ABSTRACT
Feminist bioethics formally arose in the 1990s, with the publication of the first books that interrelated feminism and bioethics. Susan Wolf, among others, attributes the resistance of traditional bioethics to power-focused feminist thought to what she perceives as its vested interest in maintaining the status quo in both the practical and theoretical world. In her estimation and ours, feminist bioethics clearly demands nothing less than the transformation of the deep structure of traditional bioethics—its very nature. Given that post-Carol Gilligan, feminist bioethics is particularly critical of the kind of universal or generalizable ethics that constitutes traditional bioethics, it has found common ground with other nonabsolutistic bioethical theories. Analyzing the organization and the development of critical processes is an urgent task for bioethics. Feminist bioethics is defined by the search for changes in social relations that are characterized by human domination and subordination and which, therefore, hinder the exercise of freedom.
