Race, Reproduction, and Biopolitics: A Review Essay

Abstract

This review essay critically examines Catherine Mills's Biopolitics (2018) and Camisha Russell's The Assisted Reproduction of Race (2018). Although distinct works, the centrality of race and reproduction provides a point of connection and an opening into reframing contemporary debates within bioethics and biopolitics. In reviewing these books together I hope to show how biopolitical theory and critical philosophy of race can be useful in looking at bioethical problems from a new perspective that open up different kinds of analyses, especially around historically embedded problems like institutional racism and the legacies of colonialism in healthcare.

The Sociotechnical Ethics of Digital Health: A Critique and Extension of Approaches From Bioethics

“…(p. 278) (38). Such an orientation toward ethics neglects the fundamental operations of power and culture in shaping moral beliefs (39,40), and ignores the ways in which bioethics is infused with assumptions that reinforce efforts to maintain the status quo of existing systems of power (37,41,42). In our work, we aim to acknowledge these influences on bioethical discourse and promote a self-critical analysis of the assumptions made in ethics work and the particular normatively relevant positions we seek to advance.…”

“…Critiques of bioethics from the social sciences have clearly illustrated the problems with an assumed universal morality, which as Fox and Swazey have made clear, “is reinforced by the field's commitment to identifying and fostering universal ethical principles that constitute a “common morality” (sometimes referred to as “the common morality”), described by philosophers Tom Beauchamp and James Childress as “the set of norms that all morally serious persons… in all places… share.” (p. 278) ( 38 ). Such an orientation toward ethics neglects the fundamental operations of power and culture in shaping moral beliefs ( 39 , 40 ), and ignores the ways in which bioethics is infused with assumptions that reinforce efforts to maintain the status quo of existing systems of power ( 37 , 41 , 42 ). In our work, we aim to acknowledge these influences on bioethical discourse and promote a self-critical analysis of the assumptions made in ethics work and the particular normatively relevant positions we seek to advance.…”

Lead Essay—Institutional Racism, Whiteness, and the Role of Critical Bioethics

“…In his review essay of Catherine Mills's Biopolitics (2016) and Camisha Russell's Assisted Reproduction of Race (2016) Christopher Mayes shows how biopolitical theory and critical philosophy of race can be useful in looking at bioethical problems from a new perspective that opens up different kinds of analyses, particularly around historically embedded problems like institutional racism and the legacies of colonialism in healthcare (Mayes 2021).…”