Authors

Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a renowned scholar, advocate, and author who has devoted her career to uplifting the voices, social conditions, and rights of women and children around the globe. A widely cited legal authority in constitutional law, health law, and women’s rights, her writings have been consulted by courts, legislators, government agencies, and civil society organizations. She has advised or given testimony before Congress and state governments as well as the United States’ Uniform Law Commission on privacy, the regulation of the human body, and reproductive health.

Gun Violence: A Public Health Concern?

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By Michele Goodwin

Posted from Amsterdam

I was in India when the tragic news hit; 26 people dead–20 of them children in a massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012.   In India, NGOs struggle with ending violence against women and children. Acid tossed in the faces of women by scorned boyfriends is not uncommon nor the increasing, random acts of slitting women’s throats on trains.  Sensational it may seem to us; but very real for women in Mumbai and Bihar.  In fact, the day before learning of the tragedy in Connecticut, Delhi officials announced the hiring of thousands of guards to deploy at 548 elementary schools in South Delhi amid reports of rapes and molestations of little girls who are followed, harassed, and in too many cases harmed on their way home after leaving school.  The government’s response comes on the heels of parents threatening to remove their daughters from school.

In that country and others, broad scale violence is understood as more than a national problem; it is a social and public health problem. In cases of sexual violence and the externalities that result, including sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies, the public health component may be more visible to those of us in the West.  However, the public health indicators extend physical health problems; violence causes emotional and psychological trauma.  The mental health component of public health must be better understood.  Americans who live in gang infested communities, where violence seems almost endless and difficult to escape, understand this all too well as their kids experience anxieties closer to post traumatic stress disorder as part of their daily lives.

The Newtown shootings offer a moment for reflection on the lives lost and also our nation’s first principles and commitments.  Perhaps this will be a time to consider gun control beyond a very divided constitutional law debate to also understand its public health dimensions.  Who benefits from current policies?  Who are those harmed?  Physical wounds do heal, but the mental health traumas, grief, and anxieties often take a lifetime to manage and overcome.

Third World Reproductive Health Outcomes

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By Michele Goodwin

The most sophisticated medical technologies are available in the United States.  The luxury afforded elite health care consumers is best captured by “executive health care” and “personalized” medicines.  Given the tailored health care afforded top-tier health care consumers, consciously or unconsciously those at the other end of the spectrum might be overlooked.

For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report this year that places some US states in the range of Third World countries for health outcomes with mothers and babies.   The report,  Infant Mortality Statistics From the 2008 Period Linked Birth/Infant Death Data Set, exposes a sad reality; race disparities persist in medicine.   The neonatal mortality rate of African Americans is about 2.5 times that of whites.  What’s more—class matters.  But here’s the interesting part.  Class matters at both ends of the scale.

The report exposes how Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, leads the nation in babies that will die before reaching their first birthday.   According data collected by CNN, “for every 1,000 Mississippi babies born in 2011, 9.4 died before their first birthday.”  One reporter found that such data “makes Mississippi’s infant mortality rate more comparable to countries such as Costa Rica (9.2), Sri Lanka (9.5) and Botswana (10.5) than the United States (6.0).”  The common answer to the challenges of infant mortality looks toward poverty—and in part such analysis is right.  However, wealth matters too and sophisticated reproductive choices can lead to dangerous outcomes.  One of the leading causes of infant mortality is womb-crowding caused by multiple gestations, which has dramatically increased as a byproduct of assisted reproductive technologies.  Those who can afford these sophisticated technologies are usually upper-income individuals, who can afford the multiple rounds of treatments, which are usually required before a pregnancy results.  In fact, ART related births are associated with the 100-fold increase in higher order births in the United States.  Low birth-weight, one of the leading causes of infant distress, is a common feature of multiple births—as are pre-term deliveries.  As we think about solutions to these challenge public health concerns, it will be important to look at both ends of the socio-economic scale.

Taking Allegations of Child Abuse Seriously: Former Penn State President Spanier Charged

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By Michele Goodwin

Penn State’s former president, Graham Spanier, is the latest person to be charged in the fallout involving Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys on the Penn State campus.  A year ago, I blogged about Spanier’s curiously timed defense of his former staff members following the horrific allegations involving the former, popular football coach.

Jerry Sandusky’s crimes are deplorable. He was convicted of molesting boys from a charity he helped to found (Second Mile) and will serve 30-60 years in prison; he will likely die there.  Yet no less problematic were Spanier’s statements immediately following the release of the grand jury’s presentment.  Last year, the statement released by Spanier could only be described as cavalier and irresponsible.  Spanier claimed that the perjury charges against his former athletic director, Timothy Curley, and Gary Schultz, his senior vice president for finance and business, were “groundless,” and that he has “complete confidence in how they… handled the allegations” against Sandusky.  Stunning.

Remember the grand jury report?  Schultz said that the allegations were “not that serious” and that he and his colleague “had no indication that a crime had occurred.”  What we know now from the Freeh Report is that there were emails between Spanier, Curley, and Schultz about allegations of Sandusky’s showers with boys in the Penn State football locker room. Spanier claims that there may have been emails that he received, but he can’t remember them.  He told Jeffrey Toobin in a New Yorker article: “I was apparently copied on two emails…I didn’t reply to them.”  A few years later, Michael McQuery (a former graduate student) reported witnessing Sandusky sexually abusing a child in the shower; he also testified before the grand jury.

