Global health solidarity

For much of the twentieth Century, vulnerability to deprivations of health has often been defined by geographical and economic factors. Those in wealthy, usually ‘Northern’ and ‘Western’, parts of the world have benefited from infrastructures, and accidents of geography and climate, which insulate them from many serious threats to health. Conversely, poorer people are typically exposed to more threats to health, and have lesser access to the infrastructures needed to safeguard them against the worst consequences of such exposure. However, in recent years the increasingly globalised nature of the world’s economy, society, and culture, combined with anthropogenic climate change and the evolution of antibiotic resistance, has begun to shift the boundaries that previously defined the categories of person threatened by many exogenous threats to health. In doing so, these factors expose both new, and forgotten, similarities between persons, and highlight the need for global cooperative responses to the existential threats posed by climate change and the evolution of antimicrobial resistance. In this paper, we argue that these emerging health threats, in demonstrating the similarities that exist between even distant persons, provides a catalyst for global solidarity, which justifies, and provides motivation for, the establishment of solidaristic, cooperative global health infrastructures

Conscientious objection in health care provision: a new dimension

The right to conscientious objection in the provision of health care is the subject of a lengthy, heated and controversial debate. Recently, a new dimension was added to this debate by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby et al. which effectively granted rights to freedom of conscience to private, for-profit corporations. In light of this paradigm shift, we examine one of the most contentious points within this debate, the impact of granting conscience exemptions to health care providers on the ability of women to enjoy their rights to reproductive autonomy. We argue that the exemptions demanded by objecting health care providers cannot be justified on the liberal, pluralist grounds on which they are based, and impose unjustifiable costs on both individual persons, and society as a whole. In doing so, we draw attention to a worrying trend in health care policy in Europe and the United States to undermine women’s rights to reproductive autonomy by prioritising the rights of ideologically motivated service providers to an unjustifiably broad form of freedom of conscience

From self-interest to solidarity: one path towards delivering refugee health

The recent and ongoing refugee crisis in Europe highlights conflicting attitudes about the rights of migrants and refugees to health care in transition and destination countries. Some European and Scandinavian states, such as Germany and Sweden, have welcomed large numbers of migrants, while others, such as the UK, have been significantly less open. In part, this is because of reluctance by certain national governments to incur what are seen as the high costs of delivering aid and care to migrants. In response to these assumptions, some theorists have argued that the appropriate way to view the health needs of migrants is not in terms of rights, but in terms of the interests of destination and transition countries – and have argued that providing care to migrants and refugees will generate benefits for their host countries. However, self-interest alone is less effective at motivating the provision of care for health deprivations which do not pose a threat to third parties, or to migrants and refugees in poor or distant countries. In this paper, I argue that while self-interest is unlikely in itself to motivate the provision of all necessary health care to all migrants and refugees, and may risk stigmatizing already vulnerable persons, it can provide the foundation upon which such motivations can be built. My goal is therefore to show how and why a more just approach to the provision of health care to migrants can and should be derived from narrower, self-interested commitments to preserving citizen health