Visiting Researcher
Fall 2019

During her time at the Petrie-Flom Center, Kathleen Hammond was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Research Group on Health and Law at McGill University’s Faculty of Law where she was exploring fertility clinic policies surrounding consent for social egg freezing and the disposition of preserved eggs. Her research interests are in health and family law, medical and legal sociology, bioethics, and gender. Her work explores infertility, assisted reproductive technologies, and their resulting markets and regulation. In particular, she specializes in the areas of egg donation, surrogacy, and egg freezing. While at the Petrie-Flom Center, she is working on a book project stemming from her qualitative research on Canadian-American egg transactions.

Katie completed her PhD in Sociology with the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge as a Commonwealth Trust scholar, and an MPhil in Gender Studies (also cantab) as a Gates Cambridge scholar. She also holds Civil and Common law degrees from McGill University Law School. She has held a number of fellowships, including with the Fondation Brocher in Geneva, Switzerland; the Embryo Project at the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University; and the Marine Biological History Project in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She has been involved with policy development in the area of reproduction for organizations such as the World Health Organization, where she was involved with organizing and consulted for the WHO’s first ever glossary and guidelines on infertility.

Her work has been have published in a number of periodicals including Anthropology & Medicine, the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, the Dalhousie Law Journal, and the Canadian Journal of Family Law. She is also active in the media on issues surrounding reproduction, motherhood, and health law.