The Discourses of Bioethics in Latin America

Abstract

Bioethics was born in the United States, and over time was adopted by (and adapted to) other countries. Among the countries accepting bioethics were those in Latin America, the name given to a linguistic and cultural community encompassing South America, Central America, Mexico, and part of the Caribbean. Because bioethics is a discipline whose discourse flourished in a North American cultural tradition, it is natural to compare Latin American and North American biomedical ethics. Latin American bioethics has evolved over a period of 30 years, in three decade-long stages commencing in the 1970s: reception, assimilation, and re-creation. As a pioneer of the process by which bioethics was institutionalized in Argentina, I cannot avoid some personal reference to my own experience, as a testifying witness (Mainetti 1987, 1990, 1995, 1996). Such an autobiographical narrative about the emergence of bioethics in Latin America can be justified by the comment of a well-known American bioethicist who said: “Identifying the origin of bioethics in the United States is a matter of some considerable controversy. But the Latin American bioethics story is to a large degree the story of one man.” (Drane 1996, pp. 557-569).