Disability Law Commons^™

How To Compromise On Saving The Most Lives: A Commentary On Hellman And Nicholson, “Rationing And Disability”, David Wasserman

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Deborah Hellman and Kate Nicholson’s “Rationing Disability” is a skillfully integrated analysis of the legal and ethical challenges of avoiding disability discrimination in setting priorities for the allocation of scarce lifesaving resources. Their analysis goes beyond the important but narrow question of what it means to wrongfully discriminate against people with disabilities in this context to the broader question of how to find a principled compromise between the consequentialist goals of public health and the potentially conflicting public value of “equal concern and respect” for each person. I will focus on this broader issue.

I agree with much …

Medical Civil Rights As A Site Of Activism: A Reply To Critics, Craig Konnoth

Publications

See Craig Konnoth, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights, 72 Stan. L. Rev. 1165 (2020).

See also Rabia Belt & Doron Dorfman, Response, Reweighing Medical Civil Rights, 72 Stan. L. Rev. Online 176 (2020), https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/reweighing-medical-civil-rights/; Allison K. Hoffman, Response, How Medicalization of Civil Rights Could Disappoint, 72 Stan. L. Rev. Online 165 (2020), https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/how-medicalization-of-civil-rights-could-disappoint/.

Parental Autonomy Over Prenatal End-Of-Life Decisions, Greer Donley

Articles

When parents learn that their potential child has a life-limiting, often devastating, prenatal diagnosis, they are faced with the first (and perhaps, only) healthcare decisions they will make for their child. Many choose to terminate the pregnancy because they believe it is in their potential child’s best interest to avoid a short and painful life. I argue that these decisions should be protected in the same way that parental healthcare decisions are constitutionally protected after birth—including a parent’s refusal or withdrawal of life-saving treatment for an infant or child who is very sick or dying. Parental autonomy ensures that parents …

Medicalization And The New Civil Rights, Craig Konnoth

Publications

In the last several decades, individuals have advanced civil rights claims that rely on the language of medicine. This Article is the first to define and defend these “medical civil rights” as a unified phenomenon.

Individuals have increasingly used the language of medicine to seek rights and benefits, often for conditions that would not have been cognizable even a few years ago. For example, litigants have claimed that discrimination against transgender individuals constitutes illegal disability discrimination. Others have argued that their fatigue constitutes chronic fatigue syndrome (which was, until recently, a novel and contested diagnosis) to obtain Social Security disability …

Ending-Life Decisions: Some Disability Perspectives, Mary Crossley

Articles

In the forty years since Quinlan, disability has been present in the conversation within medicine, bioethics, and law about the acceptability of death-hastening medical decisions, but it has at times been viewed as an interloper, an uninvited guest to the party, or perhaps the guest whom the host was obliged to invite, but whose presence was not entirely welcomed. Notwithstanding some short-term reversals and counter-currents, the steady arc of end-of-life law during the past four decades has been towards liberalization of ending-life choices by and for patients who are severely compromised or near the end of their lives. During …

Beyond Abortion: Human Genetics And The New Eugenics, John R. Harding Jr.

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …