This is an invitation-only event.
“Making Sense of Abortion and Assisted Reproduction”
April 5, 2013 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.
Rutgers School of Law-Camden- Faculty Lounge (E-403).
This workshop will bring together academics, advocates, and practitioners to discuss what often appears to be a gulf between those writing about, thinking about, and advocating about issues related to abortion and those working on assisted reproduction and assisted reproductive technology (ART). This conversation will be the first of three events on this topic. The second and third events will be hosted in 2013-2014 by I. Glenn Cohen, Co-Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and Priscilla Smith, Senior Fellow at the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice in the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Though specific agendas for the second two events are not solidified, our tentative plan is for the second event to be a more traditional workshop, again invitation-only, in which papers are presented and receive thorough comments. The final event will likely be a symposium involving the publication of the papers, which is open to the public. The form of the second two events will be shaped in part by the conversation that we begin on April 5.
At the kick-off event in April, taking place in the shadow of the 40th anniversary of Roe, we want to have a wide-ranging conversation with a group of thinkers steeped in various aspects of the reproductive justice and reproductive rights movements who can talk about the future of assisted reproduction and abortion as matters of scholarly concern and legal regulation, especially when viewed as part of a larger movement for reproductive justice. As you can see from the list of invitees that appears at the end of this e-mail, we’re hoping to bring together a group with broad interests and expertise.
Questions we imagine tackling include:
- Whether a right to create a pregnancy through assisted reproduction is or should be as rooted in the constitution as a right to terminate a pregnancy?
- What common ground and common cause can be found between those who advocate on behalf of people who use ART and women who want to terminate pregnancies?
- What are the commonalities between different ways in which women might be stigmatized for using their reproductive capacity, such as working as surrogates, versus exercising a right not to use that capacity by terminating a pregnancy?
- Is paternalism in the use of ART different from and/or more justified than paternalism in decision making about terminating pregnancies?
There is no writing requirement for participation, but the Bill of Health Blog (hosted by Petrie-Flom) will provide space for attendees who wish to contribute posts related to the event. We will provide a brief list of suggested readings about one month prior to the workshop along with more details about the format. Also, because we are inviting a range of people who are not necessarily all steeped in the same work, we’ll be asking some of you to provide brief introductions on various topics to help ground our discussion.
Our hope is not only to stimulate great discussion, but to help imagine what future discussions might look like in both academia and the real world.
The workshop is sponsored by Rutgers Law and the Law School Initiative of the Center for Reproductive Rights.