As IJFAB editor Mary C. Rawlinson writes of the general state of bioethics in the introduction to the journal's inaugural issue, It was as if the masculine marking of the subject in the history of ethics and politics made no difference.
Its approaches were informed by the feminist critique of this sleight of hand, in which a specific historical experience is installed as the absolute universal in science or ethics.
As Anne Donchin and Margrit Shildrik note in this volume, early on feminist bioethics disputed the adequacy of abstract universal norms.
Feminist approaches to bioethics challenged the field for its reliance on abstract principles disconnected from the material conditions of action and the specificities of the relationships in which ethical urgencies arise.
Our contributions are distinctive insofar as treatment of these topics is grounded in feminist scholarship that draws on background norms and prevailing conditions that shape health options.