Most agree that informed consent must be obtained for medical procedures. Yet, empirical studies and anecdotal accounts show that women's right to informed consent and to refusal of treatment are routinely undermined or ignored during childbirth. The primary reasons currently accepted for exempting a procedure from the informed consent requirement are life-threatening or emergency circumstances and protecting the life of a minor or incompetent person. We will show that these do not apply in low-risk childbirth, and, thus, that obtaining informed consent throughout the normal course of labor and delivery is morally required.
TRANSLATED BY ALLISON B. WOLF . . . and the feminists understand perfectly that infertility carries a heavy burden for women. However, they have ambivalent feelings in relation to supporting them in their search for treatments that will resolve their infertility because they feel as if they would be contributing to reinforcing traditional gender roles. It is this tension that has strongly framed the relationship between those who are in favor of these assisted reproductive technologies . . . and feminists [.]
In this article, we discuss decision making during labor and delivery, specifically focusing on decision making around offering women a trial of labor after cesarean section (TOLAC). Many have discussed how humans are notoriously bad at assessing risks and how we often distort the nature of various risks surrounding childbirth. We will build on this discussion by showing that physicians make decisions around TOLAC not only based on distortions of risk, but also based on personal values (i.e. what level of risk are you comfortable with or what types of risks are you willing to take) rather than medical data (or at least medical data alone). As a result of this, we will further suggest that the party who is best epistemically situated to make decisions about TOLAC is the woman herself.
Alison Bailey has recently explored the nature of what she calls privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback or “the variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when they are asked to consider both the lived experience and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience daily.” In this article, I want to use Bailey's argument to demonstrate how privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback is facilitated and obscured by the disciplinary tools of traditional Western philosophy. Specifically, through exploring philosophical cultures of justification and case studies, this work will reveal how students engage in privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback by deploying the reason/emotion divide and various philosophical norms and practices it underlies to protect their epistemic home turf. Then, I offer three emotion‐enhancing critical philosophical practices aimed at disrupting the ignorance‐promoting moves of privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback and, instead, engage emotion as epistemically significant.
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