Christopher ChoGlueck (Indiana University-Bloomington)
Earlier this year, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a new division to protect providers in their right to refuse patients with certain services they deem objectionable such as abortifacients and contraceptives. This raises several jointly ethical-epistemic questions: which values and whose values are legitimate within women’s reproductive health? How should our institutions be structured accordingly? I concentrate on zygote-centric values, a sexist ideology that focuses the attention of scientists and healthcare professionals away from women and toward fertilized embryos (zygotes). I do so by analyzing how the FDA’s labeling about the morning-after pill’s mechanism was laden with zygote-centric values. I then argue that our knowledge and epistemic practices should not commit epistemic injustices. Nonetheless, this drug label led to epistemic injustices because its sexist value-ladenness enabled sex-based oppression. Therefore, I conclude that these oppressive values are illegitimate within women’s reproductive health, at least prima facie. This paper provides philosophers of science with a novel solution to the problem of value legitimacy. It also contributes a novel form of epistemic injustice to social epistemology and develops the epistemic dimensions of feminist moral philosophy.
