My research focuses on issues in normative ethics, specifically addressing problems in contemporary healthcare. My dissertation, titled Redefining Paternalistic Practices in Women’s Health: How Patriarchal Biases Affect Medical Autonomy of Female Patients in the Clinical Setting, discusses the effects of dysfunctional trust relationships in the clinical setting for female patients. Existing frameworks for understanding clinical ethics are often too broad to address ethical issues that women, people of color, and other marginalized groups face when navigating the healthcare field. Like other research in healthcare, contemporary structures have developed historically from a focus on white, Protestant, upper-middle class men, or assumes that any moral theory can act as a “catch-all” that can account for the experiences of all people. Intersectional feminism explains why this is not true and my research attempts to fill the gaps left by mainstream theories in healthcare ethics. As such, much of my research fixates around the issue of reproduction and the stereotypes, biases, and misinformation that create barriers to access and success for people seeking reproductive freedom in clinical settings.
 

While my research at this point focuses primarily on the right to not be a parent, which includes forays into issues like voluntary sterilization, pronatal biases, reproductive coercion, birth control and abortion access, and reproductive paternalism, there are natural transitions to the other side of reproductive freedom, which includes research in areas like IVF and assisted reproduction, genetic testing, and uterine transplantation. In addition to reproductive ethics, I am interested in more generalized healthcare ethics issues. While my dissertation focuses on the issue of reproductive coercion in the clinical setting, I am also interested in medical coercion more broadly construed. Coercive acts exist in every area of medicine and though at odds with the belief in the primacy of patient autonomy, these acts of coercion are often essential to how medicine is currently practiced. To address the issue of whether some acts of clinical coercion are justified while others are not, is an integral follow-up to the work in my dissertation. This line of research also establishes questions about the moral value of suicide and euthanasia. As in the dissertation, addressing the shortcomings of the shared decision making model will be integral to assessing the prevalence of paternalism in medical care and defining the physician as either expert or technician.

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Additionally, as a follow-up to the parts of the dissertation that do not directly address clinical-facing issues, there is work to be done on the topic of trust. I am currently working on a conception of trust that differentiates it from shared-values bonding, which I argue is separate from and frequently misidentified as trust. Understanding agreement and trust as separate entities and why they are often conflated can help explain the increasing hostility of dissent and the phenomenon of "othering." There is also significant follow-up research I would like to explore that addresses trust in the context of language and language games. I am developing a paper that explains how language accommodation in the face of uneven power dynamics can actually provide moral justification for lying as a means of conveying truth.