ABSTRACT
The primary contribution of feminism to bioethics is to note how imbalances of power in the sex-gender system play themselves out in the ethical and social issues surrounding medical practice and the life sciences. I trace the origins in the 1990s of feminist approaches to bioethics, arguing that while feminists at that time usefully critiqued medicine’s biases in favor of men, they unmasked sexism primarily in the arena of women’s reproductive health, leaving other areas of healthcare sorely in need of feminist scrutiny. In those days they also contributed very little to bioethical theory until the late 1990s.
