Changing the Story: Narrative Ethics Meets Disability Bioethics

Join the Disability Studies Program, Medical Humanities, the Women’s & Gender Studies Program, the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in welcoming Rosemarie Garland-Thomson for a lecture on disability bioethics and reproductive ethics!

This lecture contemplates the promise of using narrative as a rhetorical tool to explicate bioethical dilemmas and make moral cases. It offers an extended first-person story drawn from life that lays out a bioethical dilemma in reproductive ethics. The story aims to explicate ethical questions of identity communities, personhood, parental obligation, consent, uncertainty, information interpretation, selective testing, and selective termination- without using this bioethical language. The explication of the story draws from several philosophical traditions that may clarify the moral stakes involved and suggest a resolution to the problem.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University. Her expertise in disability bioethics, critical disability studies, and health humanities brings disability culture, ethics, and justice to a broad range of institutions and communities. She is a Hastings Center Fellow and senior advisor, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is co-editor of “About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities” and author of “Staring: How We Look” and several other books.

This event will be followed by a “Welcome Back” reception from 6:15pm – 7:15pm.

This event is wheelchair accessible and ASL interpreted. ADA Accessible parking can be found in the University’s on-campus parking garage, the Southwest Parking Garage

Please contact disabilitystudies@georgetown.edu with accessibility requests.