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32 Cambridge Q. Healthcare Ethics 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/cqhe32 and id is 1 raw text is: Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (2023), 32:1, 1-3 a CAMBRIDGE doi:1 ( ) SO638 01200 di UNIVERSITY PRESS Joseph J. Fins 'Division of Medical Ethics, Department of Medicine, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, New York, USA 2Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury (CASBI), Weill Cornell Medical College and The Rockefeller University, New York, New York, USA 3Yale Law School, New Haven, Connecticut, USA Corresponding author. Email: Abstract By considering the history of bioethics and international humanitarian law, Joseph J. Fins contends that bioethics as an academic and moral community should stand in solidarity w ith Ukraine as it defends freedom and civility. Keywords: War in Ukraine; Bioethics; International Humanitarian; freedom; autocracy; liberal democracies; civility What does bioethics have to say about the events in Ukraine? Is it within our remit of responsibility to weigh in on the war and the human tragedy that is unfolding? If war is the ultimate public health crisis, then surely bioethics-and bioethicists-should have something to say about the tragedy in Ukraine. This all seemed obvious to me, but in discussions with colleagues, some have pushed back. What expertise do we have in world affairs? Would anybody care about what we as a scholarly community had to say? And then, the most frequent objection, if we comment on this, what about other things that pull on our moral heartstrings from the oppressions of the Uyghurs in China to the suppression of voting rights in the United States? All good points from people whom I respect and challenging questions as I personally oppose the repression of the Chinese regime of the Uyghurs (and Tibetans) and feel that voting rights suppression undermines American democracy in a fundamental way. But if we cannot speak out against everything does that mean we cannot speak out against anything? That seems morally untenable and illogical. Especially because the war in Ukraine is fundamentally different than these other worthy concerns. The scope of the horror-and what a Russian victory would mean for the democratic institutions that shelter all the subsidiary rights we seek to defend-calls on us as an academic (and moral) community to speak up. Not only are we compelled to do so, we are also positioned by our own history to bring a special kind of expertise to the conversation, knowledge that other academic domains may not possess in quite the same way. Let us start with history and an image seen around the world in mid-March. It is of a pregnant woman on a gurney being carried away from a maternity ward in Mariupol after the Russians brutally bombed a women and children's hospital. She lies on her side, her hip detached because her pelvis was crushed when she was wounded. Her hand covers her wound. The brightly colored hospital in the background is now charred with the windows blown out. The Ukrainian soldiers and aid workers are walking through rubble, a battlefield, not a hospital courtyard. As physicians tried to save her life and she learned her baby was going to die, she told them, Kill me now! The baby was stillborn, and the mother could not be resuscitated.' By early April, the WHO estimated that 72 hospitals had been shelled by Russian forces and that 71 healthcare workers and patients had been killed. As critically, with the destruction of these facilities, the public health infrastructure of countless communities was also imperiled.2 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press.