This course does not seek to provide answers to ethical questions. Instead, the course hopes to teach students two things. First, how do you recognize ethical or moral problems in science and medicine? When something does not feel right (whether cloning, or failing to clone) — what exactly is the nature of the discomfort? What kind of tensions and conflicts exist within biomedicine? Second, how can you think productively about ethical and moral problems? What processes create them? Why do people disagree about them? How can an understanding of philosophy or history help resolve them? By the end of the course students will hopefully have sophisticated and nuanced ideas about problems in bioethics, even if they do not have comfortable answers.

The goal of this seminar is to have open discussions of controversial political and social issues and raise awareness of current world events in an informal setting. Discussions for the first part of each class will focus on current events from that week, while in the second part of class students will discuss a scheduled issue in greater detail. Scheduled issues include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the regulation of marijuana, how our society should punish criminals, genocide in Rwanda and Sudan, discrimination in our society today, the future of social security, whether pornography is sexist, and where we can go from here in the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Discussions will be supplemented by readings, films, and public speakers. Students will also be encouraged to read news media from around the world.

This course is an introduction to the cross-cultural study of biomedical ethics, examining moral foundations of the science and practice of Western biomedicine through case studies of abortion, contraception, cloning, organ transplantation and other issues. It evaluates challenges that new medical technologies pose to the practice and availability of medical services around the globe, and to cross-cultural ideas of kinship and personhood. Also discussed are critiques of the biomedical tradition from anthropological, feminist, legal, religious, and cross-cultural theorists.

In the course we will use a feminist interdisciplinary lens and invite students to look critically at how practices like privatization, shrinking public “safety nets”, de-regulation, and the commodification of health services intersect inevitably with gender, race and class, for both men and women. We will draw on a blend of empirical studies, policy materials, films and guest speakers to examine specific health issues like menstrual health, corporate obstetrics, abortion, obesity, intersex, harassment and other forms of gendered violence, mental health and stress, parent-child attachment, as well as ethics and pharmaceuticals.
The Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies (GCWS)
This course is part of the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies. The GCWS at MIT brings together scholars and teachers at nine degree-granting institutions in the Boston area who are devoted to graduate teaching and research in Women’s Studies and to advancing interdisciplinary Women’s Studies scholarship. Learn more about the GCWS.

This course draws on different disciplines, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches to examine gender in relation to health, including public health practice, epidemiologic research, health policy, and clinical application. It discusses a variety of health-related issues that illustrate global, international, domestic, and historical perspectives, while considering other social determinants of health as well, including social class and race.

This course is designed to give the student a clear understanding of the pathophysiology of the menstrual cycle, fertilization, implantation, ovum growth development, differentiation and associated abnormalities. Disorders of fetal development including the principles of teratology and the mechanism of normal and abnormal parturition will be covered as well as the pathophysiology of the breast and disorders of lactation. Fetal asphyxia and its consequences will be reviewed with emphasis on the technology currently available for its detection. In addition the conclusion of the reproductive cycle, menopause, and the use of hormonal replacement will be covered.

The video lesson aims to expand students’ knowledge of abortion as a global health issue. Induced abortion is one of the most contested and controversial problems in the field of global health and an issue that concerns fetus’ rights, women’s rights and human rights. This lesson focuses particularly on abortion stigma and its consequences for women’s health worldwide. The topic of abortion will be discussed within a context of dominant ideas of womanhood, motherhood, and sexuality, addressing abortion not just as a health issue, but also as an ideological battle over gender and sexuality.

This presentation provides an introduction and explores the trends in the five sexual and reproductive health priority areas over the last decades:
Maternal and newborn health, family planning, unsafe abortion, sexually transmitted infections and sexual health.

This seminar is a space for collaborative inquiry into the relationships between social movements and the media. We’ll review these relationships through the lens of social movement theory, and function as a workshop to develop student projects. Seminar participants will work together to explore frameworks, methods, and tools for understanding networked social movements in the digital media ecology. We will engage with social movement studies as a body of theoretical and empirical work, and learn about key concepts including: resource mobilization; political process; framing; New Social Movements; collective identity; tactical media; protest cycles; movement structure; and more. We’ll explore methods of social movement investigation, examine new data sources and tools for movement analysis, and grapple with recent innovations in social movement theory and research. Assignments include short blog posts, a book review, co-facilitation of a seminar discussion, and a final research project focused on social movement media practices in comparative perspective.

This seminar is a space for collaborative inquiry into the relationships between social movements and the media. We’ll review these relationships through the lens of social movement theory, and function as a workshop to develop student projects. Seminar participants will work together to explore frameworks, methods, and tools for understanding networked social movements in the digital media ecology. We will engage with social movement studies as a body of theoretical and empirical work, and learn about key concepts including: resource mobilization; political process; framing; New Social Movements; collective identity; tactical media; protest cycles; movement structure; and more. We’ll explore methods of social movement investigation, examine new data sources and tools for movement analysis, and grapple with recent innovations in social movement theory and research. Assignments include short blog posts, a book review, co-facilitation of a seminar discussion, and a final research project focused on social movement media practices in comparative perspective.

A short Quiz on CCSS.ELA-Literacy.9-10.RI.5. The text is from Gregg Easterbrook's Essay, "Abortions and Brainwaves". The Dale-Chall text difficulty level is 11-12, the Flesch-Kincaid is 11.3.

A short quiz on CCSS.ELA-Literacy.9-10.RI.8, with excerpts from articles by Brendan O'Neill ("A March of Middle-Class Miserabilists") and Francis A. Schaeffer ("It is Your Life that is Involved"). The Dale-Chall difficulty level is 11-12, and the Flesch-Kincaid is 13.1.

In this seminar, we will explore the significance of struggles over reproductive rights in the United States. Throughout the course, we will ask such questions as: What is reproductive freedom and why has attaining it been so central to women’s liberation movements? Why have attempts to regulate reproduction been so prevalent in American politics?