{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","title":"Wylin Wilson: Womanist Bioethics","description":"For centuries, our ethics—and especially our bioethics—have left out the most marginalized, treating white men and other powerful groups as the default and the norm.\n\nWylin Wilson, a chaplain, former death doula, and ethics professor at Duke, seeks to change this. She writes about how we must center the powerless in our bioethics, and what we must do to ensure that systems of care serve them. Because when we build systems that better serve the oppressed, we build systems that better serve us all.\n\nWhen I began planning my interview with Wylin, I anticipated talking mostly about our crumbling health system, and how we build something better from the ashes. We did into this quite a bit.\n\nBut early in our interview, I realized Wylin had deep wisdom on another subject of great importance: how we can actually live our values as feminists, activists, anti-racist advocates, and people aspiring to do better.\n\nI have often remarked that it’s very easy to be a good person until you encounter other people. And then, you have to deal with the mess of other humans. Grappling with the imperfections, annoyances, and outright cruelty of others enables us to flex our own decency muscles. It tests our values.\n\nThis test of values is, I think, where many of us falter. We lash out at people for disagreeing with us. We slot people into “good” and “bad,” and justify abuse of the bad. We replicate the very norms supremacy culture has taught us—and we label that replication feminism or activism. I fight these own tendencies in myself, and have often struggled with how to work through impulsive harmful acts.\n\nWylin has much to say about the emotions, the unconscious biases, the lifetime of lessons that cause us to make these harmful decisions. Her work on love as a practice, as a skill, is revelatory to me. We can get, do, and be better, but first we must acknowledge where we are getting things wrong, then flex our muscles of decency and love.\n\nWe dig deeply into how we can be the people we aspire to be, but also so much more. In this podcast, we talk about a wide range of topics, including:\n\nHow we can learn to better navigate difficult interactions and treat all people in a way that reflects our aspirational values.\n\nLove as a skill, and kindness to others as a practice we can get better at.\n\nRacism in medicine and healthcare.\n\nWhy it is so difficult to acknowledge your own biases, and how we can push through our resistance to examining our own shortcomings.\n\nWhy healthcare providers are often resistant to acknowledging the shortcomings of the medical system, and what needs to happen for that to change.\n\nGrief as a gift that connects us to something deeper, and to our shared humanity.\n\nWylin’s “ministry of presence”—the importance of being fully present with another human being.\n\nAs always, you can find Wylin’s work, as well as the work of everyone featured on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/shop/liberatingmotherhood) .\n\nAbout Wylin Wilson\n\nWylin D. Wilson is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School where she teaches Womanist Bioethics within the Theology Medicine and Culture program. She is author of Economic Ethics and the Black Church (https://bookshop.org/p/books/economic-ethics-the-black-church-wylin-d-wilson/dc10f76574713de5?ean=9783319663470&bkshp-astro=t) and Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health (https://bookshop.org/p/books/womanist-bioethics-social-justice-spirituality-and-black-women-s-health-wylin-d-wilson/020fa881dde33383?ean=9781479817238&bkshp-astro=t) .\n\nLearn more about Wylin at her website.\n (https://wylindwilson.com/)","author_name":"Liberating Motherhood","author_url":"https://audioboom.com/channels/5130888-liberating-motherhood","provider_name":"Audioboom","provider_url":"https://audioboom.com","width":480,"height":95,"thumbnail_url":"https://audioboom.com/i/43838692/600x600/c","thumbnail_width":600,"thumbnail_height":600,"html":""}