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Full-Text Articles in Law
"As Long As I'M Me": From Personhood To Personal Identity In Dementia And Decision-Making, James Toomey
"As Long As I'M Me": From Personhood To Personal Identity In Dementia And Decision-Making, James Toomey
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
As people, especially older people, begin to develop dementia, we confront ethical questions about when and how to intervene in their increasingly compromised decision-making. The prevailing approach in philosophically-inclined bioethics to tackling this challenge has been to develop theories of “decision-making capacity” based on the same characteristics that entitle the decisions of moral persons to respect in general. This Article argues that this way of thinking about the problem has missed the point. Because the disposition of property is an identity-dependent right, what matters in dementia and decision-making is an individual’s personal identity with their prior self, not their moral …
Lessons From Personhood's Defeat: Abortion Restrictions And Side Effects On Women's Health, Maya Manian
Lessons From Personhood's Defeat: Abortion Restrictions And Side Effects On Women's Health, Maya Manian
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
State personhood laws pose a puzzle. These laws would establish fertilized eggs as persons and, by doing so, would ban all abortions. Many states have consistently supported laws restricting abortion care. Yet, thus far no personhood laws have passed. Why? This Article offers a possible explanation and draws lessons from that explanation for understanding and resisting abortion restrictions more broadly. I suggest that voters’ recognition of the implications of personhood legislation for health issues other than abortion may have led to personhood’s defeat. In other words, opponents of personhood proposals appear to have successfully reconnected abortion to pregnancy care, contraception, …
Beyond Abortion: Why The Personhood Movement Implicates Reproductive Choice, Jonathan Will
Beyond Abortion: Why The Personhood Movement Implicates Reproductive Choice, Jonathan Will
Journal Articles
In 2008, an amendment was proposed to the Colorado Constitution that sought to attach the rights and protections associated with legal “personhood” to any human being from the moment of fertilization. Although the initiative was defeated, it sparked a nation-wide Personhood Movement that has spurred similar efforts at the federal level and in over a dozen states. Personhood advocates choose terms like “fertilization,” or phrases such as “human being at any stage of development,” to identify the “person”-defining moment in the reproductive process, and these designations have profound implications for reproductive choice. Proponents are outspoken in their desire to outlaw …
Measure 26: Fear Mongering, Self-Execution & Potential Implications For Birth Control, Jonathan Will
Measure 26: Fear Mongering, Self-Execution & Potential Implications For Birth Control, Jonathan Will
Journal Articles
Depending on what we mean by “fertilization,” there could be impacts on many reproductive choices including birth control, fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization (IVF), and of course, women’s ability to choose to have an abortion. Certain proponents of Measure 26 suggest that even discussing these implications (other than perhaps abortion) amounts to fear mongering. While primarily focusing on birth control, the goal of this essay is to introduce readers to why the concerns regarding these reproductive choices are very real, and how these concerns are further complicated by the issue of whether, if passed, Measure 26 would be deemed …
Restructuring The Debate Over Fetal Homicide Laws, Carolyn B. Ramsey
Restructuring The Debate Over Fetal Homicide Laws, Carolyn B. Ramsey
Publications
The worst problems with the fetal homicide laws that have proliferated around the nation are quite different than the existing scholarship suggests. Critics often argue that the statutes, which criminalize the killing of a fetus by a third party other than an abortion provider, undermine a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy. This concern is overstated. Although supported by anti-abortionists, many of the fetal homicide laws embody the perspective of the so-called "abortion grays," who eschew the absolutism of the doctrinaire pro-choice and anti-abortion camps. This Article explores how a contextual view of life-taking allows us to reconcile legal abortion …
Preparing The Groundwork For A Responsible Debate On Stem Cell Research And Human Cloning, O. Carter Snead
Preparing The Groundwork For A Responsible Debate On Stem Cell Research And Human Cloning, O. Carter Snead
Journal Articles
The debate over both cloning and stem cell research has been intense and polarizing. It played a significant role in the recently completed presidential campaign, mentioned by both candidates on the stump, at both parties' conventions, and was even taken up directly during one of the presidential debates. The topic has been discussed and debated almost continuously by the members of the legal, scientific, medical, and public policy commentariat. I believe that it is a heartening tribute to our national polity that such a complex moral, ethical, and scientific issue has become a central focus of our political discourse. But, …
Choice, Conscience, And Context, Mary Crossley
Choice, Conscience, And Context, Mary Crossley
Articles
Building on Professor Michael H. Shapiro's critique of arguments that some uses of new reproductive technologies devalue and use persons inappropriately (which is part of a Symposium on New Reproductive Technologies), this work considers two specific practices that increasingly are becoming part of the new reproductive landscape: selective reduction of multiple pregnancy and prenatal genetic testing to enable selective abortion. Professor Shapiro does not directly address either practice, but each may raise troubling questions that sound suspiciously like the arguments that Professor Shapiro sought to discredit. The concerns that selective reduction and prenatal genetic screening raise, however, relate not to …