Adrienne Asch: A Career at the Intersection of Bioethics and Disability Studies

The first time I heard Adrienne Asch speak, she had assumed her role as a respected and influential member of the Disability Studies field. Later, as a student of Bioethics, I discovered that she was also a respected and influential Bioethicist. Who was this scholar with such expertise in two fields, and why did her contribution to each field have to be discovered separately? Asch passed away in November of 2013. Widely missed and memorialized in these two fields, I realized that there must be a third form of recognition for her pioneering work at the intersection of Disability Studies and Bioethics.

Asch was born in New York in 1946. Born premature, she developed retinopathy from too much oxygen in her incubator, thus losing her vision (Roberts 2013). Asch’s own difficulty in finding employment after graduating from Swarthmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy made her keenly aware of disability as a civil rights issue (Fox 2013). She went on to study Social Work and Social Psychology at Columbia University and in 2005, she was recruited to direct the...