Colorado Personhood Version 4.0

By Jonathan F. Will
[Cross-posted at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights.]

This November citizens of Colorado will have an opportunity to vote on a proposed amendment (Amendment 67) to their state constitution that would define the words “person” and “child” in the Colorado Criminal Code and Colorado Wrongful Death Act to include “unborn human beings.”  Similar personhood measures were rejected by a margin of 3-to-1 by Colorado citizens in 2008 and 2010, and a proposal in 2012 failed to receive the requisite signatures to get on the ballot.  Is this version 4.0 all that different?

A New Strategy

In short, the language is different, but not in ways that ought to matter for those concerned about the implications for reproductive rights.  I was initially surprised that a fourth personhood proposal was able to secure enough signatures to get on the ballot when the third measure was not.  After speaking with a reporter from Colorado, it became clear that the strategy this time around was very different.

This most recent personhood effort rode the wave of momentum generated by the 2012 story of a Colorado woman, hit by a drunk driver, who lost her pregnancy in the eighth month of gestation (a boy she had named Brady).  At that time, Colorado did not have a law on the books that permitted the drunk driver to be prosecuted for the death of the fetus.  Amendment 67, advertised as “The Brady Amendment” was offered as a solution, and there was no trouble generating over 100,000 signatures.  Even without Amendment 67, Colorado has since passed a Crimes Against Pregnant Women Act, which criminalizes (with varying degrees of punishment) the termination of a woman’s pregnancy without her consent.  This new law does not define the fetus as a person, expressly permits women to choose to have abortions, and certainly is not considered to go far enough for those in favor of sweeping personhood measures.  Amendment 67 was thus still viewed to be necessary by some. Read More

Research Assistant III: Work with Professors Eyal, Hammitt, Freedberg, Kuritzkes, and collaborators on HIV cure studies’ risks, risk perceptions, and ethics

The research assistant will work with the principal investigator Nir Eyal and collaborators from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Duke University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as the ACTG HIV trial site network. The multidisciplinary team uses methods of clinical epidemiology, economics, simulation modeling, and normative theory to predict risks in early-phase HIV cure studies, assess how much likely candidates for participation understand those risks, and make ethical recommendations on the conduct of HIV cure studies.

The research assistant will help prepare, conduct and analyze a pilot survey expected to take place in a US site of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). The survey will assess perceptions of HIV cure and of cure study risks. The research assistant will also promote other research and grant-related activities, through literature reviews and assistance in the preparation of abstract, poster, and manuscripts for publication, grant applications, a simple project website (using Harvard’s user-friendly OpenScholar platform), and slides for lectures and seminars. The research assistant will be in touch with top researchers in HIV cure, medical decision making, and ethics from around the country, to facilitate our meetings, a workshop, and regular conversations to plan the research and debate ethical issues around early-phase HIV cure studies.

For the full job ad:
https://jobs.brassring.com/1033/asp/tg/cim_jobdetail.asp?partnerID=25240&siteID=5341&AReq=33776BR

Ethics of experimental Ebola interventions

By Annette Rid

In “Ethical considerations of experimental interventions in the Ebola outbreak“, published yesterday by The Lancet, Zeke Emanuel and I discuss what we take to be the key ethical questions about the use of Zmapp and other investigational agents in the current Ebola epidemic. In essence, we argue that the national and international response to the epidemic should focus on containment and strengthening health systems, rather than experimental treatments and vaccines; that experimental interventions, if they are used, should be distributed fairly and only in the context of clinical trials; and that advance planning is needed for research in future Ebola and other epidemics, as well as for making any proven interventions against Ebola accessible in affected regions.

The full article is available open access. Be sure to check out the Lancet’s new Ebola Resource Centre as well, which includes many other interesting pieces and a podcast (access here podcast) covering—among other things—our paper.