Book Talk: Birth Rights and Wrongs
How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law
Couldn’t join us for the book talk? Check out some of the speakers’ slide presentations and blog posts!
Description
Millions of Americans rely on the likes of birth control, IVF, and genetic testing to make plans as intimate and far-reaching as any over a lifetime. This is no less than the medicine of miracles. It fills empty cradles, frees families from terrible disease, and empowers them to fashion their lives on their own terms. But accidents happen.
Pharmacists mix up pills. Lab techs misread tests. Obstetricians tell women their healthy fetuses would be stillborn. Political and economic forces conspire against regulation. And judges throw up their hands when professionals foist parenthood on people who didn’t want it, or childlessness on those who did. Failed abortions, switched donors, and lost embryos may be first-world problems. But these aren’t innocent lapses or harmless errors. They’re wrongs in need of rights.
At this event, author Dov Fox and an expert panel discussed his book Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2019). Panelists explored the ways in which the book seeks to lift the curtain on reproductive negligence, give voice to the lives it upends, and vindicate the interests that advances in medicine and technology bring to full expression. They also examined the book’s effort to force citizens and courts to rethink the reproductive controversies of our time, and to equip us to meet the new challenges — from womb transplants to gene editing — that lie just over the horizon.
This event was free and open to the public.
This event was followed by the 2019 Petrie-Flom Center Open House reception.
Panelists
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Slides
Blog Posts
Sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.