morally problematic given the values that make them desirable,…Read more
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19Sperm Harvesting and Postmortem FatherhoodBioethics 9 (4): 380-398. 1995.The motives and consequences of harvesting sperm from brain dead males for the purpose of effecting post mortem fatherhood are examined. I argue that sperm harvesting and post mortem fatherhood raise no harms of a magnitude that would justify forbidding the practice outright. Dead men are not obviously harmed by the practice; children need not be harmed by this kind of birth; and the practice enlarges rather than diminishes the reproductive choices of surviving partners. Certain ethical and lega…Read more
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9Sperm Harvesting and Postmortem FatherhoodBioethics 9 (4): 380-398. 1995.The motives and consequences of harvesting sperm from brain dead males for the purpose of effecting post mortem fatherhood are examined. I argue that sperm harvesting and post mortem fatherhood raise no harms of a magnitude that would justify forbidding the practice outright. Dead men are not obviously harmed by the practice; children need not be harmed by this kind of birth; and the practice enlarges rather than diminishes the reproductive choices of surviving partners. Certain ethical and lega…Read more
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40What Justifies a Future with Humans in It?Bioethics 30 (9): 751-758. 2016.Antinatalist commentators recommend that humanity bring itself to a close, on the theory that pain and suffering override the value of any possible life. Other commentators do not require the voluntary extinction of human beings, but they defend that outcome if people were to choose against having children. Against such views, Richard Kraut has defended a general moral obligation to people the future with human beings until the workings of the universe render such efforts impossible. Kraut advan…Read more
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2Assumption of Risk in HIV InfectionHastings Center Report 44 (2): 4-5. 2014.A commentary on “Time to Decriminalize HIV Status,” from the September‐October 2013 issue.
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26The Tortoise Transformation as a Prospect for Life ExtensionJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4): 645-649. 2015.The value of extending the human lifespan remains a key philosophical debate in bioethics. In building a case against the extension of the species-typical human life, Nicolas Agar considers the prospect of transforming human beings near the end of their lives into Galapagos tortoises, which would then live on decades longer. A central question at stake in this transformation is the persistence of human consciousness as a condition of the value of the transformation. Agar entertains the idea that…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Value Theory |