Trish Grosse Brewer, a bioethics professor in Michigan Tech’s Department of Humanities, presented “Life Before Death: Reframing Reproductive Ethics in the Bioethics Classroom” during the Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture Research Forum on Sep. 25.
“So often students learn about abortion before they learn what a zygote is,” said Brewer. Within the bioethics curriculum, abortion and reproductive technology each get a week of coverage. Pregnancy itself, however, is not mentioned. This “splits women’s lived experiences” into being “the absent referent” or the condition necessary for debate.
Professor Brewer reteaches pregnancy in courses HU 3711 Biomedical Ethics and HU 4711 Biomedical Research Ethics. Both classes are required for the university’s Bioethics minor and are recommended for students entering the medical field.
Brewer will continue a broader medical humanities conversation on Oct. 2 at Western Michigan University’s 16th Annual Midwestern Medical Humanities Conference, which will be held online through Microsoft Teams.
“Supreme Court of Alabama years ago, ruled that embryos were considered
children according to their statutes, and so if you destroy an embryo, you will have killed a child,” Brewer said, “A lot of people were incensed because it’s like, it’s a petri dish.”
Brewer said that students occasionally struggle to maintain critical thinking standards expected in the classroom, due to the topic’s controversial nature. She also realized she had assumed that students knew more about pregnancy than they truly did.
President of Students for Life at Michigan Tech Dominik Fleury attended the presentation and said that he learned to “not assume an explanation of one’s thoughts is an argument that needs to be refuted” and “learn about reproductive care, both the practical medical knowledge and the experience of women who have had to face challenges in pregnancy.”
Brewer’s approach also grew out of her own experiences. “The way that I have developed the unit is directly related to when I had my second miscarriage and the wave of kindness that came from my students,” Brewer said.
Later, a student whose partner had experienced a miscarriage came to Brewer to talk about it. Brewer said that interaction helped convince her that miscarriage and pregnancy loss need their own place in the curriculum. “I don’t want students to think like me, I want them to think,” Brewer said.
Her discussions with students also helped her decide to make pregnancy loss a part of the curriculum rather than treating it as background noise to other reproductive topics. “Taking people seriously,” Brewer said, “and believing them when they tell you something matters to them is important.”
