Event Highlights: Debating Bioethics and Making Secular France
By Aislinn O’Brien, Candidate for Bachelors of the Arts in International Relations and Political Science
Kimberly Arkin, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology here at Boston University, led a fascinating conversation as part of the Center for the Study of Europe’s “Works in Progress” series on bioethics in France. Arkin walked her audience through the increasing secularism of the French medical system and persisting aspects of more traditional conservative and religious medical ethics systems. Throughout her talk, she stressed how this aspect of medicine is uniquely French, tracing it back to French religious conservatism and contrasting the modern system in France against the far more secular systems in the rest of the European Union.
Arkin provided specific examples to advance her discussion, most notably of the councils at French hospitals that debate the morality and ethicality of patients being permitted to undergo certain procedures. She also spent some time examining the influence of patients’ and practitioners’ gender identity on ethical considerations. She offered examples of more and less gender-balanced hospital councils and compared and contrasted their debates and outcomes. She also provided examples of male and female patients seeking similar and differentiated types of care and the responses they received from their hospital councils. In addition, Arkin also discussed certain types of intersectionality in medicine, examining how male patients of different abilities were treated in seeking the same procedure of vasectomies.
