How Stories Can Inform Ethical Discourse

I have two posts over at Her.meneutics this week on taking a narrative (that is, story-based) approach to reproductive ethics. Essentially, I argue that while considering the experiences of people who use reproductive technology for a variety of reasons complicates our contemplation of ethics (because we can't help but be sympathetic to a mom who uses IVF to have a baby after all three of her children are tragically killed, for example), it is necessary. When we confine our discourse to principles, without also talking about people's lived experience, we risk alienating the very people whose decisions we hope to inform. People write off ethics as irrelevant, out of touch.

My post was published in two parts. The first post describes some specific stories that I've been thinking about recently, while the second looks more broadly at a narrative approach to ethics and how it can inform our conversations.