Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law

Dov Fox

jun 2019 · Oxford University Press

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Millions of Americans rely on the likes of birth control, IVF, and genetic testing to make plans as intimate and farreaching as any over a lifetime. This is no less than the medicine of miracles. It fills empty cradles, frees families from terrible disease, and empowers them to fashion their lives on their own terms. But accidents happen. Pharmacists mix up pills. Lab techs misread tests. Obstetricians tell women their healthy fetuses would be stillborn. Political and economic forces conspire against regulation. And judges throw up their hands when professionals foist parenthood on people who didn't want it, or childlessness on those who did. Failed abortions, switched donors, and lost embryos may be first-world problems. But these aren't innocent lapses or harmless errors. They're wrongs in need of rights. This book lifts the curtain on reproductive negligence, gives voice to the lives it upends, and vindicates the interests that advances in medicine and technology bring to full expression. It charts the legal universe of errors that: (1) deprive pregnancy or parenthood of people who set out to pursue them; (2) impose pregnancy or parenthood on those who tried to avoid these roles; or (3) confound efforts to have a child with or without certain genetic traits. This novel architecture forces citizens and courts to rethink the reproductive controversies of our time, and equips us to meet the new challenges-from womb transplants to gene editing-that lie just over the horizon.

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Dov Fox is Professor of Law and Herzog Endowed Scholar at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he directs the Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Harvard College, Yale Law School, and the University of Oxford, where he received a doctorate in political philosophy. His NIH-funded research on translational medicine, genomic privacy, and the regulation of biotechnology has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the Today Show.