Category: Dov Fox

Parenthood Bill for Known Donors in California

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By Dov Fox

Naomi Cahn and June Carbone have a timely and thoughtful new op-ed in tomorrow’s L.A. Times that considers the evolving social and genetic dimensions of legal parenthood in the context of assisted reproduction. When many of the rules that govern sperm donation were enacted in the decade after Roe v. Wade, donors were presumed to be unknown to, and uninterested in knowing, the woman or resulting child. Today, however, donors are sometimes friends or lovers who want to assume a parenthood role at some point after the child is born, even if they didn’t think they would when they gave up their gametes to conceive him or her. How should the law approach such claims?

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End the Ban on Blood Donation by Gay Men

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By Dov Fox

86 members of the U.S. Congress have requested an end to the federal policy that prevents men who have had sex with men from giving blood. Advances in blood screening technology have discredited the medical justification for this exclusion. And our country’s current critical blood shortage makes it dangerous for public health.

The antidiscrimination objection is more complicated. The policy wasn’t born of illicit motivations and doesn’t seriously disadvantage gay men. That it doesn’t reflect bad intentions or effects, does not, however, vindicate the policy on equality grounds. The blanket exclusion, independent of individual risk levels, reflects a disparaging stereotype that gay men are sexually promiscuous or use illegal drugs, I argued in an op-ed last week. I have elsewhere called this objectionable social meaning the expressive dimension of donor deferral.

Secretary Sebelius should answer the congressional plea to end our exclusionary blood donation policy. In the meantime, those who already enjoy the opportunity to help save lives can serve the causes of public health and social equality by making an appointment to give today.

Fox discussed in The Atlantic article on Brain Imaging and the Right to Silence

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A new article in The Atlantic, “Could the Government Get a Search Warrant for Your Thoughts?: Why remain silent if they can just read your mind?“, cites Bill of Health blogger Dov Fox’s research on brain imaging.

Last year, a Maryland man on trial for murdering his roommate tried to introduce results from an fMRI-based lie detection test to bolster his claim that the death was a suicide. The court ruled the test results inadmissible, noting that the “fMRI lie detection method of testing is not yet accepted in the scientific community.” In a decision last year to exclude fMRI lie detection test results submitted by a defendant in a different case, the Sixth Circuit was even more skeptical, writing that “there are concerns with not only whether fMRI lie detection of ‘real lies’ has been tested but whether it can be tested.”

So far, concerns regarding reliability have kept thought-inferring brain measurements out of U.S. (but not foreign) courtrooms. But is technology the only barrier? Or, if more mature, reliable brain scanning methods for detecting truthfulness and reading thoughts are developed in the future, could they be employed not only by defendants hoping to demonstrate innocence but also by prosecutors attempting to establish guilt? Could prosecutors armed with a search warrant compel an unwilling suspect to submit to brain scans aimed at exploring his or her innermost thoughts?

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Fox on DNA Forensic Error and the Execution of Innocents

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By Dov Fox

Willie Jerome Manning, a 44-year-old black man, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday for the 1992 kidnapping and murder of white college students Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller in Mississippi. No physical evidence has ever linked Manning to the crime. And the Justice Department has just come clean that the forensic science used to prosecute Manning was fundamentally flawed.

A jury convicted Manning almost 20 years ago based on three kinds of circumstantial evidence. First was the testimony of his cousin and a jailhouse informant who claimed that he confessed the crime to them. The cousin had accused two other men before Manning, however, and the informant has since recanted altogether. Second were Steckler’s jacket, ring, and CD player from his car that Manning was arrested for trying to sell. Manning told police from the beginning that he had acquired the stolen property from someone he didn’t know.

Critical to the prosecution’s case was the last piece of evidence against Manning: expert testimony by an FBI agent that African American hair fragments were found in Miller’s car. Not only did DNA and fingerprints found at the crime scene never incriminate Manning himself, however. Two days ago, the Justice Department notified Manning’s lawyer and the County District Attorney that “testimony containing erroneous statements regarding microscopic hair comparison analysis was used in this case.” Federal officials have yet to detail the precise errors involved, but made clear in their letter that the FBI’s forensic evidence was unsound not least because it “exceeded the limits of science” at the time.

Keep reading… 

Fox on “The Flawed Logic of Prenatal Discrimination”

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Dov Fox has an interesting new piece up at HuffPo examining the constitutionality of the abortion restrictions just enacted  in North Dakota:

As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in the same-sex marriage cases, North Dakota enacted three of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. Two of them are unlike any ever considered by U.S. courts.

One bans abortion wholesale after a fetal heartbeat is “detectable” (as early as six weeks into a pregnancy), unless termination would save the woman’s life. The other law forbids any abortion that’s sought on the basis of fetal sex or genetic anomaly, even fatal ones.

Both laws should be struck down as unconstitutional. But the selective abortion ban presents new legal questions for supporters of reproductive rights. Indeed, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade declined to insist that a woman “is entitled to terminate her pregnancy . . . for whatever reason she alone chooses.”

 Keep reading…

Cyborg Bugs and Glow-in-the-Dark Cats

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By Dov Fox

That’s what CNN called yesterday’s report with science writer Emily Anthes about her new book, Frankenstein’s Cat, which examines “genetically modified this, or cloned that,” as she put it, or “creatures that combine electronic bits and biological ones.” Wrestling with the ethics of such cases, Anthes explains, “reveals that we’re deeply conflicted about the role that animals play in our lives.” Yet she laments that this tension supplies no satisfying answers to underlying questions like “Is this unnatural?” and would “that make it wrong?”

