Offers Bioethics a bold approach to redress its failing of Black women

Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies.

Womanist Bioethics addresses this crisis from a bioethical standpoint. It offers a critique of mainstream bioethics as having embraced the perspective of its mainly white, male progenitors, limiting the extent to which it is positioned to engage the issues that particularly affect vulnerable populations. This book makes the provocative but essential case that because African American women– across almost every health indicator– fare worse than others. We must not only include, but center, Black women’s experiences and voices in bioethics discourse and practice.

To this end, Womanist Bioethics develops the first specifically womanist form of bioethics, focused on the diverse vulnerabilities and multiple oppressions that women of color face. This innovative womanist bioethics is grounded in the Black Christian prophetic tradition, based on the ideas that God does not condone oppression and that it is imperative to defend those who are vulnerable. It also draws on womanist theology and Black liberation theology, which take similar stances. At its core, the volume offers a new, broad-based approach to bioethics that is meant as a corrective to mainstream bioethics’ privileging of white, particularly male, experiences, and it outlines ways in which hospitals, churches, and the larger community can better respond to the healthcare needs of Black women.

About the author:

Dr. Wylin D. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, where she teaches within the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative.  Her teaching and research are at the intersection of Bioethics, Gender, and Theology. She is former Teaching Faculty at Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, she served as a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions, and Visiting Lecturer in Harvard Divinity School Women’s Studies in Religion Program.  She is also former Associate Director of Education for the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care and former faculty member of the Tuskegee University College of Agriculture, Environment and Nutrition Sciences. She is currently Principle Investigator for the Bioethics and Black Church: Addressing Racial Inequalities and Black Women’s Health in North Carolina research project which examines the potential of the Black Church as a resource in addressing the Black maternal health crisis in the U.S.

Dr. Wilson earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics and Society from Emory University; her M.S. in Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics from Cornell University; and her M.Div. from the Interdenominational Theological Center.  She is a member of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the American Academy of Religion, and the Center for Reconciliation Advisory Board at Duke Divinity School. Dr. Wilson’s publications include: “‘This is My Body’: Faith Communities as Sites of Transfiguring Vulnerability” in Bioenhancement and the Vulnerable Body: A Theological Engagement (Baylor University Press, 2023); her first book, Economic Ethics and the Black Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and her second book, Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality and Black Women’s Health (New York University Press) is forthcoming.