Health Law and Policy Commons^™

The Mature Minor Doctrine And Covid Vaccination In Connecticut, Brianna Cyr

Connecticut Law Review

The mature minor doctrine is an exception to the common law rule of parental informed consent for a child’s medical decisions. The mature minor doctrine is applicable as either doctrine or statute in some states, but not all. Connecticut currently upholds the common law view for a minor child’s medical decision-making authority. Consequently, one prominent topic of discussion in recent years deals with the Covid-19 pandemic and the public policy discussions over nation-wide vaccination efforts. Many minors, children legally under the age of eighteen, are looking to make their own medical decisions when dealing with vaccination for the Coronavirus. By …

Child Maltreatment Reporting Statistics During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Cursory Analysis, Alison L. Hansen

Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics

This goal of this research is to provide a cursory analysis of publicly available child maltreatment data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of total allegations of child maltreatment between the months of March and June—a span of time representative of the COVID-19 pandemic thus far—were analyzed in five different states in the years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. An analysis of total numbers of allegations and the percentage change in allegations per year revealed a disproportionate decline in child maltreatment reports during the COVID-19 pandemic. This data corroborates nationwide reports of decreases in child maltreatment allegations in the …

The Invisible Prison: Pathways And Prevention, Margaret F. Brinig, Marsha Garrison

Journal Articles

In this paper, we propose a new strategy for curbing crime and delinquency and demonstrate the inadequacy of current reform efforts. Our analysis relies on our own, original research involving a large, multi-generational sample of unmarried fathers from a rust-belt region of the United States as well as the conclusions of earlier researchers.

Our own research data are unusual in that they are holistic and multigenerational: The Court-based record system we utilized for data collection provided detailed information on child maltreatment, juvenile status and delinquency charges, child support, parenting time, orders of protection, and residential mobility for focal children (the …

Child Welfare And Covid-19: An Unexpected Opportunity For Systemic Change, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic has already wrecked greater havoc in poor neighborhoods of color, where pre-existing conditions exacerbate the disease’s spread. Crowded housing and homelessness, less access to health care and insurance, and underlying health conditions are all factors that worsen the chances of remaining healthy.Workers desperate for income continue to work without sufficient protective measures, moving in and out of these neighborhoods, putting themselves and their families at risk. During periods of greater disruption, tensions are heightened and violence more prevalent. Already some experts are warning of an onslaught of child maltreatment cases, citing earlier examples of spikes in foster …

Keynote: The Protection Of Lgbt Youth, Craig Konnoth

Publications

This keynote contains three parts. Part I addresses the intersection of two metaphors: medicine and childhood in LGBT Rights. Part II addresses the state regulation of LGBT youth. Part III offers Professor Konnoth's concluding remarks on the protection of LGBT youth.

Falling Between The Cracks: Understanding Why States Fail In Protecting Our Children From Crime, Michal Gilad

All Faculty Scholarship

The article is the first to take an inclusive look at the monumental problem of crime exposure during childhood, which is estimated to be one of the most damaging and costly public health and public safety problem in our society today. It takes-on the challenging task of ‘naming’ the problem by coining the term Comprehensive Childhood Crime Impact or in short the Triple-C Impact. Informed by scientific findings, the term embodies the full effect of direct and indirect crime exposure on children due to their unique developmental characteristics, and the spillover effect the problem has on our society as …

Child Obesity, School Food Environments And The Best Interests Of The Child, Benedetta Faedi Duramy

Publications

This article is about child obesity, school food, and the key role schools can play in creating environments that can enhance children’s eating patterns and lifestyle behaviours and, thus, can support the realization of children’s best interest in relation to food and health. In contrast to the traditional approach that frames the obesity problem as a personal issue or as a matter of parental responsibility, this article argues that the prevention of child obesity should be interpreted as a State obligation under both international and domestic laws. Analysis turns to the example of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, adopted in …

