The Petrie-Flom Center invites abstracts for its 2015 Annual Conference: “Law, Religion, and American Health Care.” The conference will be held at Harvard Law School on May 8 and 9, 2014.
This conference, and anticipated edited volume, will aim to: (1) identify the various ways in which law intersects with religion and health care in the United States; (2) understand the role of law in creating or mediating conflict between religion and health care; and (3) explore potential legal solutions to allow religion and health care to simultaneously flourish in a culturally diverse nation.
For a full conference description, including the call for abstracts and registration information, please visit our website.
Abstracts are due by December 1, 2014. The conference seeks to address the following topics. Please note that this list is not meant to be exhaustive; we hope to receive papers related to the conference’s general theme, but not specifically listed here:
- Analysis of the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other federal, state, and local legal provisions that come into play at the intersection between religion and health care
- The Affordable Care Act and employer-based health care coverage, including the contraceptives mandate and related court decisions
- Legal obligations and accommodations of religious health care organizations
- Protection (or not) of health professional conscience
- Health care decision-making for minors with religious parents
- Religious objection v. discriminatory behavior
- Informed consent and information flow, e.g., religious objection to providing certain information, inclusion of religious information in consent disclosures, etc.
- “Medicalization” of religious beliefs, e.g., regulation of homosexual conversion therapy
- Abortion policy, including clinic protests and protections, and its relationship to religion
- Embryonic stem cell policy and its relationship to religion
- End-of-life care, including assisted suicide, and its relationship to religion
- Complicity as both a legal and religious concept
- Comparative analysis, e.g., between professions, health care practices, countries, etc.
