By Susannah Baruch
Concerned about privacy protections for pregnancy- and abortion-related health data in the post-Dobbs environment?
The film Preconceived, premiering at SXSW this week, shines a bright light on anti-abortion “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” (CPCs), including their disturbing take on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
By Hannah Rahim
The regulation of medical assistance in dying (MAID) is drastically different between the U.S. and Canada. Comparing the hasty liberalization of MAID in Canada with the more wary approach of the U.S. can yield important learnings for both countries.
By Joelle Boxer
This month, the Alabama Supreme Court held that the term “children” in a state statute includes embryos, or “extrauterine children.”
As fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization (IVF) involve the creation of multiple embryos, not all of which are implanted, the implications of this ruling could be far-reaching. Four million births each year in the U.S. are via IVF, an important pathway to parenthood for couples with infertility, LGBTQ couples, and single parents.
This article will examine the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic and its consequences for Americans building their families through fertility services.
By Katherine L. Kraschel
Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court called frozen embryos created via in vitro fertilization (IVF) “extrauterine children” and referred to the cryotanks where they are stored as “cryogenic nurser(ies).” The Court sided with couples who claim the accidental destruction of frozen embryos created through IVF and cryopreserved ought to be treated equally to the death of a child.
The case, LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, involves plaintiffs seeking punitive damages from an Alabama fertility clinic for the “wrongful death” of their embryos that were destroyed when a patient in the hospital where they were stored removed them from the cryotank. While the lower Alabama Courts concluded that the cryopreserved embryos were not a person or child under the state’s law, the Alabama Supreme Court disagreed and held that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” and that the plaintiff’s wrongful death claims could proceed.
Thoughtful scholars have argued that existing state laws do not sufficiently redress mistakes and accidents that occur in the process of fertility care, pregnancy, and birth. However, the ends do not justify the means in this case; likening frozen embryos to children is not a legally sound mechanism to hold fertility clinics accountable for negligently storing embryos. It illustrates how sympathetic stories can be used to further the agendas of those who seek to equate embryos and fetuses to “people” under the law and undercut the critical role modern fertility care plays in (re)defining the bonds that create families, and particularly, many LGBTQ+ and single parent families.
Specifically, lawmaking in fertility care stands to fuel the movement to create fetal personhood rights and a federal abortion ban. It may also signify an inflection point in regulating assisted reproduction reminiscent of pre-Dobbs targeted restrictions on abortion provider (TRAP) laws that sought to limit abortion provision by imposing restrictions. TRAP laws’ new sibling – targeted restrictions on IVF Provision – or TRIP laws, as I call them, stand to rob patients of their ability to build their families by compelling physicians to provide less effective, more expensive care. TRIP laws will erect barriers and exacerbate long standing racial disparities in accessing fertility care, and they will disproportionately impact members of the LGBTQ+ community who wish to build families through fertility treatments. The Alabama decision is severe, but it should serve as a warning to state legislators with a new responsibility to safeguard reproductive health care without the floor of Roe’s protections – proceed with extreme care and regard for “unintended” consequences of regulating fertility care. Read More
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
Addressing the opioid crisis cannot stop at providing better access to treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), expanding and enhancing harm reduction efforts, and reimagining the role of law enforcement, as explored previously in this blog series. The response must go further to make treatment and harm reduction more effective, by acknowledging the opioid epidemic as a reflection of the conditions of the whole society, identifying those conditions, and addressing them head-on. A whole-person response to OUD and other substance use disorders needs a well-coordinated whole-of-government response to address myriad societal issues that are critical to effective drug treatment, including, but not limited to, housing, education, economic development, and tax policy.
By Neşe Devenot
Since the 2022 publication of “Preparing for the Bursting of the Psychedelic Hype Bubble,” a JAMA Psychiatry Viewpoint by David Yaden and colleagues, a wave of scholarship and commentaries has emphasized the ethical importance of nuanced science communication about the still-nascent field of psychedelic medicine.
By Adithi Iyer
The legal world is atwitter with the developing artificial intelligence (“AI”) copyright cage match between The New York Times and OpenAI. The Times filed its complaint in Manhattan Federal District Court on December 27 accusing OpenAI of unlawfully using its (copyrighted and paywalled) articles to train ChatGPT. OpenAI, in turn, published a sharply-worded response on January 8, claiming that its incorporation of the material for training purposes squarely constitutes fair use. This follows ongoing suits by authors against OpenAI on similar grounds, but the titanic scale of the Times-OpenAI dispute and its application of these issues to media in federal litigation makes it one to watch. While much of the buzz around the case has centered on its intellectual property and First Amendment implications, there may be implications for the health and biotech industries. Here’s a rundown of the major legal questions at play and the health-related stakes for a future decision.
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
Harm reduction in the context of the opioid crisis is focused on preventing overdose and infectious disease transmission by working with people who use drugs without moral judgment. Far too often, the public health imperative of harm reduction is blocked by federal policy, state laws, and other structural barriers anchored in the “war on drugs” that reduce the effectiveness of harm reduction efforts. To maximize the potential of harm reduction requires a whole-of-government approach, involving coordination across levels of government.
As noted in this recent report, “Bringing the W-G approach to bear on a complex problem depends on several components, including agreement as to the problem, understanding the problem, and the causes of the problem. For many involved in government at all levels, the harm reduction challenge unfortunately falls at the first of those hurdles.”
By Hannah Rahim
Luck egalitarianism is a theory of political philosophy that provides that inequalities resulting from an individual’s informed choices are just and need not be reduced, whereas inequalities resulting from circumstances over which an individual has no control are unjust and should be reduced. The application of luck egalitarianism to health inequalities has some value when allocating health care resources, but it often conceptualizes health too narrowly and risks exacerbating existing unjust disparities. If luck egalitarianism is to be applied in developing health care policy, it must only be used in clearly defined circumstances and with a holistic approach.
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
There is a well-established whole of government response to drug policing centered around the “war on drugs.” However, the existing response is largely built on flawed policies that have resulted in mass incarceration, structural racism, and lagging improvements in treatment and harm reduction related to the opioid crisis. Policy changes must be considered to replace acknowledged failures and reimagine the whole of government response to drug policing.
With support from the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE), public health law experts from Indiana University McKinney School of Law and the Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research at the Beasley School of Law recently embarked on a systematic review of US drug policy using a whole-of-government (W-G) approach to assess where these misalignments are occurring among different agencies at the same level of government (referred to as horizontal W-G), and across different levels of government (referred to as vertical W-G). It ultimately provides a tool to address these misalignments directly.