Book Talk: Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law
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
- Dov Fox, Herzog Endowed Scholar, Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics, University of San Diego School of Law
- I. Glenn Cohen, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, Harvard Law School
- Louise P. King, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, Harvard Medical School
- Katherine L. Kraschel, Lecturer in Law, Clinical Lecturer in Law, Research Scholar in Law, and Executive Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy, Yale Law School
Slides
- Dov Fox, “Birth Rights & Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law”
- Louise P. King, “Birth Rights and Wrongs”
- Katherine L. Kraschel, “What Doesn’t Kill Your Tort Only Makes It Stronger — Why Not Regulate, Too?”
Blog Posts
Recording
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.