Reproductive Rights and Practices

This course will be remote and will meet on zoom. JG102B will be available for students in this course who need on-campus space in which to attend class remotely.

Earlier courses and seminars covering the substantive laws of human reproduction were initially titled something along the lines of “Reproductive Law” or “Reproductive Rights” full stop, the latter drawing attention to the important grounding of many reproductive regulations in the Constitution. The title above—Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Practices, and Reproductive Justice—means to signal a broader conception of law’s relation to the issues of human procreation. The word “practices” adds a sociological dimension to the inquiry by looking at how women and men—the subjects of ren reproductive regulation, whether as patients or providers of medical care—respond. And the relatively newer idea of “reproductive justice” pays attention to a wider range of human needs and circumstances that contribute to people’s decisions to have children and raise them under circumstances in which they can flourish. Consider by analogy the idea of “covid justice” and what that might include.
This course examines a range of reproductive rights and reproductive practices, focusing on the relation between the two. The course will address the interests of various stakeholders in human reproduction, connecting those interests to contemporary and historical policies such as pro-natalism, population control, individual autonomy, and what is sometimes identified as respect for human life. While our focus will be primarily on the United States, we will also look at comparative regulatory and constitutional systems with regard to particular topics, including such basics as contraception, surrogacy, and abortion. Other specific topics include reproductive and communication technologies (including pre-implantation fetus diagnosis and tele-medicine), pregnancy loss (miscarriage and abortion), and limitations (constitutional, biological, financial, cultural) on various rights and practices. These explorations reveal how the regulation of reproduction cuts across existing legal doctrines in family law, property, health law, and criminal law.
We begin with the question of what counts as a reproductive practice, and move on to consider how reproductive rights reflect, intersect, or collide with other rights such as human rights, disability rights, and sex equality? How do reproductive rights play out among different sub-groups of would-be (or would-not-be) parents by wealth, race, gender, and disability? About a third of the class will focus on abortion as a subject on its own and as a way in to understanding broader policy concerns regarding reproduction, sexuality, American values, and gender. (Just why is so much in the U.S. about abortion?)