Human Reproductive Technology
Genetic Engineering
Implications of Cloning
(DF): What is the legal status of a child cloned
from cells taken without permission? In particular, does such a
child have a legal claim for support upon the involuntary cell
donor? Anyone else?
Liability
(SR) If a
mother refuses to abort a child who is diagnosed with a
physically disabling
disease, should the child be permitted to sue the parent for
wrongful birth?
(AB) Should
people be able to recover from the invitro clinic when it
accidentally inseminates the mother's egg with the wrong sperm or
vice versa? What
would the harm be in a tort analysis? What about if, looking
further down the line, the geneticist creates an embryo with genes
that provide the child with brown hair, when the parents
specifically asked for blonde hair? Would there be a cause of
action of this kind of mistake?
(CO) Could you legally “hijack” someone’s genetic material? What
if you wanted to prescreen a man’s sperm to determine if he
carried the traits you were looking for to create your ideal
child? Is that an invasion of his privacy? Did he truly abandon
that material or are you committing conversion by having it
tested?
(DF) Having identified the man who could father your ideal child,
you deliberately become pregnant by him while allowing him to
assume that you are using contraception. You don't want
support—merely genes. Does he have a legal case against you for
fraudulently induced paternity?
Selection
(CO) Why don’t we “breed out” diseases like we do
with dogs? What if you taxed people who carried those traits in
the event that they did reproduce (arguably that tax would go to
caring for their offspring who could arguably require greater
medical care)
(CO) Taken one step further, what if we became more accurate about
genetic predictability and knew if a fetus would be a 1)
psychopath, 2) terminally ill
(SR) If
two
parents carry the gene for an incurable disease such as
Tay-Sachs, creating
a high possibility that their child will have the
disease...should they be
forced to conceive using IVF and PGS (say as part of their
insurance coverage)?
(SR) To
what
extent should parents be permitted to use preimplantation
genetic
screening for purposes of 1) medical selection (screening for
diseases) 2)
trait selection and 3) sex selection?
Miscellaneous
(AB) The
question of what to do with extra embryos that were not chosen for
IVF has become politicized in light of the debate about abortion
and the status life after conception. However, the debate
concerning abortion is much more central than the disposition of
extra embryos in storage. Why
have these issue been treated differently? Would it be
unconstitutional to put undue burdens on a woman's choice of what
to do with her frozen embryos, as it is to put an undue burden on
a woman's choice to have an abortion?
(SR) Should
parents
be permitted to make savior siblings give a) tissue donations
and/or b)
organ donations to their dying child without the savior
sibling's consent? If
consent is required, at what age does the savior sibling have
"capacity" to either give or deny consent?
(SR)
In
2007
members of Congress introduced the "Cloned Food Labeling Act"
but it did not pass. Should the FDA mandate labeling of cloned
food?
AB: Ashley
Brown
CO: Crystal Ong
DF: David Friedman
SR: Susannah Ragab
Legal Research
on reproductive technology by Susannah Ragab
Legal
Research on reproductive technology by Ashley Brown
Legal
Research from a previous year on Stem
Cells and Cloning.
Legal
research from previous years
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