Leading members of the disability rights and bioethics community will address some of the most contentious issues facing people with disabilities when the College hosts a major conference May 21-22, “Disability and Ethics Through the Life Cycle: Cases, Controversies and Finding Common Ground.”
The conference at College Park Hall will offer bioethicists, disability-rights advocates, disability scholars, biomedical researchers and others the opportunity to discuss disability-related issues as they arise through all stages of life.
Among the issues to be discussed:
- Allowing people with disabilities to choose to die
- The reproductive rights of people with mental and physical disability
- Ethical challenges of raising a child with disabilities
- Medical biases against people with disabilities
- Bioethical biases against people with disabilites
Presenters include Mark Kuczewski of Loyola University-Chicago and president of the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities; Diane Coleman, founder and president of Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights group that opposes the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia; and Robert Baker, chair of the Rapaport Ethics Across the Curriculum program and the William D. Williams Professor of Philosophy at Union. He also directs the Union Graduate College-Mount Sinai School Medicine Bioethics Program.
The event, which includes a series of panels, workshops and discussions, also features leading scholars on ethics and disability from Albany Law School, St. Louis University, Union College, Stony Brook University and Yeshiva University.
There is a free public session from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Friday.
For more information, click here.
This is the second major conference on bioethics to be hosted at Union. In 2008, the College was the first liberal arts school to host the National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference. Planned and organized by students, NUBC covers issues of current interest in the field of bioethics with discussions led by experts from across the country.
In October, the College will host the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum’s annual conference, “Bioethics and Ethics Across the Curriculum: The Challenges of Teaching, Researching, and Publishing Across Disciplines.”