Kimberly M. Mutcherson

INTRODUCTION: Intersections in Reproduction: Perspectives on Abortion and Assisted Reproductive Technologies.

journal of law, medicine & ethics Judith Daar, J.D., is a Professor of Law at Whittier Law School and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. She currently serves as Chair of the Ethics Committee of American Society for Reproductive Medicine and on the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology’s Committee on Informed Consent. Kimberly Mutcherson, J.D., is a Vice Dean and a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law in Camden, New Jersey. She earned a B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and her J.D. at Columbia Law School. Her scholarly work is at the intersection of family law, health law, and bioethics. “Abortion and reproductive technologies have historically occupied separate realms in law, policy, and academia. In spite of some obvious and natural overlap, scholarship exploring the relationship between abortion and assisted reproduction is sparse.” With these two sentences, we initiated a project to explore intersections in assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and abortion that now fill the pages of this bountiful special issue. Having been given the chance to co-guest edit an issue, we enthusiastically embraced the opportunity, pledging to make a valuable contribution to the scholarship of procreation by soliciting writings in the underpopulated, underanalyzed, and undertheorized landscape that links reproduction-aiding and reproduction-avoiding medical technologies. We were aided in the process of selecting the papers by Priscilla (Cilla) Smith, Director of the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School and I. Glenn Cohen, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. They then both helped to organize and lead a 2-day workshop hosted at Yale Law School where the papers were readied for publication through a process of debate, disagreement, accord, and reflection. In our original call for papers, we opted to make a broad invitation for scholarly writing that would touch upon a wide range of topics including rights-based analyses of pregnancy in its formation and termination, the role of stigma in controlling women’s reproductive choices, the impact of genetic technologies on procreative decision-making, and the applicability of constitutional jurisprudence to abortion and assisted reproduction. Based on our broad call, we collected the 22 papers that appear in this volume. The papers explore diverse aspects of the intersection between abortion and assisted reproduction that incepted this project. Eleven of the papers are main articles, and each is accompanied by a commentary that critiques, explores or, for some, pushes the boundaries of the primary article. The myriad topics discussed and now presented in this issue reflect a variety and richness that continue to attract scholars eager to explore themes in reproduction. While we observe that heretofore scholarship has been essentially siloed, filling either an ART or abortion basket, but rarely both, we hope that this special issue will inspire many more to travel the bridge between ART and abortion.

When Is an Abortion Not an Abortion

Discussion about the similarities and differences between abortion and multi-fetal pregnancy reduction, including the tug-of-war over naming, highlights ongoing contestation about the relationship between the law, ethics, and womens bodies. Ultimately, the law must root itself in the realities of pregnancy including the physical and social consequences that any pregnancy creates for the woman who carries it.