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Faculty Scholarship

Series

1992

Court

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Adding Injustice To Injury - Compulsory Payment For Unwanted Treatment, George J. Annas Jan 1992

Adding Injustice To Injury - Compulsory Payment For Unwanted Treatment, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

A New York court this year issued one of the most disturbing and aberrant appellate opinions of the past two decades concerning the right to refuse treatment.1 In my view, the judges ruling in Grace Plaza v. Elbaum made a series of errors: they assumed that institutions can have ethics apart from those of their physicians; they believed that both institutions and physicians are primarily motivated by money; and they approved the use of legal threats by institutions and physicians against patients and their families. In this court's idiosyncratic view, dying and medical care seem to be not about …


Using Genes To Define Motherhood - The California Solution, George J. Annas Jan 1992

Using Genes To Define Motherhood - The California Solution, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Sometimes (although not often) new forms of medical technology raise unique legal and social-policy issues that require new laws. In vitro fertilization, followed by the transfer of the embryo to a woman who did not contribute the ovum, is such a technique, because when the child's gestational mother is not the child's genetic mother, society must decide which is the child's legal mother. A California Court of Appeal, the first appellate court anywhere in the world to rule on this issue, decided in late 1991 that genes determine motherhood.