By the early 1990s, feminist bioethics had emerged as a distinctive academic concentration offering sustained critique of mainstream bioethics. These critiques evolved out of several lines of influence. One was the late twentieth century women’s health movement.. In the early years of second wave feminism, activist feminists directed attention to areas of health care where women’s interests were most obvious, and yet were severely neglected: access to birth control and abortion, pregnancy, and the control of representations of female sexuality. An upsurge of concern about sexist biases in medical research and practice was rekindled by the protest movements of the 1960s and awareness of the increasing medicalization and commodification of women’s bodies. Public notice of the widespread and, it has to be said, continuing under-representation of women in clinical trials increased that momentum (Baylis, Downie and Sherwin 1999). Feminists campaigned on clinical issues with direct relevance to women’s biology: for increased research into breast cancer, more convenient and cheaper contraceptive methods, more research into the physiology of menopause, and the avoidance of unnecessary surgical interventions (e.g., hysterectomies, cesarean sections, radical mastectomies) where less alternatives are available. These campaigns were supported by several advocacy groups in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere, and later on by a number of global women’s health movements. These groups and movements struggled to raise public awareness of women’s health issues, influence national health policy, and act as a counterbalance to the priorities of professional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.