Arizona Bioethics Network
Creating a space to explore ethical issues and share knowledge and skills across an extended network.
Arizona Bioethics Network
Creating a space to explore ethical issues and share knowledge and skills across an extended network.
Our Current Focus
Provide ethics resources with particular attention to those affecting Arizonans.
Foster the work and use of ethics committees in health care and biomedical research settings.
Focus on the role of leadership, preventive ethics, and conflict management in ethical decision-making.
Mission
Arizona Bioethics Network (ABN) is dedicated to increasing the understanding of bioethical issues. ABN provides access to resources, offers educational programs, and provides networking opportunities with the goal of improving the health and quality of life for individuals and across communities.
Values
Innovation – Explore change and creatively engage with dynamic bioethical challenges
Integrity – Commit to honest and inclusive principles of practice in the care of individuals and communities
Quality – Deliver leading edge programs and services
Collaboration – Create a network to enhance collaboration within the community
Inclusion – Provide opportunities on a broad spectrum to enhance perspective with regard for the diversity of constituencies we serve
Webinars
ABN hosts a monthly webinar series addressing a wide variety of topics in bioethics and health law. These webinars are free and take place on the third Wednesday of every month.

Wednesday September 20th, 2023 – 4:00PM MST
U.S. Eugenics: Legacies, Resurgences, and Bioethics
Charlene Galarneau, PhD, MAR
Dr. Charlene Galarneau is Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and Center for Bioethics; and Associate Professor Emerita at Wellesley College, in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research explore the ethics of health care, public health, and health policy. Recent research topics include U.S. eugenics, racism in bioethics, gender-affirming care, and USPHS STD experiments in Guatemala. Galarneau’s book, Communities of Health Care Justice, cultivates a concept of community justice that understands communities as critical participants in determining the nature of just health care. Her interest in ethics was initially motivated by her work with rural community/migrant health centers and the communities they serve.
Description
Dominant narratives of US eugenics portray a by-gone era, led by academic elites promoting pseudo-science, and concluding when the harms of Nazi eugenics became known. Emerging critical analyses reveal a more complex history entailing diverse eugenic experiences by race, ability, gender, indigeneity, and national origin that reflect a mutable, multilayered eugenic logic that endures to the present day. Bioethics has a role to play both in addressing past harm (what is a just response?) and in identifying
and analyzing eugenic features present today in genetic technologies, reproductive health care, as well as land conservation and immigration policy. Considerations of who is “fit” continue to enervate social, political, and health care decision-making in the U.S.
Learning Objectives
After this session, attendees will be able to
1) understand the ways social inequities (e.g. racism) undergird U.S. eugenics,
2) identify expressions of eugenics logic in the present day, and
3) articulate ways that bioethics can contribute to a non-eugenic future.
In-Kind Support


We are an independent 501c3 organization and we couldn’t make it without support from our members and the organizations that have given us in-kind donations. Please consider making a donation.
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