Law Commons^™

What The Harm Principle Says About Vaccination And Healthcare Rationing, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical ethicists hold near consensus on the view that healthcare should be provided regardless of patients’ past behaviors. In classic cases, the consensus can be explained by two key rationales—a lack of acute scarcity and the intractability of the facts around those behaviors, which make discrimination on past behavior gratuitous and infeasible to do fairly. Healthcare providers have a duty to help those who can be helped. In contrast, the COVID-19 pandemic suggests the possible recurrence of a very different situation, where a foreseeable acute shortage of healthcare resources means that some cannot be helped. And that shortage is exacerbated …

Geneva Statement On Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Need For Course Correction, Roberto Andorno, Francoise Baylis, Marcy Darnovsky, Donna Dickenson, Hille Haker, Katie Hasson, Leah Lowthorp, George J. Annas, Catherine Bourgain, Katherine Drabiak, Sigrid Graumann, Katrin Grüber, Matthias Kaiser, David King, Regine Kollek, Calum Mackellar, Jing-Bao Nie, Osagie K. Obasogie, Mirriam Tyebally Fang, Gabriele Werner-Felmayer, Jana Zuscinova

Faculty Scholarship

As public interest advocates, policy experts, bioethicists, and scientists, we call for a course correction in public discussions about heritable human genome editing. Clarifying misrepresentations, centering societal consequences and concerns, and fostering public empowerment will support robust, global public engagement and meaningful deliberation about altering the genes of future generations.

Race And Assisted Reproduction: Implications For Population Health, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

This Article emerges from Fordham Law Review's Symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia,¹ the case that found antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional. ² Inspired by the need to interrogate the regulation of race in the context of family, this Article examines the diffuse regulatory environment around assisted reproductive technology (ART) that shapes procreative decisions and the inequalities that these decisions may engender. ³ ART both centers biology and raises questions about how we imagine our racial futures in the context of family, community, and nation. ⁴ Importantly, ART demonstrates how both the state and private actors shape family …

The Duty To Rescue In Genomic Research, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Applying the duty to rescue to incidental findings in genomic research provides benefits over the ancillary care framework. A rescue model avoids conflating the return of genetic information with providing needed clinical care, it recognizes the ethical duties researchers have toward the research study and offers a mechanism for appropriately balancing these with obligations to individual subjects, and answers definitively that there is no duty to search for incidental findings.

With Child, Without Rights?: Restoring A Pregnant Woman's Right To Refuse Medical Treatment Through The Hiv Lens, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

In Doe v. Division of Youth & Family Services , a hospital employee sought state intervention when an HIV-positive woman refused to comply with treatment recommendations during her pregnancy to drastically reduce the chances of mother-to-child-transmission (MTCT), eventually triggering a lawsuit against the hospital. With an increase in the number of HIV-positive women becoming pregnant and the court avoiding constitutional analysis of the woman’s right to refuse medical treatment, there is a clear void where legal analysis is surely needed. This Article fills this void for the inevitable case where an HIV-positive pregnant woman’s right to refuse medical treatment is …

Resource Restraints: Rethinking Disclosure Of Individual Genomic Findings, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

While there has been a seemingly endless debate over whether individual results should be disclosed in genomic research, the role that resources should play in determining a researcher's duty has been left unanswered. This commentary fills this void by fully examining how resource limitations constrain a researcher's duty to disclose. This paper is the first to anchor an obligation in the duty to rescue alone, and as a result, the first to find not only an ethical floor of what must be returned, but also a ceiling of the amount of resources that may be utilized to fulfill this duty. …

Researchers Without Borders?: Limiting Obligations Of Ancillary Care Through The Rescue Model, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

With the expansion of clinical research in developing countries, there is a need to explain obligations that researchers have to their subjects beyond those required by the study protocol. This paper outlines a model founded on the duty to rescue that provides ethical clarification of the obligations of ancillary care.

