Pedagogy and Feminist Bioethics: Learning from Susan Sherwin

Most people working in bioethics will be familiar with Susan Sherwin's contributions to the field. There is much to be said about the value and importance of Sue's contributions to feminist theory and practice (other commentaries and feature articles in this collection will take up aspects of this challenge), but in this reflective piece I am going to focus on the experience of teaching Sue's work. This is for three reasons: the first is that I was hired into the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie just as Sue retired and I teach many of the courses she developed, so her philosophical legacy and teaching are intimately related for me. Second, in my observations of Sue's interactions with graduate students (she continued this work for several years into her retirement), I have been struck by how deeply and passionately she cares for students and the transformative effect she has in their lives. I think for the same reason that teaching is generally under-appreciated in academia, this aspect of her legacy has not been fully recognized and deserves attention, even if somewhat indirectly (as below). And third, when I think about, or am called by others to reflect on, the greatest impact of my work as a feminist bioethics scholar working in academia, my mind always turns to teaching. Students build relationships with each other and with professors and instructors as mentors and role models, in the classroom. It is worth celebrating all that can be achieved in the context of this unique set of relationships.

I will use a familiar topic from the standard bioethics curriculum in this reflection: reproductive ethics. One of the challenges of teaching reproductive ethics in an introductory bioethics class is in deciding how and when to bring in a feminist perspective. I have changed my mind about this many times since I began teaching over a decade ago, but I think I have finally settled on the following approach: I wait until at least half-way through the semester before introducing the topic, because students need some training in critical thinking and ethical reasoning first. They also need some level of trust in each other and in me. I begin by engaging the "classic" bioethics literature on the ethics of abortion, specifically the debates over moral personhood and the moral status of the fetus. I try my best to engage this material directly, teaching principles of critical evaluation along the way as usual ("And who might be excluded from this account of personhood?," "What objections do you anticipate to this account of the wrongness of killing?," etc.). This is challenging, to be honest, because I find these discussions problematic for reasons discussed below. But I think patience is a virtue in teaching, and pacing matters. So, we talk a lot about fetuses and the stages of fetal development. We discuss moral status and aliens and nonhuman animals. And so on.

Finally, I have them read Sue's paper "Abortion through a Feminist Ethics Lens" (2009 [1991]). In the paper, Sue begins by pointing out that philosophers discussing the ethics of abortion have tended to assume that a feminist perspective on the issue would simply defend reproductive freedom and the "right to choose" an abortion. At this point, students would be familiar with precisely this sort of argument; they will be nodding their heads as I review this point in class. But, as she goes on to illustrate in the article itself, feminist analysis does so much more than this: in fact, it completely reframes the discussion. It does so in a number of ways, but perhaps one is most striking: noting that most philosophical analyses of the ethics of abortion focus on the moral status of the fetus, Sue writes, "The woman on whom the fetus depends for survival is considered as secondary (if she is considered at all) in these debates. … In some contexts, women's role in gestation is literally reduced to that of 'fetal containers'; the individual women disappear or are perceived simply as mechanical life-support systems" (258).¹ This resonates with students, who...