LAW 5007: Current Topics - Health Law - Bioethics, Babies, and Babymaking
Fall 2024 • Section 21 • CRN 56430

Course Description

This course examines the interactions and conflicts among law, bioethics, and morality in the context of reproductive and parental decision-making. Long before the 1978 birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby,” regulators, lawmakers, ethicists, and others struggled to understand and, in some cases, contain developments in how babies are made and gestated and how families are formed. Dilemmas born of reproductive technology have expanded controversies about the conditions under which parents make decisions for existing children and future children, including whether the law has a role in determining who should get pregnant, how people should behave during pregnancy, and how parents should care for their children. Despite decades of discussion and policymaking, we have found no easy answers to ongoing conflicts on issues such as abortion, coerced sterilization, forced obstetrical interventions, and tort liability for pregnancy related harms. Added to these longstanding conundrums are confounding topics like gene editing, trait selection, and other choices made by individuals about how to make babies with new technologies. These debates take place in the social, political, and medical arenas with varying consequences for individuals and the larger society as lawmakers and policymakers make decisions about parenting, families, and children.

Over the course of this semester, we will study how the law responds to changes in reproduction and the role science and technology play in the regulation of procreation and family formation. More specifically, we will grapple with the relationship between law and ethics and ponder whether, and if so, how, the law should concern itself with ethics. Through a study of topics like gene editing, decision making for children who are sick or living with disabilities, abortion, and limitations on access to parenting, we will evaluate where law and ethics intertwine and where they depart. While we will study cases and learn black letter law, the class will also focus squarely on ethics, particularly feminist bioethics, and how policymaking does and does not reflect the ethical imperatives in any given situation.

Book List/Materials