The Irony of Pro-life Efforts to Grant Embryos Legal Personhood
Treating embryos more like persons will ultimately result in fewer people born and fewer families formed.
Dov Fox
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Read more: The Irony of Pro-life Efforts to Grant Embryos Legal Personhood -
Read more: Professor: The Law Has No Straight Answer for Our High-Tech Baby Boom Professor: The Law Has No Straight Answer for Our High-Tech Baby Boom
This is an excerpt of an article by Alaina Lancaster that originally appeared on Law.com. Read the full interview here. After thousands of dollars of in vitro fertilization treatments and nine months of pregnancy, a New York couple was forced to give up the twins they birthed. It turns out CHA Fertility Center, the Los…
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Read more: What Happens When Reproductive Tech Like IVF Goes Awry? What Happens When Reproductive Tech Like IVF Goes Awry?
Accidents happen: Freezers fail. Samples are mislabeled. Embryos get switched. These may be first-world problems. But they’re not innocent, or harmless.
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Read more: How Technology is Changing Reproduction and the Law How Technology is Changing Reproduction and the Law
Failed abortions, switched donors, and lost embryos may be first-world problems, but these aren’t innocent lapses or harmless errors.
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Read more: The Legal Limbo of Lost Embryos The Legal Limbo of Lost Embryos
More than once, the freezer tanks that secure families’ hopes have failed. Courts may fail these families too.
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Read more: A Lawsuit Involving an Alabama Man and a Fetus Is Particularly Threatening to Reproductive Rights A Lawsuit Involving an Alabama Man and a Fetus Is Particularly Threatening to Reproductive Rights
This troubling decision should worry all those who seek to defend the rights of women in these contexts.
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Read more: Dov Fox on BYU Radio Dov Fox on BYU Radio
Though a booming enterprise, the fertility industry remains distinct from other medical practices: it offers patients little recourse for medical mistakes and misconduct.
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Read more: When Fertility Doctors Use Their Own Sperm, and Families Don’t Find Out for Decades When Fertility Doctors Use Their Own Sperm, and Families Don’t Find Out for Decades
An Idaho U.S. District Court ruled this week that parents can provisionally sue the fertility doctor who, in 1980, used his own sperm to create their daughter—just so long as their claims aren’t barred by the many years that have passed since the alleged misconduct that DNA tests substantiate. The daughter—now almost 40—discovered the fraud…
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Read more: Silver Spoons and Golden Genes: Designing Inequality? Silver Spoons and Golden Genes: Designing Inequality?
A recent web series sparked controversy with the headline that “Designer babies aren’t futuristic. They’re already here.” The online articles make the case that disparate access to frozen embryo screening for debilitating diseases—sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs, or cystic fibrosis—is “designing inequality into our genes.” The authors are right that reproductive technology isn’t open to everyone….
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Read more: Should courts treat destroyed embryos as “lost property” or “wrongful death”? Should courts treat destroyed embryos as “lost property” or “wrongful death”?
Bill of Health contributors Glenn Cohen and Dov Fox were featured in this week’s news coverage of novel claims related to recent freezer malfunctions at two major fertility clinics. A class-action suit by one Ohio couple who lost their embryos asks the court to afford embryos standing to use and declare that life begins at…