Our confusion lies, I’ve suggested, in the failure of animal welfare discourse to capture the sense many of us share that animal “nature” has value apart from its happiness or well-being. If its welfare were all that mattered, then we shouldn’t be troubled by animals designed to experience less frustration living in the conditions for which they’re destined. Consider three examples of designer animals that are currently being developed: cows with stunted sentience, less apprehensive of going off to slaughter; chickens that lack nesting instincts, more satisfied to a life confined to laying eggs in a battery cage; and pigs without legs, better suited for a sedentary existence as ham and bacon in potentia.

The dominance of the animal welfare view obscures a reason to resist such creations: to preserve animal integrity. Cows should be able to fear danger, pigs to play in the mud, and chickens to peck about in the sand, according to this view, less because those capacities make the animals happy than because they are integral to an intrinsically valuable way of being. To deprive a cow of its responsiveness, or a pig of its limbs, or a chicken of its proclivity for pecking would, on this account, violate its essential “cowness” or “pigness” or “chickenness,” even if those animals were perfectly content in their designated roles.

For thoughts on why animal nature may indeed be worth preserving, and implications for conventional breeding (e.g., dogs for companionship, or horses for racing), and what all of this  means for designer children and embryonic stem cell research, check out the article.

Fox on Prenatal Genetic Testing

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A front-page story in today’s Sunday Boston Globe quotes Bill of Health blogger Dov Fox on whether the routine use of new prenatal blood testing could “‘bring a tendency to exclude rather than accommodate people whose abilities fail to meet [certain] demands'” of modern society or “‘exert[] social pressure on parents to terminate pregnancy for fear of criticism or reproach from people who regard the[ir] choice [to have a] child with a disability [] as negligent, or irresponsible.'”
If these non-invasive tests (which look at potentially unlimited amounts of fetal DNA) were able to provide genetic information for conditions beyond just sex and health, might we come to think in similar ways about children of “merely” average looks or normal height or ordinary intelligence? Dov explored this question and others in a talk that he gave as a 2006 summer fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center. His article is called Silver Spoons and Golden Genes.

Birth Control for Men?

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By Dov Fox

We’re not talking vasectomies or condoms.

Medical Daily reports that the NIH has awarded a $4.7 million grant to come up with a “Pill” for men. Most previous attempts to develop such contraceptives used testosterone to reduce the number of sperm men produce. This one takes aim at its mobility instead, using a non-hormonal compound that promises fewer side effects, according to scientists. Clinical testing into its safety and efficacy, assuming the FDA grants permission, would take at least five to ten years before the agency could consider approving the drug for use.

The availability of male birth control would make it possible for men and women to share responsibility for contraception. Today, women alone shoulder the considerable physical and other burdens that come with the Pill. And only women enjoy the security that control of its use affords over the likelihood of unwanted pregnancy. Tomorrow, we could even things out a bit. That’d surely be a development worth embracing. Or would it? Sharing responsibility for contraception means leaving it to men to take the necessary measures to prevent the reproductive consequences that in our society fall far more heavily on women.

We might suppose that some such men, who have less at stake than their female partners, would be less vigilant about birth control and forget to take the pill. There is also evidence to suggest that other men might use greater control over conception for abusive purposes. A 2010 study found that 15% percent of respondents women ages 16-29 who sought care in several Northern California family planning clinics reported that their male partners had damaged condoms or otherwise sabotaged their birth control.*

Would birth control for men be cause for celebration, or concern? Would it revolutionize sexual equality, or change little at all?

*This “pregnancy coercion,” as the researchers call it, differs in respect of the gestation, abortion rights, and sex-differentiated social expectations involved from the reverse-gender cases that Glenn Cohen has analyzed in which courts “have imposed legal parenthood [] on fathers deceived into believing that their partners could not conceive” or under circumstances in which “conception took place without meaningful consent.”

The U.S. Should Cover the Cost of IVF (for Gays and Lesbians Too)

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By Dov Fox

Glenn Cohen and I make the case in this morning’s Huffington Post:

This week the United Kingdom joined the ranks of countries like Canada, Israel, and Sweden that provide in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment to citizens under a certain age (42 in the U.K.) who can’t have children without it. That includes gays and lesbians. When it comes to helping people form the families they long for, the United States is woefully behind. The U.S. has among the lowest rates of IVF usage of any developed country in the world, owing in part to boasting the highest cost for the procedure, on average $100,000 for each successful pregnancy.

Among the handful of states that require insurers to cover IVF, many carve out exclusions for same-sex couples and people who aren’t married. These singles, gays, and lesbians are sometimes called “dysfertile” as opposed to “infertile” to emphasize their social (rather than just biological) obstacles to reproduction. The U.S. should expand IVF coverage for the infertile, and include the dysfertile too.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the inability to reproduce qualifies as a health-impairing disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The commitment to universal health care that we renewed in President Obama’s health reform act invites us to understand the infertile and dysfertile alike as needing medicine to restore a capacity—for “[r]eproduction and the sexual dynamics surrounding it”—that is, in the words of the Supreme Court, “central to the life process itself.”

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