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The Absurd Consequences of Statutory Rape Law

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By Michele Goodwin

Across the country, children under the age of fourteen are being convicted of rape for engaging in consensual sex with children of similar age.  In Utah, a child who commits “more than five ‘separate acts’ of sexual touching,” can be prosecuted for “aggravated sexual abuse of a child.” In South Dakota, a minor can be adjudicated a delinquent and guilty of first degree rape for one act of sexual penetration, regardless of consent.  Wisconsin’s law reads similarly.  To be clear, I am not referring to the Romeo and Juliet cases (the male is 18 and the girl is 16).  No, I’m speaking of children as young as eleven.  These adolescent violators now end up on sex offender registries—some for life.  In some states, including Utah, adolescent fondling is considered sexual abuse of a child as are: attempts to touch the buttocks, breasts, or “intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire…”  Even consenting children will always be deemed “victims” in states that take this approach.

In 2011, J.L. was adjudicated a delinquent, charged with first-degree rape, and convicted under the South Dakota statutory rape statute.  J.L. had no prior convictions, nor other violations of the law that might suggest a propensity for crime, violence, or danger to the community.  Indeed, the first degree rape conviction did not stem from a violent, coercive sexual encounter with an adolescent, rape of an adult woman, or from forced sex with a child or infant.  Rather, according to the South Dakota Supreme Court, J.L., who was fourteen, “engaged in consensual sexual intercourse with his girlfriend [], who was twelve,” and only fifteen months his junior.  Ironically, in the state of South Dakota, J.L.’s conviction will result in legal and extra-legal penalties far more severe than that of an adult rapist who commits a sexually violent act against a college peer, a random woman, or during the commission of another crime.

For all the recent controversy about rape, its legal and political definitions, politicians have ignored the uneven, punitive punishments resulting from statutory rape laws’ harsh application against minors who fornicate with minors.  Indeed, no coherent framework has been offered by politicians that respond pragmatically to the empirical realities of adolescent sexuality.  Neither federal nor state legislatures offer a coherent, well articulated approach to militate against the harshest criminal punishments demanded by statutory rape provisions and sex offender registries.

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Reproductive Politics

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By Michele Goodwin

In recent months, women’s reproduction has been in the spotlight.  A few weeks ago, the Republican Party adopted an anti-abortion platform calling for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion and making no exception for victims in cases of incest, rape, or to save the woman’s life.  Ironically, some of the very same party leaders responsible for drafting the amendment issued demands for the Missouri Congressman, Todd Akin, to resign or step aside in a hotly contested Senate race after he made controversial claims that “legitimate” rapes rarely result in pregnancies.

As the gender war plays out in high profile ways, we should be aware that abortion politics is not the only area in which women’s reproductive rights are closely scrutinized and under threat of political attack.  Relatively little attention has focused on the pernicious on-the-ground forms of criminal policing targeted at pregnant women across America.

Since the late 1980s, state legislatures have enacted criminal feticide laws that now ensnare women for a broad range of activities, including falling down steps, suffering drug addiction, refusing cesarean sections, or attempting suicide. For example, in 2010 Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed into law the “Criminal Homicide and Abortion Revisions Act,” which specifically applies to miscarriages and other fetal harms that result from “knowing acts” committed by women.  A prior version of the bill drafted by state legislator Carl Wimmer authorized life imprisonment for pregnant women who engage in reckless behavior during pregnancy that could result in miscarriage and stillbirth.  Arkansas, Florida, Minnesota, and some other states define child abuse as intentional or neglectful harm to the fetus.

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The Body Snatchers: Human Recycling in The Global Age

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By Michele Goodwin

For all the attention by legal scholars, doctors, and politicians to the global organ shortage—and particularly the crisis in the United States, relatively little is said about tissue demand and that supply industry.  Well known are the horrific stories involving black markets specializing in organs like kidneys and livers.  The troubling stories of Indian women, Pakistani men, and Brazilian boys pillaged for parts and left suffering with grotesque scars, owing debts, and in medical need are chronicled by a growing chorus of scholars (see here, here, and here).  Even those of us who support incentives to encourage organ donation strongly oppose human rights abuses paraded as free markets.  What scholars continually overlook, however, are the surreptitious, global tissue trades that effect more people and have the potential to cause greater harm, such as diseased tissues, bones, and other body parts entering the stream of US commerce and transplantation.

Several years ago, I presaged some of these problems and wrote about these issues; one of the articles can be found here.  More recently, an international consortium of journalist have come on board with an eye-opening special report, revealing black markets in Europe for human tissues and bones.  Their story begins in the Ukraine, where earlier this year security guards discovered body parts and skin stuffed into coolers, and envelopes filled with cash–transported on a “grimy white minibus.”  Authorities stumbled onto this body part heist thinking that a mass-murder had been uncovered. To their surprise, the bus and its contents were headed off to Germany before shipment of the parcels to Korea, the US and other countries.

On its own, tissue transplantation makes as much sense as organ transplantation, because they help to improve patients’ quality of life and in some instances may be vital to saving lives, such as heart valve transplants.  The problem is that the dark-side of this industry operates nefariously.  Sometimes this includes pillaging parts from cadavers dead from communicable diseases such as HIV and hepatitis or acquiring tissues through illegal means, or mislabeling parts—claiming that body parts are from Germany, when in fact they are from developing countries.  Often companies that trade on stock exchanges are linked to the darker side.  For example, investigators discovered that a US business, RTI, located in Florida is linked to the Ukraine discovery.  As Dr. Martin Zizi remarked to reporters, “once a [body part] is in the European Union, it can be shipped to the U.S. with few questions asked…They assume you’ve done the quality check, [but] we are more careful with fruit and vegetables than with body parts.”

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