The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade has played a subtle but critical role in the history of bioethics in America. The finding of a constitutional right to abortion coincided with the first several years of a more or less self-conscious transition from traditional medical ethics, focused on physician decision-making, to “bioethics,” which incorporated the patient’s values and preferences. By the early 1980s informed consent was widely seen as the application of the principle of respect for autonomy.
Neither of the first two bioethics research centers, The Hastings Center (1969) and the Kennedy Institute (1971), had abortion explicitly on their agendas, but the prospects for control of the genetic traits of future human beings and the scope of parental decisions concerning seriously ill newborns were. Questions about the moral status of future and tiny humans were only one step removed from that of the moral status of the human embryo. In 1970 Hastings co-founder Dan Callahan, with the support of the Population Council, published a monograph, “Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality.” In retrospect, in the 1970s and 1980s Roe enabled the growing field to put abortion per se on the back burner.
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