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Analysis shows abortion and disability narratives reveal rights and personhood complexities, indicating shifts in bioethics post-Dobbs.
Nonideal approaches to classic bioethics discourse have brought new solutions as bioethics has struggled to respond to landmark sociopolitical moments. The author builds on these nonideal approaches to argue classic discourse on abortion in bioethics about personhood, rights, and obligations is no longer acceptable as we see Dobbs play out. The author similarly argues classic ways of engaging eugenic discourse about disability amidst the COVID-19 pandemic can no longer continue. In both cases, the same, fundamental thing is lacking: a willingness to acknowledge narratives of identity-based retributory suffering, i.e., that one’s identity warrants suffering for being what it is.
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Spencer Schmid (2026) studied this question.
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