Childhood Obesity And Positive Obligations: A Child Rights-Based Approach, Benedetta Faedi Duramy

Publications

Childhood obesity is one of the most serious current public health challenges. Its prevalence has increased at an alarming rate. The World Health Organization estimated that in 2016 the global number of overweight children under the age of five was over 41 million. Although there is widespread concern about the rising rates of childhood obesity, there is not as much consensus on how to address the problem. Obesity has been mostly considered either a matter of personal responsibility or of parental responsibility when it concerns children. Inadequate attention has been given instead to the obligations borne by States to prevent …

Autonomy And Accountability: Why Informed Consent, Consumer Protection, And Defunding May Beat Conversion Therapy Bans, Melissa Ballengee Alexander

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Guidelines For Avoiding Pitfalls When Drafting Juvenile Curfew Laws: A Legal Analysis, Elyse R. Grossman, Kathleen S. Hoke

Faculty Scholarship

Curfew laws seek to provide general protection to youth and adults by restricting the times that children of certain ages are allowed to occupy public places or streets. These laws often contain exemptions for youth accompanied by an adult, responding to an emergency, or traveling to or from school, work, or a religious service, among others. However, the actual language used and exemptions included vary by locality. As a result, courts have reached different results—several courts upheld curfew laws as constitutional, while others overturned these laws. Although not the original reason behind juvenile curfew enactment, several studies have found that …

Rethinking The Childhood-Adult Divide: Meeting The Mental Health Needs Of Emerging Adults, Barbara L. Atwell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Part I of this article describes ADHD and explores the extent of ADHD medication abuse, especially among young adults. Part II discusses the characteristics of emerging adults, who may be more likely than their older counterparts to make unwise decisions about medications and other life choices.34 While we protect minors by requiring parental consent for their medical treatments, emerging adults are effectively able to obtain any drug on the market if they convince the doctor that they have the requisite diagnosis. Part III explores HIPAA, the medical malpractice standard of care and the challenges associated with a society that is …

The Four Stages Of Youth Sports Tbi Policymaking: Engagement, Enactment, Research, And Reform, Hosea H. Harvey, Dionne L. Koller, Kerri M. Lowrey

All Faculty Scholarship

This article advances, for the first time, a framework for situating public health law interventions as occurring in a predictable four-stage process. In this article, written in connection with our panel at the Public Health Law Research Conference (2014), we briefly apply this four-stage framework to youth sports TBI laws, and conclude that public health lawmaking in this area is consistent with prior high-visibility public health law interventions.

Children's Health In A Legal Framework, Elizabeth S. Scott, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

The interdisciplinary periodical Future of Children has dedicated an issue to children’s health policy. This contribution to the issue maps the legal landscape influencing policy choices. The authors demonstrate that in the U.S. legal system, parents have robust rights, grounded in the Constitution, to make decisions concerning their children’s health and medical treatment. Following from its commitment to parental rights, the system typically assumes the interests of parents and children are aligned, even when that assumption seems questionable. Thus, for example, parents who would limit their children’s access to health care on the basis of the parents’ religious belief have …

Liberty Without Capacity: Why States Should Ban Adolescent Driving, Vivian E. Hamilton

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sex, Science, And The Age Of Anxiety, Linda C. Fentiman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the question of whether the HPV vaccine should be mandated (for girls and/or boys) in the context of declining rates of childhood immunization, and the potential threat to public health that this decline poses. The article addresses two interconnected legal issues: first, is mandating vaccines to prevent the spread of disease constitutional under substantive due process and equal protection principles, and second, should parents be permitted to “opt out” of mandatory vaccination on their children’s behalf, either for all vaccines or those which prevent particular diseases. The article addresses these issues in the context of America’s growing …

