Category: Personhood

Westworld and Bioethics

I. Glenn Cohen 3 Comments

By I. Glenn Cohen

[WARNING: Spoilers below]

On Sunday, HBO’s Westworld finished its run. Though I thought some of the early episodes were arguably a bit of a failure as television (and my partner almost jumped off the bandwagon of making this one of “our shows”) IMHO the show finished very strong.

But whatever you thought of it as television, the show is wildly successful at raising a series of bioethics issues. There have been a bunch of other very good treatments of some of these issues in the last couple of decades – A.I., Ex Machina, Humans, Battlestar Galactica all come to mind – that touch on some of these issues. But, what I loved about Westworld is its lack of direct moralizing on these subjects, and how it leaves the viewer puzzling through them in a much more naturalistic way: I have been thrust in this unfamiliar world, and now I am trying to use my ethical compass to get my bearings.

Once upon a time I discussed Bioethics and the Martian, and my aim is to do the same here. I thought one way to share why I think the show is so successful as a text for bioethics exploration was to develop a “mock exam question” on the subject. This is really written more like an oral exam, with follow-up questions. The goal is not entirely fanciful since I do teach a course that uses films as texts to explore bioethics and the law.

Here goes: Read More

Initial Quick Thoughts on the Announcement of the Birth Through Mitochondrial Replacement in Mexico

I. Glenn Cohen Leave a comment

The science media is abuzz about the birth of a child using mitochondrial replacement techniques in Mexico to Jordanian parents at the hands of NY Doctors. A few quick reactions (I am heading to this unrelated NAS/IOM Committee meeting tomorrow evening so may have some more thoughts when that settles down).

  • This is the first time this particular technique has been used to produce a live, but I am not sure from an ethical standpoint the arguments are all that different. That said, for those deeply interested in the more philosophical question of harm to children and the propriety of best interests argument in light of Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem (my take here and here) it may matter whether mitochondrial replacement is done through Pronuclear Transfer or Maternal Spindle Transfer as argued quite well here.
  • The fact that the doctors are from New York, the Patients are from Jordan, and the procedure took place in Mexico is not insignificant. This is a form of medical tourism, a topic I wrote a book on, most similar to cases of fertility and stem cell therapy tourism I cover in the latter half of the book. Absent making domestic prohibitions extraterritorial, something that I argue is permitted by international law and justified in some instances, there is very little that a home country can do about this. The going abroad is likely in part at least a function of some U.S. laws on the subject Eli Adashi and I wrote about for JAMA prohibiting FDA from considering approval of the technology.
  • As I wrote on this blog in February in relation to the IOM report “whatever the US policy in a world where medical tourism is possible and other countries adopt their own systems, so long as not everyone adopts the approach of the US some of these problems will manifest no matter what. So this is about harm reduction not harm avoidance.” This was a bit quicker than even I thought, but is not surprising. More generally if your concern about MRT is harm to offspring and transmission to future generations, people born elsewhere through the technology will inevitably enter the United States and/or marry, and procreate with U.S. citizens who themselves become U.S. citizens. To sound a bit X-Files about it “THEY WILL BE AMONG US!” This is a great example of the limits of unilateral regulation in a world of globalized health care.
  • Interesting that it was a male birth. This may be coincidence or in keeping with the IOM recommendation that only male embryos be transferred (to get rid of germ line transmission). Eli Adashi and I raised some ethical questions in Nature about whether that was an ethically problematic form of sex selection or not but in the reporting I have seen so far it has not been clear that they used only male embryos on purpose.
  • I wish we could stop calling it in the media “Three Parent IVF” or “Three Parent Reproduction.” That assumes the answer to what I think of as a subtle and interesting set of questions — is the mitochondrial donor a “parent” and what sense of the word do we mean.

More soon, I hope!

NIH Announces Plans for new Rules for Funding Chimera Research (Human-Animal Mixtures)

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As reported by Science, today the NIH announced plans to lift a preemptive year long moratorium on funding chimera research – that which mixes human and animal cells, often at the embryonic stage.

Here is a snippet from the Science article about the new proposed NIH process:

According to two notices released today, NIH is proposing to replace the moratorium with a new agency review process for certain chimera experiments. One type involves adding human stem cells to nonhuman vertebrate embryos through the gastrulation stage, when an embryo develops three distinct layers of cells that then give rise to different tissues and organs. The other category is studies that introduce human cells into the brains of postgastrulation mammals (except rodent studies, which won’t need extra review).

These proposed studies will go to an internal NIH steering committee of scientists, ethicists, and animal welfare experts that will consider factors such as the type of human cells, where they may wind up in the animal, and how the cells might change the animal’s behavior or appearance. The committee’s conclusions will then help NIH’s institutes decide whether to fund projects that have passed scientific peer review.

The devil will, of course, be in the details. It will be interesting to see how much NIH takes a more categorical approach as opposed to more case-by-case rule making like in the Institutional Review Board or ESCRO setting. Read More

Whole Woman’s Health – Some preliminary thoughts on benefits, purposes, and fetal status

jwill 3 Comments

By Jonathan Will

The Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health is sure to be dissected in the coming days, weeks, and months.  In the meantime, I wanted to quickly reengage the discussion about the status of the “purpose prong” of Casey and what, if anything, Whole Woman’s Health tells us about it.  While Justice Breyer’s analysis in the majority opinion does not seem to be couched expressly in terms of Casey’s purpose prong, the majority’s willingness to assess the applicable laws’ benefits may ultimately be purpose dressed in different clothing.  If there is not sufficient evidence of a law’s benefit, there could be a problem.

