31 research outputs found
Perfecting pregnancy: Law, disability, and the future of reproduction
No full text© Isabel Karpin and Kristin Savell 2012. Prenatal and preimplantation testing technologies have offered unprecedented access to information about the genetic and congenital makeup of our prospective progeny. Future developments such as preconception testing, noninvasive prenatal testing, and more extensive preimplantation testing promise to increase that access further still. The result may be greater reproductive choice, but it also increases the burden on women and men to avail themselves of these technologies in order to avoid having a child who has a disability. The overwhelming question for legislators has been whether and, if so, how to regulate the use of these technologies in the face of compelling but seemingly contradictory claims about the advancement of reproductive choice and the dangers of eugenic or discriminatory effects. This book examines the evolution of this legislative oversight across a number of jurisdictions and explores the tensions and ambiguities that inform these laws
Consiructions of the Materna1 Body in Legal, Medical and Cultural Discourses
No full textThis manusaipt has W n mproducud from the microfilm mutsr. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thur, wme thests and dissertation copies am in-ter face, whiie Othon may!s h m any type of cornputer pnnter. The qurlity of this reproduction is depondant upon the qurlity of th4 copy submkted. Braken or ~ndisîmct pnnt cobred or poor qwiii illustrations and photographs, pnnt bkadthrough, substandard margins, and irnpmper alignment can advenely affed reproducum ln ttie unlikely event ümt the author dd not send UMI a cornpiete rnanusçnpt and Viere are missing pages. tnese mil be noted Also, d unauüionzed wpyngftt matenal had to be mmoved. a note wrli indiMe the deletm. Overs~e matenals (e.g.. maps. drawings. ma*) are repcdducad by sedonmg the onginal. beginning at me uppcr letthand amer and continuing fmm lefi to ngnt in equal sedioris wttn small overlaps Photographs rnciudd in me onginai manuscnpt have been reproduœd xerogmph~cally in mis wpy Higher ouairty 6 ' x 9 ' biack and white photographie pnnts are avaibble for any photognphs or ~llustrations appeanng m mis copy for an addiuonal charge Contact UMI dincUy to order
A Jurisprudence of Ambivalence: Three Legal Fictions Concerning Death and Dying
No full textThrough a critical reading of the English decision Ms B v An NHS Hospital Trust, and the more recent Australian decision, Brightwater Care Group (Inc) v Rossiter, this article examines three fictions that have been crucial in protecting the choice to die in the context of treatment withdrawal whilst maintaining a prohibition on assisting individuals who wish to die. These are: (i) a competent patient can refuse medical treatment for any or no reason, even if it means they will die; (ii) the doctor’s removal of life-supporting technology does not entail responsibility for the resulting death; and (iii) such deaths are natural deaths. The argument developed here is that when patients and doctors disagree about whether and how death should occur in the treatment withdrawal context, the conceptual space created by law to distance these deaths from culpable deaths is threatened. It is in these moments of dispute that the fictions are challenged, their fragility exposed, and law’s underlying ambivalence about the choice to die revealed
Ideal mother/ideal body
No full textThis thesis argues that women's bodies are constituted by discourses about them. It explores the operations of power over women's bodies by analyzing the way in which the maternal body is constructed in the discourses of law, medicine and culture. Chapter One provides a theoretical context for this thesis. It examines the organization of knowledge and its relationship to power within the Western liberal tradition. Power is implicated in the production and dissemination of knowledge about the maternal body in two ways. First, scientific knowledge is privileged in legal and cultural discourses with the effect that knowledge claims based on experience are discredited. Second, scientific knowledge about the fetus, divined through the routine application of diagnostic technologies, has generated new opportunities for scrutinizing the maternal body. This information has been used to create expectations about which bodies are appropriate for reproductive purposes. These points are explored in Chapters Two and Three. Chapter Two is a study of cultural discourses about two women whose pregnancies were condemned on the basis that their bodies deviated from the ideal maternal body. In these stories, each woman was represented as a bad mother for pursuing her pregnancy against medical advice. Chapter Three is a study of the law's response to women who have failed to comply with medical advice deemed necessary for fetal well-being. It analyzes the strategies and implications of legally regulating pregnant women. Overall, this thesis poses a challenge to the way that the maternal body is represented by excavating the partial nature of the claims upon which these representations are based. Further, it argues for a re-conceptualization of the maternal body
Life and Death Before Birth: 4D Ultrasound and the Shifting Frontiers of the Abortion Debate
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