By Ana Santos Rutschman
What can the New York City Marathon experience teach those reflecting on ways to increase equity in the transnational allocation of scarce vaccine doses?
Quite a lot, it turns out. I explore this analogy in a recently published article in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (JLME), Increasing Equity in the Transnational Allocation of Vaccines Against Emerging Pathogens: A Multi-Modal Approach.
By Marie-Amélie George
A tweet turned Luna Younger’s personal struggle into a national controversy. Using 148 characters, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services would be investigating the seven-year-old’s family. Prompting his declaration was a jury’s award of custody to Luna’s mother, Anne Georgulas, a pediatrician who supported Luna’s gender transition. A year before the case made its way into court, Luna had asked her parents to call her Luna, rather than her (traditionally male) legal name, to reflect her gender identity. That same year, a therapist diagnosed Luna with gender dysphoria, which is distress from the mismatch between a person’s assigned sex at birth and their gender identity. As a result, medical professionals recommended that Luna be referred to as “she” and be allowed to wear the feminine clothing and keep the long hair that she preferred. Luna’s father, Jeffrey Younger, registered his objection to Luna’s gender identity by shaving her head, even as he allowed Luna’s twin brother to maintain his locks. Georgulas petitioned for an order prohibiting her ex-husband from “engaging in non-affirming behavior and/or taking Luna outside the home as [her birth name], or allowing others to do so.” Jeffrey Younger counterclaimed for sole legal custody.
By Mary Ziegler
As Joanna Wuest writes, the role played by science in the LGBTQ+ movement “is at once a celebratory and cautionary story.” Something similar could be said of struggles over reproductive rights in the half century since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.
Today, after decades of staying on the sidelines, physicians have once again been at the forefront of struggles over abortion, launching a ballot initiative in Ohio, bringing lawsuits, and speaking against state criminal bans. Physicians’ investment in the struggle — and the scientific arguments they bring to bear — seem like a possible turning point in future struggles over reproductive rights and justice. After all, medical professionals have both special expertise and political capital that could make a difference at a time when disapproval of abortion bans is already high.
But history suggests that arguments based on science have played a far messier role in struggles over reproductive rights. As often as scientific evidence has advanced reproductive rights, abortion foes have used claims about scientific uncertainty to justify new restrictions — and have harnessed claims of biological difference to assert that there is no connection between sex equality and abortion.
By Natasha Hammond-Browning
Uterus transplantation first hit the headlines in 2014, with the birth of the first baby born following a uterus transplant. This first birth in Sweden has led to trials worldwide. Most recently, in August 2023, the United Kingdom saw its first uterus transplant. In the United States, the University of Alabama (UAB) Medicine uterus transplant program is the first program to offer uterus transplantation outside of a clinical trial, and the first birth in that program was in May 2023.
While recent estimates of future uterus transplants are relatively small — for instance, Womb Transplant UK estimates that between 20-30 uterus transplants could be performed annually — the increasing number of uterus transplant recipients should not be ignored. In particular, questions of access and the workplace rights of those undergoing this surgery are important to consider. This post will briefly lay out some of the issues that may arise for potential recipients and their partners in the workplace.
By Joanna Wuest
“Medical uncertainty” is no straightforward matter when it comes to LGBTQ+ health and civil rights. Take for instance the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals 2020 decision striking down a pair of municipal ordinances in Florida that had banned so-called “conversion therapy” for minors (contemporary psychology’s preferred nomenclature is “sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts”). In an enormous blow to the evidence-based notion that such change efforts are harmful — they are indeed responsible for much trauma and death — two Trump-appointed judges declared that the science of sexual orientation and gender identity was much too uncertain to justify the bans. Gesturing to the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) renowned 1973 removal of homosexuality from its list of disorders, the judges explained that “it is not uncommon for professional organizations to do an about-face in response to new evidence or new attitudes.” Ergo, because the APA had changed its mind once fifty years ago, it may just as easily reverse itself again. According to this view, we may one day wake up to find that mental health professionals have reclassified queerness as a malady to be cured rather than a sense of self to be embraced and protected by law.
