Law Commons^™

Body And Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, And The Unitary Right To Abortion, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This Article explores equality-based arguments for abortion rights, revealing both their necessity and their pitfalls. It first uses the narrowness of the "health exception" to abortion regulations to demonstrate why equality arguments are needed--namely because our legal tradition's conception of liberty is based on male experience, no theory of basic human rights grounded in women's reproductive experiences has developed. Next, however, the Article shows that equality arguments, although necessary, can undermine women's reproductive freedom by requiring that pregnancy and abortion be analogized to male experiences. As a result, equality arguments focus on either the bodily or the social aspect of …

Contraception, Abortion, And Health Care Reform: Finding Appropriate Moral Ground, Dena S. Davis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In this essay, I make the argument that abortion and contraception are fundamentally different actions that occupy fundamentally different moral space, and that justify fundamentally different political action. I conclude that, while it is morally licit, even morally obligatory, for people who believe that embryos are people like us, to attempt to impede access to abortion, it is morally illicit to attempt to block access to contraception (including sterilization).

Science, Public Bioethics, And The Problem Of Integration, O. Carter Snead

Journal Articles

Public bioethics — the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods — is an emerging area of American law. The field uniquely combines scientific knowledge, moral reasoning, and prudential judgments about democratic decision making. It has captured the attention of officials in every branch of government, as well as the American public itself. Public questions (such as those relating to the law of abortion, the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, and the regulation of end-of-life decision making) continue to roil the public square.

This Article examines the question of how scientific methods and …

Can There Be A Progressive Bioethics?, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Progressive bioethics-the words are not an oxymoron. Far from it; they are more redundant than oppositional. Yet they leave me almost as uneasy, as if they were contradictory. My unease exists because bioethics should be neither progressive nor regressive, neither right wing nor left wing, neither liberal nor conservative. It should be just good, sound ethics applied to the often difficult moral problems posed by present-day medicine and the genomic revolution.

I do not mean to suggest by this that all bioethicists need agree. Respectable ethicists using established modes of ethical analysis have long disagreed on and argued for different …