Law Commons^™

Of Woman Born? Technology, Relationship, And The Right To A Human Mother, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Jennifer S. Hendricks

This article explores the legal implications of a scientific fantasy: the fantasy of building artificial wombs that could gestate a human child from conception. It takes as its touchstone a claim by sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman, who writes, “Every human child has a right to a human mother.”

While the article discusses the legal principles that would apply to artificial wombs, it is skeptical about the technological possibility of artificial wombs in the foreseeable future. Accordingly, the focus of the article is the effect that the fantasy of artificial gestation has on the legal discourse around pregnancy and reproduction today. …

Teaching Values, Teaching Stereotypes: Sex Ed And Indoctrination In Public Schools, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Jennifer S. Hendricks

Many sex education curricula currently used in public schools indoctrinate students in gender stereotypes. As expressed in the title of one article: “If You Don’t Aim to Please, Don’t Dress to Tease,” and Other Public School Sex Education Lessons Subsidized by You, the Federal Taxpayer (Jennifer L. Greenblatt, 14 TEX. J. ON C.L. & C.R. 1 (2008)). Other lessons pertain not only to responsibility for sexual activity but to lifelong approaches to family life and individual achievement. One lesson, for example, instructs students that, in marriage, men need sex from their wives and women need financial support from their husbands. …

Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Jennifer S. Hendricks

The Supreme Court’s decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 has been extensively analyzed as the latest step in the Court’s long struggle with the desegregation of public schools. This Article examines the decision’s implications for the full range of equal protection doctrine dealing with benign or remedial race and sex classifications. Parents Involved revealed a sharp division on the Court over whether government may consciously try to promote substantive equality. In the past, such efforts have been subject to an equal protection analysis that allows race-conscious or sex-conscious state action, contingent on existing, de …