History of the Health Sciences Lecture with the Medical Center Hour

Featuring Professor Johanna Schoen

“Innovation and Moral Distress in the History of Neonatology”

Wednesday December 3, 2025

12-1pm EST

Location: MR6, Room 2502

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89105967067

This talk discusses the use of aggressive treatment and the lack of anesthesia and analgesia that made many NICUs a fraught ethical place in the 1970s through the 1990s.  It analyzes the moral distress felt by clinicians and parents about the care neonates were receiving and describes the parent-initiated reform movements that led to changes in NICU care by the turn of the 21st century.

Johanna Schoen is distinguished professor of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of two books: Choice and Coercion:  Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare in the Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and Abortion After Roe (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2015) which won the Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine.  In addition, she has edited an anthology on Abortion Care as Moral Work: Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022). She is now working on a book, Life and Death in the Nursery, on the history of Neonatal Intensive Care Units for which she received a 3-year research grant from the NIH/NLM. In her spare time, Schoen volunteers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where she is emeritus co-chair of the Patient and Family Advisory Council and works on improving end of life conversations between clinicians, patients, and caregivers.