Are Mothers Hazardous To Their Children’S Health?: Law, Culture, And The Framing Of Risk, Linda C. Fentiman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines the psychosocial processes of risk construction and explores how these processes intersect with core principles of Anglo-American law. It does so by critiquing current cultural and legal perceptions that mothers, especially pregnant women, pose a risk to their children’s health. The Article’s core argument is that during the last four decades, both American society and American law have increasingly come to view mothers as a primary source of risk to children. This intense focus on the threat of maternal harm ignores significant environmental sources of injury, including fathers and other men, as well as exposure to toxic …

The Dangers Of Psychotropic Medication For Mentally Ill Children: Where Is The Child’S Voice In Consenting To Medication? An Empirical Study, Donald H. Stone

All Faculty Scholarship

When a child with a mental illness is being prescribed psychotropic medication. who decides whether the child should take the medication — the parent or the child? What if the child is sixteen years of age? What if the child is in foster care: Should the parent or social service agency decide? Prior to administering psychotropic medication, what specific information should be provided to the person authorized to consent on behalf of the child? Should children be permitted to refuse psychotropic medications? If so, at what age should a child he able to refuse such medication What procedures should be …

Forgotten Fathers, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

Poor fathers like John are largely forgotten, written off as a subset of the unworthy poor. These fathers struggle with poverty – often with near hopelessness – within multiple systems in which they are either entangled or overlooked, such as child-support and welfare programs, family courts, the criminal justice system, housing programs, and the healthcare, education, and foster-care systems. For these impoverished fathers, the “end of men” is often not simply a question for purposes of discussion but a fact that is all too real. In the instances in which poor fathers are not forgotten, they are targeted as causes …

Nature And Nurture: Revisiting The Infant Adoption Process, Barbara L. Atwell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Adopted children constitute approximately two percent of the United States' childhood population, but are disproportionately represented in mental health settings, where they make up an estimated four to fifteen percent of the population. Science suggests that for those adopted at birth, this discrepancy may be due in part to their abrupt removal from the biological parents. We are now beginning to understand the importance of the bonding that takes place in utero and the infant's awareness at birth. This article suggests three changes to the infant adoption process to align it with scientific knowledge. First, all adults involved in the …

How Much Anguish Is Enough - Baby Switching And Negligent Infliction Of Emotional Distress, 13 Depaul J. Health Care L. 255 (2010), Marc Ginsberg

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Safety First: Recognizing And Managing The Risks To Child Participants In Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research, Matthias Schmidt, Jocelyn Downie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Specialized and up-to-date knowledge is required to identify and manage the risks associated with advanced biomedical research. Additional complexities need to be considered when the research involves infants or young children. In this article, we focus on recent information about the physical risks of pediatric magnetic resonance imaging research and highlight information gaps. With an eye to assisting institutional review boards and researchers, we consider strategies for the management of these risks and formulate key questions aimed at exposing hidden hazards. Institutional review boards should ask these questions, and researchers should bear them in mind as they develop research protocols.

Evolutionary Theory And Kinship Foster Care: An Initial Test Of Two Hypotheses, David J. Herring, Jeffrey J. Shook, Sara Goodkind, Kevin H. Kim

Articles

Public child welfare systems increasingly rely on kin to serve as foster parents. This study tests two hypotheses concerning kinship foster care that have been formulated based on evolutionary theory and behavioral biology research. The first hypothesis is that on average foster children are likely to benefit from higher levels of parental investment and realize better outcomes if placed with kin rather than non-kin foster parents. The second hypothesis is that on average children in kinship foster care placements are likely to benefit from higher levels of parental investment and realize better outcomes if placed with some types of kin …

Decisional Dignity: Teenage Abortion, Bypass Hearings, And The Misuse Of Law, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

How might we think about reforming abortion regulation in a world in which the basic legality of abortion may, as a matter of constitutional law, at last be relatively secure? I have in mind the era just upon us in which the overturn of Roe v. Wadeno longer looms so threateningly over the reproductive rights community in the United States and is no longer necessarily its central concern. There is now a general and seemingly well-founded optimism that under the Obama administration, those who support and rely on reproductive rights will not have to pray nightly for the health …

