A recent article in Marie Claire delved into the story of a Cleveland fertility clinic that lost 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos belonging to 950 patients and featured commentary by Bill of Health contributors. In the piece, “When Your Dreams of Motherhood Are Destroyed,” three Bill of Health/Petrie-Flom Center affiliates discussed some of the many legal challenges of this particular case, and others like it.
The story was reported by
When I was a senior in college, after having worked for the Cornell University Police Department for four years, I hosted a town hall meeting to promote and improve the Blue Light Escort Service, a service which most colleges have to give students safe, free late-night walks home by law enforcement or affiliated personnel.
One of the key takeaways of the meeting, as I knew it would be, was that many students were unsure of the relationship of the escort service to enforcement of underage drinking laws: they were scared that if they were drunk underage and called for an escort, they would get in trouble.
This post is, in a sense, about a narrow issue: the effect of the national minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) of 21 on campus law enforcement. More broadly, however, it’s about a specific and often overlooked result of a legal framework that ostensibly-but-not-really makes criminals of the hundreds of thousands of college students who live on their own and are legally considered to be adults, for behavior that virtually all other adults engage in with laws that are virtually but not entirely unenforced.
It’s kind of a weird thing, if you think about it.