By Jaime S. King On March 26, 2013, North Dakota Governor, Jack Dalrymple, signed into law two of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bills. The first, HB 1456, prohibits providers from performing an abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks gestation (Fetal Heartbeat Ban). The second,…
By John Robertson The meeting at Rutgers-Camden on convergences and divergences between abortion and assisted reproduction (to use Glenn Cohen’s term) was stimulating and interesting on many fronts. To pick up on one such issue, must physicians who reduce pregnancies to twins or singletons comply with state regulations for abortion? Many of us thought that they…
By Kimberly Mutcherson On Friday, April 5, a group of almost 30 (mostly legal) scholars gathered at Rutgers Law-Camden to have difficult conversations about abortion and assisted reproduction. The event, sponsored by Rutgers Law and the Law School Initiative of the Center for Reproductive Rights (https://reproductiverights.org/en/our-work/law-school-initiative) sought to initiate discussion about the seeming gulf between…
Dov Fox has an interesting new piece up at HuffPo examining the constitutionality of the abortion restrictions just enacted in North Dakota: As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in the same-sex marriage cases, North Dakota enacted three of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. Two of them are unlike any ever considered…
By Michele Goodwin The Family, Privacy, Secrets, & The Law Roundtable (March 7-8. 2013) was a great success. Kudos to the brilliant presenters and commentators who came together for this important, groundbreaking session, including Lori Andrews, Glenn Cohen, June Carbone, Laura Rosenbury, Camille Gear Rich, Martha Field, Deborah Epstein, Martha Ertman, Gaia Bernstein, Taunya Banks,…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a new column up discussing the surrogacy agreement gone awry (noted by Judy Daar below) in which a surrogate was offered $10K to abort the fetus upon discovery of abnormalities. Take a look. We’ve also had other discussions of this issue at Bill of Health, from Dov Fox’s recent…
By Judith Daar A recent news item about a gestational carrier who refused a $10,000 bribe from the intended parents to abort a fetus with severe abnormalities has stirred debate about the allocation of fundamental rights when reproduction is shared among multiple parties. Though surrogacy and abortion are rarely aligned, the pregnancy-inducing act of hiring…
By Dov Fox Having a child is hard work. It can be especially taxing—“physically, emotionally, and of course, financi[]ally, to bring a child with [disabilities] . . . into the world and raise it,” as commentators have noted in response to an earlier version of this piece that Chris Griffin and I wrote yesterday on…
By Michelle Meyer I woke this morning to the very sad news that legal philosopher and NYU law professor Ronald Dworkin died in London early this morning of leukemia, at the age of 81. I’m not sure whether his illness was well known to those within the legal academy, but it came as news to…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch For an excellent perspective on the legal challenges to the contraceptives coverage mandate being brought by for-profit, secular companies with religious owners, check out Bill Keller’s recent NYT op-ed. A brief snippet: “Also, courts tend to distinguish between laws that make you do something and laws that merely require a financial…
