In a related form of decontextualization, some bioethicists and physicians reduce autonomy to informed consent and restrict its exercise in medical practice to a patient’s selection of choices from a limited set of clinical options (Dodds 2000). This formulation of the principle of respect for autonomy ignores background conditions that patients bring to their medical experience, the institutional power relationships and social contexts that influence their options, and the medical research priorities that shape them. Expanding on this critique Carolyn Ells adopts Foucault’s analysis of biopower to argue that informed choice must be understood in explicitly relational terms that construe power relations as diffused throughout society (2003). Ells argues here that the standard conception of choice relies on a false model of persons that situates them outside relations of power. Once this is recognized, the need for an understanding of autonomy that grapples with the complexities of power relations becomes obvious.