THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ... : ABORTION POLITICS & THE REGULATION OF ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY
Abortion and assisted reproductive technology (“ART”) may seem paradoxical in reproductive health: a woman seeks to terminate a pregnancy in the first, while a woman goes through herculean attempts to attain one in the latter. In fact, they share fundamental concerns: women’s health and autonomy. Both include medical procedures, with potential health risks and benefits, and both help a woman choose whether and when to become a mother. Abortion and ART share another commonality: when these issues enter public and political discourse, consideration of women’s health often recedes into the background. This response to articles by June Carbone and Jody Lynee Madeira suggests that issues central to the development of abortion-related regulation and jurisprudence have the potential to drive the development of ART and related law.
The First Amendment Right Against Compelled Listening
This Article argues for a new First Amendment right: the right against compelled listening. Free speech jurisprudence - which already recognizes the right to speak, the right to listen, and the right against compelled speech - is incomplete without the right against compelled listening. The same values that underlie the other free speech rights also lead to this right. Furthermore, this claim holds true regardless of whether one conceives of the primary purpose of the free speech clause as creating a marketplace of ideas, enhancing participatory democracy, or promoting individual autonomy. The Article starts by examining the protection afforded to unwilling listeners by the captive audience doctrine, which balances private speakers' right to communicate against listeners' rights to privacy, equality, and voting. It then argues that protection for captive listeners can be grounded in free speech values, and explores two possible approaches to delimiting the free speech right against compelled listening. The Article concludes by applying the new right to state-mandated abortion counseling and state-mandated diversity training.
Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Religion: The Ban on Federal Funding as a Violation of the Establishment Clause
Many Americans die each day from diseases affecting the heart, liver, kidneys, brain and a whole host of other bodily organs. Scientific researchers are constantly trying to develop new treatments for such medical conditions. Presently, the research community is working hard to develop medical treatments using stem cells from human embryos. That process involves extracting stem cells from either excess embryos that are no longer needed for in vitro fertilization or from embryos that are created through therapeutic cloning. At the blastocyst stage, about five days after the beginning of an embryo, researchers extract stem cells from the embryo and place them in a petri dish where the cells divide to produce a line of millions of stem cells. These stem cells are undifferentiated, meaning that they are still capable of transforming themselves into many different types of cells that exist in the human body. The hope is that physicians and other medical personnel will one day be able to inject these stem cells into a patient’s diseased heart, kidney, brain, liver, spinal cord or other organ, and the stem cells will transform themselves into the same type of cells that comprise the host organ. The expectation is that the stem cells will repair the patient’s heart or other organs by curing diseases and otherwise improving the patient’s medical condition and life expectancy.