In his new book The Conscience of Care, Dov Fox explores the concept of medical conscience through controversies around health care services like IVF, IUDs, opioids, gender affirming care, psychedelics, organ transplants, and advance directives.

“We’re used to hearing about conscientious refusers: physicians and pharmacists whose moral convictions lead them to deny a range of treatments that they deem sinful or wrong,” Fox writes. “Less familiar in public discourse are those medical professionals who have weighty reasons of their own for supplying treatment in ways that state law or institutional policy forbids. Call them conscientious providers.”

In conversation with Petrie-Flom Center Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen, Fox will consider how the law is set up to protect conscientious refusers more than conscientious providers. 

Join us for the one-hour, lunchtime discussion at Harvard Law School.

Lunch will be provided to registered attendees.

This event is open to HUID holders only.

(Note: There will also be a livestreamed keynote by Professor Fox the day before. We encourage people to tune in!)

This event is co-sponsored by the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics.

Speakers

Dov Fox is Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he has been named Herzog Endowed Scholar for exceptional scholarship and teaching. He also won BIOCOM’s Life Science Catalyst Award for “significant contributions to human health through research, discovery, and entrepreneurship.”

I. Glenn Cohen is the Petrie-Flom Center Faculty Director, and James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, and Deputy Dean at Harvard Law School. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called “medical ethics”) and the law, as well as health law.

This event is organized by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University