By Sarah Alawi
Dar Al-Ifta, Egypt’s Islamic body, issued a statement earlier this month on the legality of egg freezing under Islamic law following a controversial Facebook post by an Egyptian woman, Reem Mahana, on her decision to freeze her eggs.
Mahana said she froze her eggs for “the simple reason” that she wants to build a family when the time is right: “I cannot guarantee when exactly I will get married… I totally reject the idea of getting married to any man [only] to have a child.”
By Alexa Richardson
A new study indicates that 28.1% of women birthing in U.S. hospitals experienced mistreatment by providers during labor, with rates even higher for women of color. The multi-stakeholder study, convened in response to World Health Organization efforts to track maternal mistreatment, included more than 2,000 participants, and defined mistreatment as including one or more occurrences of: loss of autonomy; being shouted at, scolded, or threatened; or being ignored, refused, or receiving no response to requests for help. The study newly highlights the lack of legal protections available to for pregnant and birthing people who experience these kinds of mistreatment by providers.
Campaigns like Exposing the Silence have chronicled the outpouring of people’s harrowing birth stories, riddled with abuse and violations of consent. In one typical account, a user named Chastity explained:
I had a room full of student doctors, an OB I never met come in and forcibly give me extremely painful cervical exams while I screamed for them to stop and tried to get away. They had a nurse come and hold me down. There was at least 10 students practicing on me. I was a teen mom and my partner hadn’t gotten off work yet so I was all alone.
Another user named Abriana recounted:
As I was pushing, I got on my side and it was then that I started to feel pain much different from labor pains. I asked, ‘What is going on?’ The nurse replied, ‘I am doing a perineal rub.’ I immediately said, ‘Please stop doing that. You are hurting me.’ The nurse argued, ‘It will help you’ and didn’t move. I asked her again to please stop. I then yelled, while pushing, ‘Get your hands out of me!’ The nurse continued.
The traditional modes of seeking legal recourse have little to offer those who experience these kinds of mistreatment.
By Shelly Simana
The topic of posthumous reproduction has produced great interest globally due to the fundamental dilemmas it raises. The most controversial cases are the ones in which there is no explicit consent on behalf of the deceased person for using his or her gametes after death. In those cases, courts try to trace the presumed intentions of the deceased person, heavily relying on testimonies of the deceased’s family members and friends.
I recently published an article about this topic, in which I advocate for a more permissive approach toward posthumous reproduction. In this blog post, I would like to focus on a particular issue—the permission for the deceased’s partner, but not the parents, to engage in posthumous reproduction.
By Sarah Alawi
My name is Sarah Alawi; I’m an LLM Student at Harvard Law School, from New Zealand. I am excited to contribute to the Petrie-Flom Blog as a Petrie-Flom Student Fellow. My area of interest is assisted reproductive technology (ART), although I intend to use this forum to write on a broad range of medico-legal issues in the bioethics sphere. This post introduces my specific research interest in ART disputes, and concludes with a recommendation for anyone considering ART.
ART is a growth industry and yet, despite the sophistication of new birth technologies, its use depends on functioning human relationships. Commonly, parties try to define these relationships using pre-conception ART agreements. During my fellowship at the Petrie-Flom Center, I intend to write a thesis on what should happen, in terms of the parties’ rights at law, when three common forms of ART agreements break down:
By Alexa Richardson
A woman whose hours-old baby was dying admitted to her care providers that she had abused prescription and over-the-counter medications shortly before the birth. This summer, in United States v. Flute, 929 F.3d 584 (2019), the Eighth Circuit held that she could be charged with federal manslaughter for the death of her baby. While some states have charged pregnant people with manslaughter for drug use during pregnancy, Flute marks the first time that federal prosecutors have brought such charges. The decision, which reversed the district court decision dismissing the charge, opens the door for pregnant people to be criminally charged for a wide range of prenatal conduct — should it result in the baby’s death after birth — such as driving recklessly, receiving chemotherapy treatment during pregnancy, failing to obtain adequate prenatal care, or declining a medical recommendation.
Samantha Flute, an American Indian woman, gave birth at a Sisseton, South Dakota hospital on August 19, 2016. She told the medical staff that she had ingested Lorazepam, hydrocodone (possibly laced with cocaine), and cough syrup before coming to the hospital. Four hours after birth, Baby Boy Flute died. The autopsy revealed a full-term baby with no anatomical cause of death, and the pathologist determined the death to be the result of drug toxicity from the substances ingested prenatally by Flute.