Tereza Hendl and Bianca Jansky: 

Femtech technologies, such as period and fertility trackers, promise their users empowerment through reliable knowledge about and control over their bodies and ownership of their procreative health. However, the notion of empowerment through period and fertility apps deserves scrutiny. Based on a thematic analysis of a range of ‘female health’ app promotion materials, we explore the kind of empowerment promised by app providers and point towards significant contradictions and tensions in the discursive tales of empowerment. Building on digital sociology and intersectional feminist scholarship, we observe that the discourse promoting many of the health apps is grounded in exclusionary ontologies, normative femininity, epistemic injustice and heterosexist notions of female sexuality, which undermines the liberational rhetoric of these digital health technologies.

Tereza Hendl & Bianca Jansky (2022) Tales of self-empowerment through digital health technologies: a closer look at ‘Femtech’,  Review of Social Economy, 80:1, 29-57, DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2021.2018027

Tereza Hendl, Tiara Roxanne: 

Our paper interrogates the ethics of digital pandemic surveillance from Indigenous perspectives. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that Indigenous peoples are among the communities most negatively affected by pandemic infectious disease spread. Similarly to other racialized subpopulations, Indigenous people have faced strikingly high mortality rates from COVID-19 owing to structural marginalization and related comorbidities, and these high rates have been exacerbated by past and present colonial dominance. At the same time, digital pandemic surveillance technologies, which have been promoted as effective tools for mitigating a pandemic, carry risks for Indigenous subpopulations that warrant an urgent and thorough investigation. Building on decolonial scholarship and debates about Indigenous data sovereignty, we argue that should Indigenous communities wish to implement digital pandemic surveillance, then they must have ownership over these technologies, including agency over their own health data, how data are collected and stored, and who will have access to the data. Ideally, these tools should be designed by Indigenous peoples themselves to ensure compatibility with Indigenous cultures, ethics and languages and the protection of Indigenous lives, health and wellbeing.

Hendl, T., & Roxanne, T. (2022). Digital surveillance in a pandemic response: What bioethics ought to learn from Indigenous perspectives.  Bioethics, 36, 305– 312. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13013

Verina Wild, Jan-Christoph Heilinger and Alison Thompson

The appropriate starting point for ethical discussions of public-health-related issues, such as pandemic management, are the existing social inequalities in health and related issues of social justice. No contradiction between freedom and justice arises from this. Fundamental liberty rights can only be secured for all, starting from a justice-based approach. On this basis vulnerabilities should be identified and measures should be developed and prioritized.

Wild, Verina, Heilinger, Jan-Christoph and Thompson, Alison. "Covid-19 und Public-Health-Ethik. Gerechtigkeit ernst nehmen" Public Health Forum, vol. 30, no. 1, 2022, pp. 24-27. https://doi.org/10.1515/pubhef-2021-0140

Cristian Timmermann, Katharina Wabnitz and Verina Wild

The climate crisis is a major public health ethics problem that needs to be addressed using a broad set of ethical tools to analyse the manifold ethical issues. To enrich the discourse, we suggest to bridge the gap between environmental ethics and public health ethics. A planetary health ethics could help to develop a holistic perspective and create awareness about the multiple ethically relevant interactions between humans and the environment.

Timmermann, Cristian, Wabnitz, Katharina and Wild, Verina. "Responding to the climate crisis – bridging the gap between public health ethics and environmental ethics" Public Health Forum, vol. 30, no. 1, 2022, pp. 37-40. https://doi.org/10.1515/pubhef-2021-0141

David Freis:

In March 1970, the first ever medical teleconference connected U.S. aeromedical experts in Houston and San Antonio to an audience of 25,000 physicians in congress centres in West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. As this article shows, the ‘Medizin Interkontinental’ transmission was a costly demonstration of the latest developments in satellite telecommunications and projection technology as well as a stage for space-age visions of the future of medicine in the aftermath of the moon landing. Audio-visual and space technology became, at one at the same time, the medium and the message of medical futurity. As I argue, the teleconference was an audio-visual techno-spectacle that marked the culmination of the German medical community’s infatuation with futurology at the end of the 1960s, but it was also contingent on the concrete interests of the parties involved, which included the German Medical Association, medical futurologists, nasa, the U.S. Air Force, and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba. Decades before teleconferences and telemedicine entered day-to-day medicine, the convergence of new medical and media technology, changes in medical education, Cold War geopolitics, and pharmaceutical sponsorship created a brief glimpse of a technology-based future of medicine that fell apart once these constellations changed in the early 1970s.

Freis, D. (2022). When Teleconferencing was the Future: The 1970 ‘Medizin Interkontinental’ Transmission and West German Medicine in the Space Age,  European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health (published online ahead of print 2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/26667711-bja10018

Adeline Perrot, Ruth Horn:

On July 2021, the UK High Court of Justice heard the Case CO/2066/2020 on the application of Heidi Crowter who lives with Down’s syndrome, and Máire Lea-Wilson whose son Aidan has Down’s syndrome. Crowter and Lea-Wilson, with the support of the disability rights campaign, ‘Don’t Screen Us Out’, have been taking legal action against the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (the UK Government) for a review of the 1967 Abortion Act: the removal of section 1(1)(d) making termination of pregnancy lawful for ‘severe’ fetal indications detected after 24 weeks' gestation. On 23 September 2021, the High Court dismissed the claim. This action came at a time when non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) was introduced into the NHS England Fetal Anomaly Screening Programme for the trisomies 21, 13 and 18. The implementation of NIPT has been heavily criticised, in particular by ‘Don’t Screen Us Out’ campaigners, for increasing fetal selection and discrimination of people living with disabilities. The case of Crowter and Lea-Wilson echoes debates in other European countries such as in France and Germany, where the introduction of NIPT in the public healthcare system has provoked equally vehement public reactions and discussions. The comparison between these three countries allows contextualising the public discourses around NIPT and the ground for termination of pregnancy in relation to different socio-cultural and political contexts. We examine how each country, and particularly England, deals with the conflict between the principles of promoting the rights of people living with disabilities and preserving women’s reproductive autonomy.

Perrot A, Horn R. Preserving women’s reproductive autonomy while promoting the rights of people with disabilities?: the case of Heidi Crowter and Maire Lea-Wilson in the light of NIPT debates in England, France and Germany

Journal of Medical Ethics Published Online First: 28 March 2022. doi: 10.1136/medethics-2021-107912