Renowned bioethics scholar, longtime University of Texas Law Professor, and frequent Bill of Health contributor John A. Robertson has recently passed away. We at the Petrie-Flom Center mourn his passing, and our Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen writes a few words: I saw John roughly a month ago at the Baby Markets Roundtable at UT Austin. He…
By John A. Robertson Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (WWH) is the most important abortion case since Casey in 1992, and a major setback for the anti-choice movement. By allowing courts to weigh the importance of the health benefits of a regulation, it will most likely invalidate most TRAP laws, which usually only marginally advance…
By Dov Fox The landmark abortion decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt eclipsed quieter reproductive rights news out of the Supreme Court at the end of its term. It involves a couple’s claim that the Tennessee Supreme Court violated their equal protection rights by refusing to recognize “disruption of family planning as either an independent cause of action or element…
By Dov Fox Everything went fine the last time for Melissa Cook, when the 48-year old mother of four carried a child for a family back in 2013 to supplement her office job salary. This time was different. First were the triplets. She had been impregnated with three embryos, created using eggs from a 20-something donor and…
[Cross posted at the OUPBlog] By John A. Robertson The birth of a healthy child in Sweden in October, 2014 after a uterus transplant from a living donor marked the advent of a new technique to help women with absent or non-functional uteruses to bear genetic offspring. The Cleveland Clinic has now led American doctors into…
By John A. Robertson [also published on Balkinization] The Fifth Circuit decision in Whole Women’s Health v. Cole upholding Texas’ law requiring all abortions, including medication abortions, to be performed in a licensed ambulatory surgical center (ASC) by doctors with admitting privileges at nearby hospitals seems outrageous on several counts. It defies a medical consensus…
By John A. Robertson Anti-abortion groups have found another way to limit previously legal abortions. Building on the analysis in Gonzales v. Carhart, the 2007 case upholding the federal partial birth abortion law, Kansas has now prohibited “dismemberment” of fetuses. This law would ban dilatation and evacuation (D&E) of the uterus by banning piecemeal removal…
By John A. Robertson Nonmedical sex selection is a thorny topic. Usually used to favor males, it has harmed women and resulted in sex ratio disparities in India, China, and other nations where son preference is strong. Sex selection is also troubling because it relies on infanticide, abortion, or the discarding of embryos based on…
By John A. Robertson Dr. Jeffrey Ecker, a noted fetal medicine specialist, has an excellent piece on the Munoz case in Texas in a recent NEJM article (“Death in Pregnancy—An American Tragedy”).[1] He shares the widespread view that brain dead pregnant women should not be maintained over the father or family’s objections. He does, however,…
By John A. Robertson, Law School, University of Texas at Austin A new twist on frozen embryo litigation is now before a Dallas probate court facing what to do with 11 frozen embryos after the parents were murdered. They left no will and gave no instructions to the fertility clinic for disposition if they both…
