Photo of Susannah Baruch in front of book shelves.

Meet Susannah Baruch: Q&A with the Petrie-Flom Center’s New Executive Director

On June 20th, the Petrie-Flom Center welcomed Susannah Baruch on board as its new Executive Director.

Susannah comes to the Petrie-Flom Center with expertise in reproductive health law policy, genetics, and genomics, and a wealth of experience in nonprofits, academia, and government. We asked Susannah to share a bit about herself and her past work by way of introduction to Bill of Health’s readers.

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

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Doctor wearing glasses listening to female patient.

Physician Free Speech and the Doctor-Patient Relationship Post-Dobbs

By Lynette Martins and Scott Schweikart

Laws regulating physicians’ professional speech – i.e., what they can and cannot discuss in the exam room with patients — have made a resurgence in the post-Dobbs era. These so-called “gag laws” have primarily targeted physicians’ speech around firearms, reproductive rights (predominantly abortion), and, less frequently, conversion therapy.

In the abortion context, these restrictive laws impact not only patient access to critical medical services, but also the fundamental underpinnings of the physician-patient relationship.

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Health insurance application form with money, calculator, and stethoscope.

Going Public – The Future of ART Access Post-Dobbs

By Katherine Kraschel

The loss in Dobbs and the bleak outlook for abortion rights within the federal courts may afford advocates a unique opportunity to fully adopt a reproductive justice framework and apply it to access to fertility care, as other contributors to this symposium have argued.

This article outlines specific strategies for blue states eager to stake a claim in the reproductive justice movement to consider.

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Magazines on wooden table on bright background.

Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy 

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Aviva Wang, andAaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues.

Below are the citations for papers identified from the month of April. The selections feature topics ranging from an analysis of government and industry investments for recently approved drugs, to a discussion of court decisions on mifepristone, and an examination of the added therapeutic benefit associated with the top-selling brand-name drugs in Medicare.

A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

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Fertilized human egg cells dividing.

The Irony of Pro-life Efforts to Grant Embryos Legal Personhood

By Gerard Letterie and Dov Fox

The overruling of Roe v. Wade has emboldened pro-life lawmakers to confer legal personhood status on early-stage embryos outside of pregnancy as well, including in the context of assisted reproduction. Recognizing embryos as legal persons, it is said, promotes a “culture of life.” And yet treating embryos as persons would actually undermine a promotion of human life, in this critical sense: helping people to have the children they want and are otherwise unable to have.

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Austin, TX, USA - Oct. 2, 2021: Participants at the Women's March rally at the Capitol protest SB 8, Texas' abortion law that effectively bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

The Impact of Criminal Abortion Bans on Assisted Reproduction in the Post-Dobbs Landscape

By Yvonne Lindgren

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the constitutional floor that had protected the abortion right for nearly fifty years, and returned the issue of regulating abortion to the states. In the post-Dobbs landscape, thirteen states have banned abortion, either through laws passed after the decision, through trigger laws, or by reviving pre-Roe era abortion bans. As a result of criminalizing abortion, the protective function of medical malpractice law is supplanted by provider and institutional decision-making driven by the imperative to avoid criminal liability and loss of licensure. This essay argues that abortion bans have made all reproductive health care less safe, and that these new pregnancy-related dangers will disproportionately impact assisted reproduction, because those who conceive through assisted reproduction often face a higher risk of complications needing medical intervention, and because women may be reluctant to act as surrogates in light of the heightened risk of pregnancy.

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cell with pipette and needle.

The Impact of Dobbs on Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Does It Matter Where Life Begins?

By Judith Daar

In February 2023, a Louisville lawmaker introduced a bill that would prosecute women for criminal homicide for having an abortion. The Kentucky Prenatal Equal Protection Act, introduced by Republican Representative Emily Callaway, extends the state’s criminal abortion law to pregnant women for any termination not linked to a life-threatening condition or spontaneous miscarriage. Declaring, “innocent human life, created in the image of God, should be equally protected under the laws from fertilization to natural death,” the bill elevates the rights of the unborn over any rights held by the pregnant woman to control her reproductive future. Now sanctioned in a post-Dobbs rational basis world, this bill and others like it pose potential roadblocks to other medical interactions with unborn persons, notably in vitro fertilization (IVF) and related assisted reproductive technologies.

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Washington, DC, USA - December 1, 2021: Abortion rights rally at the Supreme Court, Jackson Women's Health v. Dobbs.

Assisted Reproduction in a Post-Dobbs US

By Chloe Reichel and Seema Mohapatra

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF) face an uncertain future as anti-abortion policymakers and advocates work to restrict access to reproductive care post-Dobbs.

Until last summer, modern ART had been performed in the United States with the Constitutional protection for abortion care in the background. After Dobbs, fertility doctors and patients have begun to realize that strict abortion laws and policies affect not only those who do not wish to continue a pregnancy, but also people who very much desire to have a child.

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