2025 Jill Vickers Prize

Winner: Candace Johnson

Boundaries of Birth, Medicine, and the Body: Toward a Theory of Obstetric Justice

Excerpt from jury report: This paper directly addresses the polarized political context in which we find ourselves at this global historical moment in which truth-claims and facts have become politicized. Johnson argues for a paradigmatic shift to a justice framework that centres the enhancement of autonomy as key to determining the “rightness” of particular obstetric practices. Johnson’s investigation into the requirements of such a non-ideal theory of obstetric justice draws on the global contextual experiences of birth and challenges oppositional framings of “natural” and “scientific”. As such, it provides a model of how to think through and beyond the polarized politics of our era and work toward a truly just future.