Faculty & Staff
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Libby Bogdan-Lovis, M.A.
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I hold the position of Assistant Director at Michigan State University Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences (CEHLS). In this capacity my primary responsibility is to assist the Center’s core faculty in program and curricular development. I received my Master’s degree (1995) from MSU’s Interdisciplinary Programs in Health and Humanities, producing a thesis titled The Death of Birth: A Critical Interpretive Analysis of Second Wave Liberal Feminist Efforts to Influence Women’s Childbirth Experiences. By adopting a critical social science perspective on contemporary health care, I focused on the political economy of US medicalized childbirth. Recently, I have expanded that research to incorporate insights from the emerging paradigm of evidence-based medicine.
The focus of my graduate research was the direct outgrowth of a long and diverse association with clinical care programs. These prior experiences included my roles as a founding member and President in the consumer advocacy group The Consumer Taskforce on the Childbearing Year, and as education coordinator and prenatal advisor of a women’s health clinic.
I returned to university life as an undergraduate advisor to several programs including the Interdisciplinary Programs in Health and Humanities, and was the founding Coordinator for MSU’s undergraduate Medical Scholars program.
My teaching responsibilities are multidisciplinary in nature and include commitments to Michigan State University’s two medical schools – the College of Human Medicine (CHM) and the College of Osteopathic Medicine (COM), undergraduate education, and guest lectures for graduate courses. I administer the second-year CHM Medical Humanities history selective where I teach A Recent Social History of the Medical Model of Birth. I am a preceptor for the CHM Health Policy course and participate as well in the CHM and COM medical ethics modules. As part of my Pluralism in Health Care medical humanities seminar, students in the Advanced Baccalaureate Learning Experience Program (ABLE) prematriculation program examine how social diversity influences health care access and delivery at multiple scales. We focus especially on the complexities of social location and the concepts of cultural identity and construction in clinical bioethics to interrogate current ethical controversies including research ethics in developing countries. Unique to the course is an "inclusive" bioethics conversation, accomplished through email, with medical students in selected African countries.
Current Research Interests:
I continue to expand my research interests on the medicalization of childbirth, using those insights as an analytical lens by which to examine the larger context of health-care delivery. From my analysis of women’s agency in childbirth "choice", I consider the alluring notion of evidence-based patient choice. Key to my analysis are those macro-level political, social, and economic forces that define and frame the slate of individual clinical care options, and which covertly and overtly shape the general appeal and availability of patient choice.
Publications:
(with A. Sousa) “Certified Nurse-Midwives’ Knowledge of and Reliance on Evidence-Based Practice: The Contextual Influence of Professional Culture”. Submitted to and under review by Social Science and Medicine.
(with H. Brody and F. Miller) “Evidence-Based Medicine: Watching out for its Friends”. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Special Issue, guest edited by K. Borgerson and R. Bluhm). In Press, 2005.
(with W. Lovis) Ridged Fields, Catastrophic Wet Season Planting, and Germination Rates: Notes from Libby's Garden. The Wisconsin Archeologist 85(1-2). 2004. (In Press, ISSN 0043-6364)
The Promise (the Tyranny?): Some Observations on the Evolution of Evidence-Based Medicine. Medical Humanities Report, Winter 2004, 25(2): 1-3. Electronic publication at http://bioethics.msu.edu/newsletter.html 2004.
Misreading the Power Structure: The Failure of Liberal Feminists to Influence Childbirth. Of SIGnificance, Semi-Annual Bulletin of the Society for Health and Human Values Student Interest Group. 1996.
Misreading the Power Structure: The Inability of Liberal Feminists to Influence Childbirth. Michigan Feminist Studies 11:59-79. Women’s Studies Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 1996.
The Death of Birth: A Critical Interpretive Analysis of Second Wave Liberal Feminist Efforts to Influence Women’s Childbirth Experiences in the United States During the Last Third of the Twentieth Century (vi + 97 pp, references). Interdisciplinary Program in Health and Humanities, Michigan State University. 1995.
Normal Childbirth: The Medicalization of Women’s Birth Experiences. Abstract, Michigan Academician, Spring, 1994.
A Discussion of Obstetrical Interaction: If I Were You. Society for Health and Human Values Student Bulletin, Spring 1991.
