Ethical Issues in Women's Healthcare: Practice and Policy [Paperback]

This is an edited collection exploring ethical issues in women's health care. It includes topics related to reproduction, but goes beyond this familiar theme to address clinical and social issues largely unrecognized in the bioethics literature. These include ethical issues related to the care of Indigenous women, uninsured refugees and immigrants, rural women, women engaged in sex work, and those with HIV and perinatal mental health disorders. The collection analyzes the complex ways in which practice, policy, and institutional structures intersect and raise ethical issues affecting women's access to health care. Contributors comprise an interdisciplinary group of practitioners including physicians, clinical ethicists, and nurses, as well academic scholars.Numerous issues confront women's healthcare today, among them the medicalization of women's bodies, cosmetic genital surgery, violence against women, HIV, perinatal mental health disorders. This volume uniquely explores such difficult topics and others at the intersection of clinical practice, policy, and bioethics in women's health care through a feminist ethics lens. With in-depth discussions of issues in women's reproductive health, it also broadens scholarship by responding to a wider array of ethical challenges that many women experience in accessing health care.Contributions touch on many themes previously tackled by feminist ethics, but in new, contemporary ways. Some chapters expand into new fields in the bioethics literature, such as the ethical issues related to the care of Indigenous women, uninsured refugees and immigrants, women engaged in sex work, and those with HIV at different life stages and perinatal mental health disorders. Authors seek to connect theory and practice with users of the health system by including women's voices in their research. Bringing to bear their experience in active clinical practice in medicine, nursing, and ethics, the authors contemplate new conceptual approaches to iml³~