Rights Relationships And The Experience Of Children Orphaned By Aids, Jonathan Todres

Faculty Publications By Year

The global AIDS pandemic has left more than fifteen million children orphaned. These children constitute one of the most vulnerable populations, yet their situation has received relatively little scrutiny from legal scholars. This Article intends to fill that void by explicating the experience of children orphaned by AIDS, situating it in the broader context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and evaluating protections available under international human rights law. Analyzing human rights law as applied to children orphaned by AIDS exposes the extent to which rights are interrelated, particularly for marginalized populations.

In current scholarship, the interrelationship among rights, for the most …

Respecting Adolescents' Confidentiality And Reproductive And Sexual Choices, Rebecca J. Cook, Joanna Erdman, Bernard M. Dickens

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Adolescents, defined as between 10 and 19 years old, present a growing challenge to reproductive health. Adolescent sexual intercourse contributes to worldwide burdens of unplanned pregnancy, abortion, spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, and maternal mortality and morbidity. A barrier to contraceptive care and termination of adolescent pregnancy is the belief that in law minors intellectually mature enough to give consent also require consent of, or at least prior information to, their parental guardians. Adolescents may avoid parental disclosure by forgoing desirable reproductive health care. Recent judicial decisions, however, give effect to internationally established human rights to confidentiality, …

The New "Fetal Protection": The Wrong Answer To The Crisis Of Inadequate Health Care For Women And Children, Linda C. Fentiman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article will expand upon the feminist critique by focusing on children's health as well as the health and liberty interests of their mothers. In the first part of this article, I examine the legal and cultural underpinnings of “fetal protection” and explore its current manifestations. In the second part, I place “fetal protection” in a broader context, documenting the ways in which American law currently promotes fetal life, while simultaneously neglecting the lives and health of born children. The third part of the article offers concrete recommendations about how government, both state and federal, can actually achieve the goal …

Induced Autism The Legal And Ethical Implications Of Inoculating Vaccine Manufacturers From Liability, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Child Placement Decisions: The Relevance Of Facial Resemblance And Biological Relationships, David J. Herring

Articles

This article discusses two studies of evolution and human behavior addressing child-adult relationships and explores implications for policies and practices surrounding placement of children in foster homes. The first study indicates that men favor children whose facial features resemble their own facial features. This study may justify public child welfare decisionmakers in considering facial resemblance as they attempt to place children in safe foster homes.

The second study indicates that parents are likely to invest more in children who are biologically related to them, thus enhancing their long term well-being. Among other implications, this study may justify public child welfare …

Are You My Parent? Are You My Child? The Role Of Genetics And Race In Defining Relationships After Reproductive Technological Mistakes, 5 Depaul J. Health Care L. 15 (2002), Raizel Liebler

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Imagine that you are a married woman who wants to have a genetically related child with your husband. Your doctor tells you that you are infertile, and therefore you and your husband go to XYZ fertility clinic to receive in vitro treatment. You have your eggs harvested, your husband supplies sperm, and ten embryos are created. Five embryos are implanted in your uterus and five are frozen and kept by the fertility clinic for your later use. You successfully conceive and give birth to twins. You notice that the children you give birth to are of a different race than …

The Undue Burden: Parental Notification Requirements For Publicly Funded Contraception, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the legal impact of legislative proposals in 1998 and 1999 to require parental notification for minors seeking publicly funded contraception. Part I explores the history of Title X and some of its amendments, the HHS interpretive “squeal rule,” and the federal courts' rejection of the HHS rule based on the congressional intent behind Title X. Part II focuses on the Parental Notification Act of 1998 and its likelihood for success against a constitutional challenge, based on an analysis of precedent on parental consent requirements for contraception and abortion. Part III discusses the change in the legislative and …