Law Commons^™

Baby M Reconsidered, Judith C. Areen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Surrogate mothering depends on treating procreation, an activity traditionally viewed as an integral aspect of family life (and family law), as a service to be purchased in the marketplace and governed by the rules of contract law. Thus surrogacy forces us to confront the differences between two of our most fundamental institutions-the family and the market.

A Civil Liberties Analysis Of Surrogacy Arrangements, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay the author comes to the following conclusions based upon a civil liberties analysis. First, surrogacy arrangements cannot be prohibited or criminalized. Second, the state cannot ban the exchange of money for surrogacy services, provided the money is paid for conception, gestation, and birth. Money, however, cannot be paid on condition that the gestational mother waive her parental rights over the child. Third, contractual provisions that require the gestational mother to waive her parental rights or her rights to privacy and autonomy are void and unenforceable. Fourth, when the child is born, both the gestational mother and the …

Baby M And The Cassandra Problem, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I of this essay outlines the facts of the Baby M case and traces the reasoning the New Jersey Supreme Court used to justify the legal conclusions that it reached.

Part II then identifies the three common analytical techniques or modes of argument on which the state supreme court relied in conducting its analysis and suggests that each is itself too dependent upon unprincipled policy preferences to have excluded such preferences from the decisionmaking process.

Finally, Part III suggests that no matter how strong an argument one might offer to demonstrate the systemic vulnerability of principle to preference, the …

A Scarcity Of Organs, Judith C. Areen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The scarcity of organs will be eliminated only if significantly more people agree to donate their own organs and those of close family members. For this, a more fundamental rethinking of the present system of organ retrieval may be required. Such a revision would begin by placing the debate between supporters of a system based on voluntary giving and those who favor either a market system or one based on expropriation (presumed consent) in the larger context of debate about the kind of society we favor.