Several essays look specifically at how racial inequality is embodied in health inequities.
Black Lives in a Pandemic: Implications of Systemic Injustice for End-of-Life Care
Alan Elbaum
In recent months, Covid-19 has devastated African American communities across the nation, and a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd. The agents of death may be novel, but the phenomena of long-standing epidemics of premature black death and of police violence are not. This essay argues that racial health and health care disparities, rooted as they are in systemic injustice, ought to carry far more weight in clinical ethics than they generally do. In particular, this essay examines palliative and end-of-life care for African Americans, highlighting the ways in which American medicine, like American society, has breached trust. Is there such a thing as a “good” or “dignified” death when African Americans are dying not merely of Covid-19 but of structural racism? Elbaum is a medical student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program.
The Future of Bioethics: It Shouldn’t Take a Pandemic
Larry R. Churchhill, Nancy M.P. King, and Gail E. Henderson
This essay looks at how a focus on “lifeboat” issues in the pandemic, such as rationing and fair allocation of scarce medical resources, has diverted attention from the structural racism that magnifies the burden of disease for people of color. “The Centers for Disease Control and others are now posting race-linked data showing that Covid-19 is fast becoming what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has called ‘the Black Plague,'” the authors write. They argue that it is time to broaden our teaching, research, and practice to match the breadth of the field in order to help address these significant societal inequities and unmet health needs. Churchill is a professor of medical ethics emeritus at Vanderbilt University. King is a professor at Wake Forest University. Henderson is a professor at University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Other essays include:
- Disability Rights as a Necessary Framework for Crisis Standards of Care and the Future of Health Care
- What Could “Fair Allocation” during the Covid-19 Crisis Possibly Mean in Sub-Saharan Africa?
- Rethinking “Elective” Procedures for Women’s Reproduction during Covid-19
- Employment-Based, For-Profit Health Care in a Pandemic
- Digital Contact Tracing, Privacy, and Public Health
- AI Surveillance during Pandemics: Ethical Implementation Imperatives
- Pandemics, Protocols, and the Plague of Athens: Insights from Thucydides
- Interdependent Citizens: The Ethics of Care in Pandemic Recovery
- Older Adults and Covid-19: The Most Vulnerable, the Hardest Hit
- Communities Matter
- Global Disparity and Solidarity in a Pandemic
- Duties toward Patients with Psychiatric Illness
- Vulnerable Children in a Dual Epidemic
- Covid-19: Exposing the Lack of Evidence-Based Practice in Medicine
- Our Next Pandemic Ethics Challenge? Allocating “Normal” Health Care Services
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The full Hastings Center Report is available here:
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For more information and to interview authors, contact
Susan Gilbert
The Hastings Center
845-424-4040 x244
[email protected]
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