Feminists, disabled people, and bioethics

Japanese bioethics began in the early 1970s. Most Japanese scholars still think that Japanese bioethics began in 1980s, but it is questionable. My recent book, Life Studies Approaches to Bioethics: A New Perspective on Brain Death, Feminism, and Disability, 2001, demonstrated that.

Women’s liberation groups and a disability group brought a new type of thinking into our philosophy and ethics. It should be noted that “minorities” in our society, that is, women and disabled people, founded Japanese bioethics. In this sense, it started as “feminist bioethics” and “disabled people bioethics.” This made Japanese bioethics somewhat different from “American” bioethics. Feminists and disabled people were mainly grass-root activists; they did not write academic papers or books. Instead they wrote a great deal of leaflets and handwritten documents. We can read them today because their publication finally began in recent years. Japanese “academic” bioethics began in 1988 when Japanese Association for Bioethics was founded. I wrote about Japanese feminist bioethics elsewhere, hence, I want to concentrate myself on the Japanese disability movement and its impact on bioethics.

>> To read more please visit:

Disability Movement and Inner Eugenic Thought
(2002)
(You can read the entire text)