In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of feminist activist groups were able to influence the public narrative around women’s health issues. The main focus of activism was on cheaper and more accessible contraception and abortion, research into the physiology of menopause, and the inclusion of women in clinical trials. In 1989, Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal, published two special issues on feminism and medical ethics. Around the same time, the Hastings Center Report published a series of essays on ethical issues in women’s reproductive health (Lindemann Nelson 2000). Scholarship at the intersection of feminism and bioethics focused largely on reproductive health and abortion. Women’s voices were argued to be fundamental to the ethical discussion around these issues. However, women’s voices need to be present in all health-related issues. Gender inequalities extend beyond sexual and reproductive rights. In late 1992, Susan Sherwin published the article ‘No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and Health Care’, in which she sought to push the field by offering a feminist approach to the classic ethical problems in health care (Sherwin 1992). This led to the emergence of specialist journals in feminist bioethics, as well as conferences and other formal forums where feminisms and bioethics converged.

This sketch offers a sense of the dominant story of the emergence of feminist bioethics. It points to influential movements within the field that have shaped our course as scholars today. But it is not the only story. We would like to offer a counter narrative. Counter narratives run against the grain of mainstream accounts of academic knowledge production, highlighting how the ‘official’ stories told about the development of ideas and disciplines are very often the stories of the global minority (Zhukova 2021; Greenhalgh-Spencer 2017). In this case, the dominant narrative is a narrative of mainstream, white feminism centered in the United States. This narrative overlooks a plurality of traditions of knowledge production that have shaped the praxis and theory of feminisms, understandings of bodies, health, and relationships of the body-politic to socio-political structures, that have been marginalized. In this commentary, we would like to ask: what is meant by the feminist turn in German-speaking bioethics? We take this opportunity to reflect on how non-dominant histories in feminist thought and bioethics might offer important starting points for considering the feminist turn in German-speaking bioethics.

Buedo, P., McLennan, S. & Fiske, A. What feminist turn?. ZEMO (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-025-00214-8