Human Rights And American Bioethics: Resistance Is Futile, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The Borg are always confident that humans will be assimilated into their collective hive and therefore that, as they say, “resistance is futile.” In Star Trek, of course, the humans always successfully resist. Elizabeth Fenton and John Arras, like the Borg, resist the idea that humans are uniquely special as well as the utility of the human rights framework for global bioethics. I believe their resistance to human rights is futile, and I explain why in this essay. Let me begin with their subtitle, because we do seem to agree that popular culture is a powerful aid to understanding human …

The Legacy Of The Nuremberg Doctors' Trial To American Bioethics And Human Rights, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In this lecture I argue that modern bioethics was born at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, a health law trial that produced one of the first major human rights documents: the Nuremberg Code. Accepting this conclusion has significant consequences for contemporary American bioethics generally, and specifically in the context of our continuing global war on terror in which the United States uses physicians to help in interrogations, torture, and force-feeding hunger strikers.

The primary force shaping the agenda, development, and current state of American bioethics has not been either medicine or philosophy, but law, best described as health law. Like bioethics, …

From Free Riders To Fairness: A Cooperative System For Organ Transplantation, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

In America alone almost 100,000 people are suffering while waiting for organ transplants, and more than 7,300 of these patients will die waiting. Given that tens of thousands of useable cadaveric organs are buried or incinerated every year, the organ shortage is a social, political and legal problem, one that is inherent in the conceptual design of the current organ system. While the system is supposed to turn on individuals’ autonomous choices, it instead depends on default outcomes and the decisions of next of kin. While we tend to think about the organ choice as one of altruism (viz. -- …

Politics, Morals And Embryos, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Bioethics in the United States reflects US culture and tends to be pragmatic, market-oriented and insular. Add embryo politics to this mix and, over the past few years, the result has been a bioethics that has become so narrow and selfabsorbed as to be virtually irrelevant to the rest of the world. Not all the blame for this can be placed on President George W. Bush’s political agenda for his President’s Council on Bioethics, now in its third year of operation, but much can. The council has made public bioethics the servant of politics by pursuing a narrow, embryo-centric agenda. …

The Abcs Of Global Governance Of Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Arbitrage, Bioethics And Cloning, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Symposium: Stem Cell Research and Human Cloning: Where Do We Draw the Line: Symposium Transactions

Thank you for that introduction, which reminds me that I used to do regulatory work for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, primarily as a member of the Board of Registration in Medicine, and we had real regulations, real law, that could be enforced. What I am going to talk about today is not "fake law," but a kind of law that is often seen as more like ethics-international law. There is really no such thing as global bioethics governance, but I would like to think that …

American Bioethics And Human Rights: The End Of All Our Exploring, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In his compelling novel Blindness, José Saramago tells us about victims stricken by a contagious form of blindness who were quarantined and came to see themselves as pigs, dogs, and “lame crabs.” Of course, they were all human beings - although unable to perceive themselves, or others, as members of the human community. The disciplines of bioethics, health law, and human rights are likewise all members of the broad human rights community, although at times none of them may be able to see the homologies, even when responding to a specific health challenge.

The boundaries between bioethics, health law, and …

The Law And Ethics Of Organ Sales, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The proposed solutions to my hair supply hypothetical, transfer of property and reliance on altruism, are essentially the only two solutions formally adopted in response to the real world "organ supply" problem.' Because of the shortcomings of these solutions, a number of commentators, myself among them, ² have suggested the allowance of some limited commerce in body parts. This solution can be seen as a compromise between the extremes of transferring property rights and relying entirely on altruism. Property rights are maintained under the market system because anyone who wants the body part of another must gain the consent of …

Amici For Appellees: Brief For Bioethicists For Privacy As Amicus Curiae Supporting Appelles Brief For Bioethicists For Privacy As Amicus Curiae Supporting Appellees, George J. Annas, Leonard H. Glantz, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Amicus is an ad hoc group of 57 philosophers, theologians, attorneys and physicians .. .who teach medical ethics to medical students and physicians. The members believe that permitting competent adults to make important, personal medical decisions in consultation with their physician is a fundamental principle of medical ethics, and that the doctor-patient relationship deserves the constitutional protection the Court has afforded it under the right of privacy.