The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. “Many eugenicists,” Thomas argued, “supported legalizing abortion.”

Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, citing a brief entitled “The Eugenic Era Lives on through the Abortion Movement.” That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas’ misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons.

Dobbs appears more extreme when juxtaposed against Roe’s hidden history. Justice Blackmun was the author of Roe, but the opinion was the product of a remarkable collaboration that incorporated the suggestions of many Justices. Thus, Roe’s medical framing embodied the vision of the Court as a whole, not one individual.

In our article, we share the lessons we have learned after creating and running a successful legal laboratory over the past seven years at Yale Law School. Our legal laboratory, which focuses on the intersection of law and severe brain injury, represents a unique pedagogical model for legal academia, and is closely influenced by the biomedical laboratory.

This column will be the first in a series exploring innovative ways to teach concepts and ideas in health law across a wide variety of classrooms, schools, and curriculums.

Current guidelines and regulatory frameworks create a dilemma that threatens the effectiveness of much needed communication between patients and medical providers: How can patients be presented with detailed facts without creating cognitive “overload”? We explain how this is a false dichotomy and illustrate, using three examples, how fuzzy-trace theory offers a third way of informing patients.

The emerging global climate crisis threatens human health in unprecedented ways, yet global health concerns have not been sufficiently considered within international climate change efforts. A more collaborative pathway could advance efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change while protecting public health and social justice.

This article argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs is likely to impact medical decision-making by pregnant patients in a variety of contexts. Of particular concern are situations where a patient declines treatment recommended for its potential benefit to the fetus and situations where treatment is withheld due to potential risk to the fetus. The Court’s elevation of fetal interests, combined with a history of courts using abortion jurisprudence to guide their reasoning in compelled treatment cases, means that Dobbs has the potential to limit patient autonomy in a wide array of clinical settings. The article calls on professional medical associations to issue ethical guidance affirming the duty to respect the medical self-determination of pregnant patients.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for people living with dementia (PLWD) and their caregivers. While prior research has documented these effects, it has not delved into their specific causes or how they are modified by contextual variation in caregiving circumstances.

This essay examines the right of health care freedom of choice contained in some state constitutions. It explores how courts have, and could, use this constitutional health care right as a basis for recognizing or reinforcing a fundamental right to choose an abortion.

This article argues that state laws banning abortions for disability violate reproductive justice for parents with disabilities. These bans deprive people with disabilities of choices that may be important to their possibilities of becoming parents, including possibilities for abortion of pregnancies that have become risky to continue. Far from protecting disability civil rights, these state law bans restrict the abilities of people with disabilities to choose to have children and to parent.

Abortion stories have always played a powerful role in advancing women’s rights. In the abortion sphere particularly, the personal is political. Following the Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion politics, and abortion storytelling, take on an even deeper political role in challenging the bloodless judicial language of Dobbs with the lived experience of women.

The Dobbs opinion emphasizes that the state’s interest in the fetus extends to “all stages of development.” This essay briefly explores whether state legislators, agencies, and courts could use the “all stages of development” language to expand reproductive surveillance by using novel developments in consumer health technologies to augment those efforts.

While empirical evidence has exposed the harms and health disparities flowing from being denied a wanted abortion, we know less about how anti-abortion laws and policies impact health care more broadly. This article surveys the public health impacts of Dobbs on health care beyond wanted abortion care. The article argues that focusing the public’s attention on the harmful consequences of abortion bans for healthcare beyond wanted abortion care could help to fend off further restrictions on abortion

The global market for biologics and biosimilar pharmaceutical products is experiencing rapid expansion, primarily driven by the continuous discovery of new molecules. However, information regarding Latin America’s biological market remains limited.

This article explores the role of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in drug approval and restrictions to mifepristone access in the context of historical regulation and current litigation.

In anticipation of extraterritorial application of antiabortion laws, many states have enacted laws that attempt to shield abortion providers, helpers, and patients from civil, professional, or criminal liability associated with legal abortion care. This essay analyzes and compares the statutory schemes of the seven early adopting shield states: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. After describing what the laws do and how they operate, we offer reflections on coming disputes, areas of legal uncertainty, and ways to improve future shield laws.

The global impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the backlash towards reproductive justice that it represents warrant a global feminist response informed by broad theoretical and geopolitical lenses. We consider how a solidaristic, transnational feminist movement might learn from Latin American feminist movements that have been successful in uniting broad coalitions in the fight for reproductive justice as situated within far-reaching political goals. The success of such a global movement must be decolonial and must contend with the fact that overlapping realities of global inequality, severe poverty, extractivism, and western-backed violence are fundamentally implicated in reproductive justice.

Post-Dobbs abortion restrictions impact access and choice in the context of reproductive genetic medicine, raising serious reproductive justice concerns. The consequences of these restrictions are particularly acute and far-reaching for individuals with genetic conditions and their families.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health continues a trajectory of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence that undermines the normative foundation of public health — the idea that the state is obligated to provide a robust set of supports for healthcare services and the underlying social determinants of health. Dobbs furthers a longstanding ideology of individual responsibility in public health, neglecting collective responsibility for better health outcomes. Such an ideology on individual responsibility not only enables a shrinking of public health infrastructure for reproductive health, it facilitates the rise of reproductive coercion and a criminal legal response to pregnancy and abortion. This commentary situates Dobbs in the context of a long historical shift in public health that increasingly places burdens on individuals for their own reproductive health care, moving away from the possibility of a robust state public health infrastructure.

Low-income women and, disproportionately low-income women of color seeking reproductive and pregnancy care are increasingly subject to what this article terms carceral care – care compromised by its’ proximity to punishment systems. This article identifies the legal and health care practice mechanisms leading to carceral care and proposes solutions designed to stop criminalization at the bedside.