A further area of strong feminist bioethical interest is the interaction between medicine, health status, and family and social care. Feminist bioethicists have argued that there are legitimate questions to be asked about the scope of and justification for claims about the forms of care offered, and the balance between individual, familial, state and commercial suppliers of medical and social care. These questions are being asked more widely in mainstream bioethics, prompted by longterm changes to the shape of family life across different societies and, as a result, the way families interact with medical and social care. At the same time, the demographic changes leading to aging populations are combining with economic and political forces to drive the retrenchment of health and welfare structures across many western countries. As a result, care responsibilities are increasingly falling back onto families, and implicitly onto traditional family structures in which responsibility for the care of dependent members is assumed to lie with women members of the family. Feminist critics have pressed for both empirical and normative consideration of familial versus societal responsibilities in the areas of health and other forms of care, asking critical questions about how these responsibilities come to exist and are enacted in a range of situations. In 2011 a group of leading scholars, both feminist and others, established an international consortium, the Network of Ethics of Families, specifically to provide a more robust theoretical ethical framework in this area (Verkerk et al. 2014, in Other Internet Resources).