By Zaina Mahmoud and Kirsty Horsey
At the end of March 2023, the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission published their joint Report, Building Families Through Surrogacy: A New Law, outlining recommendations for a new regulatory regime governing surrogacy in the UK, including a new route to (legal) parenthood for intended parents (IPs), referred to as “the new pathway” (para 1.10). Chapter 15 of the Report provides an overview of the consequential impact of surrogacy on other areas of law — most relevantly here, employment law.
By Elizabeth Chloe Romanis and Sabrina Germain
For people in England and Wales needing access to fertility treatment, economic barriers can be a huge hurdle. There are the direct costs of the treatment (some, but not all, of which are covered by the National Health Service). But there are also the less visible indirect costs associated with accessing these treatments. These include needing time off work to attend appointments, funding travel to and from fertility clinics, and having access to spaces at work to store and administer medication and take private phone calls. Indirect costs limit access to fertility treatment for structurally disadvantaged individuals in England and Wales. It is for this reason that a Private Member’s Bill currently being debated in the House of Commons, the Fertility Treatment (Employment Rights) Bill, which seeks to introduce fertility leave in the UK, should be welcomed (see earlier posts in this symposium by Dafni Lima and Manna Mostaghim).
Introducing a formal entitlement to “allow employees to take time off from work for appointments for fertility treatment; and for connected purposes” is a step in the right direction. We offer an intersectional reading of the Fertility Treatment (Employment Rights) Bill and consider how the benefits offered are likely to be stratified along class, race, sexuality, and gender lines. The Bill is well-meaning and highlights the critical issue of indirect barriers to fertility treatment in the workplace, but it is inattentive to structural issues affecting marginalized people experiencing infertility.
By Alma Beltrán y Puga
Is Barbie feminist? Is Greta Gerwig’s script based on ideas of gender equality? The movie is certainly appreciated for promoting a global discussion on feminist ideas and gender roles. But answering these questions is complicated. Barbie opens in a version of a feminist utopia: a world where women are rulers and men servants. These inverted political gender roles are based on radical feminist theories that consider women’s liberation will only be possible when feminist values, such as care and dialogue, are taken seriously, and women in power embrace them. However, Barbie Land is a portrait of this feminist fantasy with too much pink and a very basic liberal idea of the State: civil and political rights are the fundamental rights of society.
By Manna Mostaghim
Fertility leave — employer-sanctioned time off for fertility treatment appointments — is becoming a feature of modern employment relationships in the UK. Some public and private sector employers in the UK have fertility leave policies within their organizations; however, currently there is no “statutory right to time off for fertility appointments” in UK law. As of March 20th, 2023, a private members’ bill (the Fertility Treatment (Employment Rights) Bill) has had its second reading in the House of Commons to codify the right for employers to be required to “allow employees to take time off from work for appointments for fertility treatment.” But, as it stands, employees in the UK still require the beneficent support of their employers to receive support and fertility leave in their workplaces.
By Yael Hashiloni-Dolev and Nitzan Rimon-Zarfaty
In 2009, Israel was one of the first countries to authorize social egg freezing, before it was declared non-experimental.
Israel is a highly pronatalist familistic society with relatively high marriage rates, low divorce rates, and the highest birth rate among OECD countries. Israeli pronatalism frames the favorable Israeli approach to fertility medicine and preservation. Currently, egg freezing is used for both medical and social reasons, and for transgender men.
Israeli policy views social egg freezing as primarily enabling, based on liberal ideology, “individual autonomy.”
Indeed, on one hand, social egg freezing has been praised as a revolutionary solution for women’s age-related fertility decline, thus providing women with liberating opportunities. On the other hand, it has been criticized for as oriented toward women’s bodies rather than toward taking away social obstacles to their full participation in the labor market and society in general. Giant corporations such as Apple and Facebook have offered funding for social egg freezing to their female employees while provoking ongoing bioethical and public debates regarding their implications, including; medicalization, (dis)empowerment, “appropriate” motherhood, medical risks, and success rates. This post considers these debates with a focus on the Israeli context.