By James G. Hodge, Jr.
Based on the May 2022 leak of an initial draft, most believe the Supreme Court will carry through some rescission of abortion rights later this month through its final opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Already, concerns have arisen over other freedoms the Court may seriously reconsider down the road, including rights to gay marriage, intimacy, contraception, and informational privacy.
By James R. Jolin
POLITICO’s leak of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization suggests that U.S. abortion rights are on the verge of a fundamental shift.
If the official decision, expected this month, hews closely to the draft, the constitutional right to abortion affirmed in Roe v. Wade (1973), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and other seminal Supreme Court rulings will disappear.
This brief history of abortion rights and jurisprudence in the United States aims to clarify just what is at stake in this case.
By Chloe Reichel
On May 2, 2022, Politico published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which showed the Supreme Court’s intent to overturn the right to abortion as decided in Roe v. Wade.
In response to the leak, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted a discussion with legal historian and Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law Mary Ziegler and Petrie-Flom Center Faculty Director, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, and Deputy Dean I. Glenn Cohen.
Together, Cohen and Ziegler explained the background of the case, the contents of the draft opinion, and its potential implications not just for abortion access, but also for other constitutionally-protected rights, and for access to reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization.
The highlights of the conversation have been edited and condensed below.
By Cathy Zhang
In February, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a one-sentence order allowing Tennessee’s “reason ban” abortion restrictions to go into effect. The restrictions make it a felony for a provider (or any other person) to perform an abortion if the provider “knows” the patient is seeking an abortion on account of the fetus’s sex, race, or probable diagnosis of Down syndrome.
The court below had previously enjoined the Tennessee law, which also includes a pre-viability abortion ban. This order leaves the previability ban in place while lifting the injunction on the reason bans; the reason bans will remain in effect until the Supreme Court makes a further ruling on abortion in Dobbs. In her dissent, Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore charged that the court’s order “subvert[s] the normal judicial process” and reflects a growing tendency of federal courts “to delay the adjudication of laws that significantly impair constitutional rights.”
Numerous health organizations, racial justice groups, and disability advocates alike have warned against the harms that the reason bans will inflict on people of color and disabled persons. Statements from these groups, along with 19 states and the District of Columbia, a host of constitutional law scholars, and other amici make clear that the law’s purported concern for marginalized groups belies an effort to restrict abortion access at the expense of pregnant people’s health and constitutional rights.
By Martín Hevia and Ximena Benavides
Acknowledging what went wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial to any pandemic lawmaking efforts. Chief among these concerns should be the centrality of human rights to global health security.
Health systems that lack universality and inclusivity will always fall short on disease surveillance, detection, and response during health emergencies, at the risk of not reaching all populations. The risk of exclusion exceeds national borders. Regional and global health governance favor the ‘competition of a few’ over (formal) solidarity, which explains why some of the small number of international collaborative initiatives aiming to reach the poorest countries during the pandemic are falling short.
Nonetheless, human rights remain at the periphery of the global health security conversation and the pandemic treaty debate.
Following the call of dozens of world leaders for a new treaty or another legally binding instrument to strengthen pandemic preparedness and response, the World Health Assembly will convene a special session in November 2021 to consider a new binding agreement that could address key failings in the COVID-19 response, including the insufficient international cooperation to implement the International Health Regulations’ (2005) public health capacities. Such an initiative should also serve as the long-awaited international policy-making window to address our health systems’ deep structural problems.
How can a pandemic treaty positively transform our health systems? In this contribution, we outline four core strategies.
By Lauren Breslow
On October 5, 2021, a 20-year-old Native American woman, Brittney Poolaw, was convicted by an Oklahoma jury of manslaughter for the death of her 17-week-old, non-viable fetus.
Her conviction stands as a modern recapitulation of the historical violations that women, especially Black and Brown women, have endured regarding their fertility.
By Joel Michael Reynolds and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
During the COVID-19 crisis, many nation-states did not consult or substantively take into consideration treaties protecting the rights of people with disabilities when developing their pandemic responses.
For example, the United Nations’ 2008 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) is an international human rights treaty intended to protect the rights and dignity of all persons with disabilities. It articulates principles of non-discrimination (see especially Articles 2, 3, and 5) and broader obligations upon specific parties, such as states parties, which are obligated to protect the rights and freedoms of people with disabilities (see Article 4, et al.).
The failures to uphold these principles and obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic were met with a swift response. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) produced guidelines on COVID-19 and the rights of persons with disabilities in April of 2020, as well as a policy brief in May of that year.
This commentary outlines three of the more important considerations for international pandemic lawmaking — both for specific instruments and wider deliberation — with respect to people with disabilities in general and the United Nations’ 2008 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in particular.
By Kaitlynn Milvert
After Britney Spears testified this past summer about her struggle to have her intrauterine device (IUD) removed while under conservatorship, many commentators posed a simple, but critical question: Can conservators (or guardians) make contraceptive decisions for those under their care?
Attempting to answer that question reveals an area of state guardianship law where guardians’ authority is particularly murky and ill-defined. Reform is needed to address the restrictions on reproductive decision-making rights that adults under guardianship currently face.
The Health Law, Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts. Though the Workshop is typically open to the public, it is not currently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many of our presenters will contribute blog posts summarizing their work, which we are happy to share here on Bill of Health.
By Matthew S. Smith & Michael Ashley Stein
Persons with disabilities face an ongoing struggle to reclaim power and control over their lives.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is an important tool in this struggle.
In mental health care settings, the CRPD has challenged states and practitioners to reject coercive forms of care orchestrated by substitute decision-makers — be they clinicians, family members, or court appointees — in favor of modalities that preserve and privilege individuals’ direct control over their care.
By Jennifer Cohen
Profit-motivated economic activity conflicts with the realization of population health and health justice.
To work toward health justice, we must recognize health as a function of (1) capitalist economic development processes, including (2) gendered and racialized divisions of labor. Together, these heighten the contradiction between the profit motive and the domestic and global requirements of public health. This contradiction is also evident in the ways (3) markets can misallocate inputs to health (e.g., hand sanitizer, personal protective equipment for medical practitioners) and how most people obtain health (e.g., as “consumers”).