Remarks on the occasion of FAB’s twentieth anniversary, June 25, 2012

To mark FAB’s twentieth anniversary, Becky Holmes and I both made brief remarks at the 2012 conference (mine in absentia) about our initial scheme to launch a feminist bioethics group. At that time, we had never in our wildest dreams imagined that the group would have so illustrious a future. It’s clear now that in our apprehensions about our fledgling project we vastly underestimated the industry and dedication of those who ran with the ball. As more and more of our membership lent a helping hand, our confidence grew by leaps and bounds. FAB has prospered under the leadership of skillful and accomplished hands.

Here I mention a few of the landmarks along the way to FAB’s twentieth-anniversary celebration. Becky has chronicled our early life in her companion piece to these remarks and has left it to me only to mention our publishing ventures and to thank some of the many who helped launch FAB.

The first FAB anthology, based on papers from our 1996 conference in San Francisco, appeared in 1999 (Donchin and Purdy 1999). It was followed by a second compilation that formalized a selection of presentations from our 1998 conference in Tsukuba, Japan (Tong, Anderson, and Santos 2001). Papers from the 2002 conference in Brasilia appeared in 2004 (Tong, Donchin, and Dodds 2004), and a volume catalyzed by our 2004 conference in Sydney appeared subsequently (Scully, Baldwin-Ragaven, and Fitzpatrick 2010).

Editors of the journal Bioethics invited me to guest edit an issue based on FAB papers from our 2000 conference in London (Donchin and Diniz 2001). It was so successful that they invited us again after our 2006 conference in Beijing (Donchin, Dodds, and Nie 2007). Then through the leadership of Mary Rawlinson and her home institution, Stony Brook University, our own journal made its debut in 2008. The journal is fast becoming an invaluable teaching and research tool for all of us in FAB and many more, enriching both bioethics and feminism.

In 1993, Rosie Tong took the lead to edit our newsletter. Over our initial four years, we relied on voluntary contributions to cover expenses. Then in 1997, Maggie Little intervened to give the newsletter institutional support at the Kennedy Center for Ethics. This freed up funds that defrayed the cost of producing the newsletter during our formative years and made it possible to continue offering it to our members without cost. The generosity of my chair, Paul Nagy, enabled us to reallocate funds from a Ford Foundation grant (more on this later) to expand the availability of conference travel grants.

Maggie Little also set up our website, and Toby Schonfeld produced an online version. We initiated a network of country representatives (currently twenty-five) to further FAB’s global reach. During Rosie Tong’s term as FAB coordinator, she took the lead to establish a formal Advisory Board and, foreseeing the need to develop an institutional memory, committed our policies to writing.

Now to thank some of those outside of FAB who have helped carry us along. We’d never have made it to our twentieth birthday without the help of the IAB. First, Dan Wikler for his initial encouragement. It would not have been possible to mount our biennial conferences without the logistical support of our host, the IAB. Thanks are due particularly to Ruth Chadwick, who has been our champion and enabler from the start; we also thank her fellow-editor of the IAB journal, Udo Schüklenk, and all of those folks in the IAB who provided the impetus to get us off the ground.

A nudge from Kathryn Hinsch, then director of the Women’s Bioethics Project, led to an eventual $43,000 grant from the Ford Foundation that funded the travel of fifteen bioethics scholars and activists from developing countries to our 1998 conferences in Japan. The generosity of the Ford Foundation significantly strengthened our ties with feminist bioethicists in regions of the world where FAB had had little or no prior presence (most notably, South America, Brazil, and the Philippines). Our members...