Thank you for the lovely introduction, Kathryn. Had I only known that Lithuania was so forward thinking, I would have added to my bio that I have taught in Lithuania for three summers, including issues of medical ethics.
It's an honor and a privilege to speak to you tonight on behalf of our colleague Dr. Wylie Burke, particularly since this reception inaugurating the Women's Bioethics Project really encompasses values that are very close to both Wylie's and my primary interests in research, scholarship, teaching, and, of course, our political persuasion as well.
Never has the need for multi-disciplinary dialogue and public policy development been more pressing for women than it is today. This is particularly true with respect to the use and the potential abuse of science and technology. While we'd all like to believe that science, technology, and their applications are gender neutral, the sad-and somewhat sobering-fact of the matter is that science is reflective of society, which, as we all know, is not gender neutral.
Virtually every day we pick up the newspaper and we see some new issue that really demands that we, as women, begin to coalesce and have a voice in the debate. The Women's Bioethics Project will interconnect women in academia, public policy, and private industry to develop and highlight understanding of biomedical ethics as it relates to women, particularly as we face the brave new worlds of genetics, biotechnologies, assisted reproduction, and health care rationing, an ever-present specter over our system here in the United States.
More importantly, the Women's Bioethics Project is going to provide us with an opportunity to have a voice for the interests of women-something that, unfortunately, women, as a group, have sadly lacked in the political arena here in the United States in recent years, and perhaps forever. This is exceedingly important as these new scientific advances can all too easily be used to exploit and devolve women rather than improve and evolve their status. My areas of academic research are a little bit different from Wylie's, but there is some commonality, and I will very briefly outline a few examples.
One of the areas that is, of course, very integral to my work [in health law] is access and financing of health care. As we struggle to take a look at the costly health care system, we already have ample evidence that we have distributive justice and resource allocation issues that impact women in a negative fashion. This is particularly true with respect to older women. We know that women live longer than men, and even more frequently, they end up being the caretaker of their spouse, who may be ill and disabled. They, of course, do this out of love and respect for their spouse and their long-standing relationship, but the sad side effect is that, very frequently, the spouse and the long illness eat up the financial resources of the couple. The couple is forced to spend down, and indeed become devoid of significant assets. And when the sick spouse passes on, our caretaker spouse, usually the wife, is left with ten or twenty years to live in poverty and to struggle to figure out how on earth she will be able to get her own medicines from an ever-dwindling access to drugs and medical care through our programs of Medicare and Medicaid, and an ever-shrinking opportunity for elders to access the health care system.
This facet of health care policy is ripe for consideration by women of our age group, the women who will be these women of tomorrow. And while it's not jazzy like biotechnology, it is one of our more compelling biomedical ethics issues as women. It raises integral questions with respect to distributive justice and our rights as individuals and as a population of women.
One of the other areas that I do a fair bit of work in along with Dr. Burke and Dr. Riven, who is over here at one of the front tables, is work in the area of health and human rights. Indeed when you look at health and human rights, our focus has been primarily on developing countries, primarily in Asia, Indonesia being our primary project currently. As we take a look at global health and justice as we work in the developing world, what we see is that women are the barometers of health in these developing countries; when the women in these countries are deprived of access to health care, reproductive autonomy, and human rights in general, we can count on the fact that the developing country's population will remain mired in poverty. More important, these countries will be unable to realize the economic and social rights that we increasingly demand as a political structure here in the United States. Essentially, if we do not reach out as women, as a society to help these women, we will consign developing countries to ongoing poverty. We need to empower [women in developing countries] to improve their own health, the health of their children, and the economic as well as physical health of their populations.
Even in countries that have very advanced civil and political rights, their economic, cultural, and social rights lag so far behind that the health status of the population will forever consign them to not being able to be a viable market player in our increasingly global marketplace, and, essentially, leave them in a developing nation status for the foreseeable future. Bioethics plays very heavily in this area. In fact, most of the scholarship in international health and human rights now looks at health and human rights laws as the global bioethic. The way that we look at bioethics on a global basis is through human rights law and human rights policy. This is where some of our work at the law school and in the medical ethics department is going now, and we can use all the help we can get. We need as many voices to rise up for our sisters, mothers, and our children in other countries as we do here in the United States.
And finally, as a third example, we have assisted reproductive technologies, genetics, and stem cell research, the topic that Dr. Holland will be speaking on in more depth. We've already seen that this has profound effects on women, and indeed, the entire concept of parenthood is changing before our eyes. Women need to have a distinctive and clear voice in terms of offering opportunities to women and to couples and to future children, while simultaneously preventing the exploitation of the women who are less capable of raising their voice on their own behalf.
Kathryn mentioned the fact that when we take a look at surrogacy and the exploitation of women to aid the reproductive dreams of perhaps those of us who have more money, we see that there is a clear bias towards using women who are not empowered to speak on their own behalf and who are easily exploited. And indeed there are virtually no protections for these women in the law, as most of you know, and indeed, assisted reproductive technology remains perhaps the single most unregulated area of law, save for genetic testing. Much of the genetic debate focuses on prenatal testing, which is also integral to the reproductive autonomy of women. And as we take a look at prenatal testing, particularly genetic testing, we're in a position to speak on the bioethics issues arising from this wonderful, brave new science better than just about anybody else. Once again, this is an area where women are uniquely poised to be the predominant voice in the debate, and it's time to pick up the microphone and start to talk.
Similarly, stem cells: here our bioethics issues begin with the genesis of such cells, in terms of how they are created, what tissue they are taken from, to their ultimate use as therapies for debilitating diseases that affect women as partners, as patients, or as caretakers, as well as bring all sorts of interesting issues in terms of what are we doing in terms of treating diseases in a temporary or perhaps not risk-free way. We've already seen the disasters that can result from a little bit too-eager science with deaths due to genetic therapy and a variety of other adventures that we embarked on perhaps without due care and due concern for the vulnerable subjects that engaged in those experiments.
Dr. Holland is going to speak a bit more about stem cell issues arising in bioethics. She is far better equipped to do so than I am. She is a world-renowned authority on this particular issue. She serves currently as the Associate Professor of Religion and Social Ethics and the University of Puget Sound. She is chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and she teaches a courses that look at issues of gender justice, the ethics of assisted reproductive technologies, as well as the more broad issues that speak to religious ethics and public policy. We're very lucky to have her because she just returned from Sweden, where she provided a keynote address on a topic that is, of course, near and dear to all of our hearts: gender justice and global health. So, with no further ado, let me turn the podium over to Suzanne Holland.
Dr. Kuszler is the Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law. She also serves as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medical History and Ethics.