Feminism

“. . . ‘the natural’ still exerts substantial power of us, perhaps in part because of its continued usefulness in environmental issues. Yet we must free ourselves from it as it also inappropriately naturalizes our way of life. For instance, the contemporary American middle-class environment requires little physical exertion and tempts us with ever-bigger portions of food. So, in the absence of conscious control, our bodies become quite different from those of our Stone Age ancestors of Cretan peasants . . . the need to reject appeals to nature as guides to action has long been clear in bioethics: defining states of affairs as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ implies nothing about how to deal with them. When we learn that African-American women in the United States die more often in childbirth than white women, and that horrifying numbers of Third World women are dying as we speak, nobody concludes that preventive action would be morally intrusive. Yet we tend to be bewitched by the claim that menstruation or pregnancy are natural processes and thus inappropriately dealt with in the medical realm” (Purdy, 254).