The coronavirus vaccine presents a dilemma for pregnant women

The coronavirus vaccine presents a dilemma for pregnant women

“There have been shifting attitudes in terms of who qualifies as a woman,” Michele Bratcher Goodwin, a bioethicist and law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said. “Early experimentation on a variety of things, including in the gynecological space, was done on Black women.” J. Marion Sims, who is sometimes called the father of modern gynecology, developed his surgical technique for repairing obstetric fistulas—which result in incontinence among postpartum women—on enslaved women, at least one of whom he had purchased expressly for his experiments. “Men like Marion Sims were lauded for the expertise that they were able to develop, and the science that they were able to move forward,” Goodwin said.