Week 5 Journal: Gender and Reproduction
When Castro describes how different ethics are activated and human rights compromised in the name of stemming the tide of a pandemic (Castro, 2020), she spotlights the process by which healthcare decisions are made by the few for the many. Individual agency becomes overwritten by state intervention seeking to improve and isolate healthcare trends such as disease, mortality or contagion. Such intervention often shows up as quantitative goals, but also in the unforeseen consequence of suffering (Castro in Joiner, 2024). Any majority-oriented decision will exclude those who fall outside of a policy’s scope. It is these excluded individuals, often poor and female, who end up bearing the highest burden of suffering in times of communal need.
Castro also argues such healthcare decisions are unexpectedly malleable, often needing to flex towards more immediate political or broader environmental and economic initiatives (Castro, 2020). These might be the need to pivot resources towards a global pandemic, or motivated by electoral regime change. We see this acutely in the ideological arguments concerning states’ reproductive rights in The United States. There is a moral imperative to protect the unborn fetus, fueled by a belief that all life demands protection, as much as there is a moral argument to allow an individual the rights and agency to choose for themselves (Kantor & Liptak, 2023). There are strong arguments for both sides, characteristic of democratic privilege and aspects of freedom often missing in developing countries or harsher regimes, even to the extent of overturning longstanding legislation (Liptak, 2022). But even what we may think of as individual agency in healthcare is still the result of political and financial resource decisions made elsewhere on our behalf. Our challenge as global citizens is to ask better questions as to why.
References:
Castro, A. (2020). Challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic in the health of women, children, and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean. Unicef. [Digital File]. Retrieved from: https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1781220/files/133613889?module_item_id=29900572.
Joiner, M. (2024). Week 5 Required Lecture (38:48). [Digital File]. Retrieved from: https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1781220/pages/week-5-required-lecture-38-48?module_item_id=29900573.
Kantor, J. & Liptak, A. (2023). 5 Takeaways From Inside the Overturning of Roe v. Wade. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/supreme-court-dobbs-roe-abortion-takeaways.html.
Liptak, A. (2022). In 6-to-3 Ruling, Supreme Court Ends Nearly 50 Years of Abortion Rights. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/us/roe-wade-overturned-supreme-court.html.
