Technology, Ethics and Reproduction: Controversy in the Era of Normalisation (Kone Foundation), Tampere University, Tampere, Pirkanmaa, Finland.
Sociology/SoSaMiRe (Academy of Finland), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland.
Bioethics. 2022 Mar;36(3):328-335. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12973. Epub 2021 Nov 24.
The Nordic welfare state aims to offer universal healthcare and achieve good health, bar none. We discuss past and present moral blind spots in welfare state bioethics through reproductive justice and queer bioethics, particularly focusing on race and racism, based on ethnographic data from Finland. Globally portrayed as aspirational and mostly uninterrogated, it is crucial to have a thorough bioethical evaluation of a Nordic model informed by Black and queer perspectives. We have come to conceptualize the Finnish welfare state as haunted. We fear that the seemingly non-racial racial hygiene continues to haunt bioethics of the welfare state as structural racism. A key cause for this concern is the lack of racial awareness in public politics and the reluctance in discussing racism due to the national agenda of color-blindness. This crucially compounds to our findings that medical professionals prefer to think they operate on "purely medical" reasoning as opposed to nuanced ethical contemplation, the latter associated with "social issues" that allegedly cannot be resolved and are outside medical interest. We discuss how the bioethical aftermath of eugenics remains unresolved. Racist, classist, sexist, ableist, and cis- and heteronormative stratification of reproduction requires a nuanced moral compass for Nordic welfare state bioethics, not "strictly medical practice." We suggest queer bioethics as a moral theory for recalibrating this compass, joining forces with other justice movements to tackle racism in healthcare and further to interrogate racism, sexism, ableism and cis- and heteronormativity in bioethics.
北欧福利国家旨在提供普遍的医疗保健服务，并实现全民健康。我们通过生殖正义和酷儿生命伦理学探讨了福利国家生命伦理学中过去和现在的道德盲点，特别关注种族和种族主义问题，这些问题基于来自芬兰的民族志数据。北欧模式被描绘为令人向往的，而且基本上没有受到质疑，但从黑人视角和酷儿视角对其进行彻底的生命伦理评估至关重要。我们开始将芬兰福利国家概念化为被困扰的。我们担心看似非种族主义的种族卫生学仍然作为结构性种族主义继续困扰福利国家的生命伦理学。这种担忧的一个主要原因是公共政治中缺乏种族意识，以及由于国家的色盲议程而不愿讨论种族主义。这使得我们的发现更加严重，即医疗专业人员更愿意认为他们是基于“纯粹医学”的推理而不是细致入微的伦理思考来进行操作的，后一种思考与“社会问题”有关，这些问题据称无法解决，也不属于医学兴趣范围。我们讨论了优生学的生命伦理学后果如何仍未得到解决。种族主义、阶级主义、性别歧视、能力歧视以及生殖的顺性别和异性恋规范，需要为北欧福利国家生命伦理学提供一个细致入微的道德指南针，而不是“严格的医学实践”。我们建议酷儿生命伦理学作为一种道德理论，用于重新调整这一指南针，与其他正义运动合作，解决医疗保健中的种族主义问题，并进一步质疑生命伦理学中的种族主义、性别歧视、能力歧视以及顺性别和异性恋规范。
