As the preceding discussion illustrates, feminists have participated in scholarly discussion of virtually all the major topics in bioethics.  Their contributions are distinctive not least because of the foundational relationship of feminist scholarship to activism, which means that the scholarly treatment of these topics is grounded in a critique of the background norms and conditions that produce observable and persistent injustices in medicine and healthcare. This is one reason why feminist bioethical theory tends to have a practical orientation. Its criticisms most characteristically address the adequacy of mainstream bioethical theory that emphasizes universal moral principles framed abstractly, individualistically and isolated from context (the most widely cited example of such a theoretical framework is Beauchamp and Childress’ Principles of Biomedical Ethics). Though some feminist criticism objects to any attempt to formulate universal principles at all, most is more circumscribed, directed principally against theoretical frameworks that presuppose a generic individual subject that is abstract, disembodied and socially disembedded, in a way that has enabled morally relevant particulars to be ignored, and that privileges the perspective of an elite, historically mostly male group (Walker 2008). Feminist critics point out that this theoretical orientation generally has the consequence of justifying the prevailing status quo, thereby inhibiting any real consideration of social change.