Abolition as an Approach to Bioethics: Uncovering the Medical Industrial Complex

Abstract: Since the fight to end chattel slavery, abolitionists have been resolute that morally corrupt institutions deserve a level of criticality beyond that offered by reform. Slavery, they argued, need not be reformed—it required abolition. This pursuit of justice has continually evolved, with scholars like Angela Davis (working against the prison industrial complex) and Dorothy Roberts (critiquing the family policing system) identifying that many other systems require the transformative analysis afforded by the abolition framework.

The pursuit of justice, including health justice, requires an abolition imaginary. While this work has more commonly centered violent state institutions like policing, scholars in the field have recently made the call that bioethics should problematize all forms of carcerality, including those embedded within healthcare. Abolition asks us to imagine a future where families and communities are safe, healthy, and free, without deprivation of liberty, coercion or oppression. It asks us to consider whether inequities caused by systems are bugs that can be reformed, or are features baked into the systems themselves.

Our panel consists of an emergency physician, a lawyer, and a sociologist—all bioethicists working within academic medicine. The first panelist will describe the history of hegemonic systems and explore their relationships to healthcare. The second panelist will describe the abolition framework, and its applications within a justice-centered approach to ethical analysis of healthcare. The third panelist will offer a vision for the future that begins by confronting our assumptions about healthcare and discuss the potential for bioethics to adopt an abolitionist stance.