Just Health Care? 2004
The VI Annual Swedish Symposium on Biomedicine, Ethics and Society was held on May 24-25 in Sandhamn.
Gender, Justice and Health in the 21st Century
Suzanne Holland, Associate Professor of Religious and Social Ethics at the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington USA
Abstract of keynote lecture
The world over, disparities in health care access and availability affect women differently than men. For example, women and their children suffer disproportionately from HIV-AIDS than do men. It can be argued that women bear a disproportionate amount of burden of health care disparities, even as they realize fewer of the benefits from available treatments, access to treatments, and financial resources that would make access possible. One might ask what justice means from a global health perspective, and what it means, concretely, for women's health, and for women's concerns.
I consider two kinds of methodological approaches to justice - what I will call the universalist and the relativist/particularist. As binary opposites these two approaches have produced a stalemate that detracts from real justice concerns. Feminist theory, on the other hand, affords us a bridge between the two. Through its questioning of binary assumptions, and its methodological shift in starting place, feminist ethics provides the possibility of a way out of this stalemate. I will demonstrate the efficacy of a particular feminist approach to justice by examining its application to matters of global health, particularly as these bear upon women and children.