As a quick refresher, recall that Casey prohibits laws that have either the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.  While most folks can readily associate Casey’s “undue burden” test in terms of abortion restrictions that have the effect of placing obstacles, Priscilla Smith and Caitlin Borgmann, have written about courts seemingly ignoring Casey’s other mandate that laws should not have the purpose of even trying to place such obstacles (regardless of whether they succeed in creating that effect).  This avoidance of the purpose prong coupled with great deference to the asserted justifications of the legislature (without the kind of benefits inquiry seen in Whole Woman’s Health) has historically led to many TRAP (targeted regulation of abortion provider) laws being upheld.

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Sex Markers in Official Documentation – Between Biology and Self-Identification

maayans1 Leave a comment

A recent civil action filed by LAMBDA Legal highlights a debate ongoing for the past several years on the issue of “sex-markers” in official documentation to the U.S courts. In different instances, plaintiffs and interest groups have sought to challenge the state’s sex-binary classification system when issuing official identification documents such as passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses and more. Litigation and advocacy around sex-markers in official documentation may be roughly distinguished between groups advocating for easier access to the existing Male /Female categories (“M/F”), mostly by and for the trans community, and to groups asking to break the M/F distinction altogether in favor of an unspecified category: ”X”/”MF”/Unknown/Unspecified. This group is not seeking better access to the existing M/F categories, but is rather pursuing the goal of creating an all-inclusive new category for those who do not identify as males or females, sometimes also referred to as “third sex” or “third gender”.

These challenges were sometimes fruitful in generating administrative adjustments. For example, in 2011 it became possible to mark “X” instead of M/F on passports in Australia. In 2013 Germany approved a change in legislation that allows leaving the “sex” checkbox in birth certificates empty. These developments were presented very positively in the media with headlines like: “Germany got it right by offering a third gender option on birth certificates” in the Guardian, or: “Germany allows ‘indeterminate’ gender at birth” in the BBC, that portrayed them as victories for intersex and LGBT activists. Although the wish to open up sex categories in official documentation seems to be in line with progressive politics, some Intersex advocacy organizations have had misgivings about this line of advocacy. One argument is that being an Intersex or a Trans person does not necessarily dictate a non-specified gender identity and so conjoining intersexuality and transgenderism with non-specified gender identity is incorrect to say the least.

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Does the NAM Recommendation of Sex Selection for Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy Violate the Equal Protection Clause (Part III on my take on the NAM report)

I. Glenn Cohen 2 Comments

As I said in one of my earlier posts today one of the most interesting parts of the NAM report on mitochondrial replacement therapy was its recommendation that only male embryos be implanted and not female ones. The argument is that this will eliminate the risks of germ-line transmission of anything untoward. I will leave it to others more versed in the risk factors to discuss whether this is an over-reaction (the UK did not adopt this in their recommendation) or reasonable. In the last post I discussed why politically/ethically this may get them in some hot water, but here  I want to raise a different question. Would such a recommendation be unconstitutional?

If FDA were to adopt this rule it would clearly be state action. It seems to be a state-law that favors one gender (males) over another (females) in that only males can be produced in this way. If that is right, under existing Supreme Court precedent it would be judged under “intermediate scrutiny.” To pass intermediate scrutiny, the challenged law must further an important government interest by means that are substantially related to that interest. Would this rule satisfy that test? Read More

The “Ashley Treatment” – Thoughts about Avoiding Sexualization

maayans1 Leave a comment

Ashley is young woman who was born in 1997 with a severe mental and physical disability that prevented her from ever eating, walking or talking by herself. Her mental capacity was also not expected to develop further than that of an infant. In 2004, When she was six and a half years old, Ashley‘s parents and the Seattle Children’s hospital physicians who had been treating her sought to perform on Ashley a novel medical intervention that would include hormonal treatment for growth attenuation, surgical removal of her breast buds, and a hysterectomy. This surgical intervention was presented as beneficial to Ashley by allowing her parents to take care of her longer and postpone institutionalization. The removal of breast buds and hysterectomy were meant to spare Ashley the pain and discomfort of menstruation and the development of fully-developed breasts, and also to “avoid sexualization” in order to make her less vulnerable to sexual abuse when she was ultimately institutionalized. Read More

Fetal Personhood and the Constitution

jrobertson 2 Comments

By John A. Robertson

The Rubio-Huckabee claim that actual and legal personhood start at conception has drawn trenchant responses from Art Caplan on the medical uncertainty of such a claim and David Orentlicher, drawing on Judith Thomson’s famous article, that even if a fetus is a person, woman would not necessarily have a duty to keep it in her body.

Their debate claim that the fetus is already a legal person under the constitution also deserves a response, for it has no basis in positive law.  In Roe v. Wade all nine justices agreed that the use of “person” in the Constitution always assumed a born person, and therefore that the 14th Amendment’s mention of person did not confer constitutional rights until after a live birth.  In the years since Roe, when the make-up of the court has changed, no justice has ever disagreed with that conclusion, including those who would overturn Roe and Casey. Read More

Abortion and the Fetal Personhood Fallacy

dorentlicher 6 Comments

By David Orentlicher

[cross-posted at HealthLawProfs blog and orentlicher.tumblr.com]

Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, and other politicians continue to assert a common fallacy about abortion—because human life begins at conception, fetuses are persons, and abortion must be prohibited. Indeed, Huckabee and Rubio claim that the U.S. Constitution requires such a result.

But they are wrong. And not just because people disagree about the beginning of personhood. The flaw in the Rubio/Huckabee logic was pointed out more than 40 years ago, even before the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. In “A Defense of Abortion,” Professor Judith Jarvis Thomson correctly observed that even if we assume that personhood begins at conception, it does not follow that abortion must be banned before the fetus is viable. Indeed, as she wrote, a ban on abortion before fetal viability would be inconsistent with basic principles of law. Read More