State laws dictating “informed consent” about surgical and chemical abortions sometimes ensnare emergency contraceptives, as the science surrounding EC shows. Courts evaluating mandated disclosures gravitate to professional norms rather than the information most women would value: basic factual information about EC so that they can decide for themselves whether to use these drugs.

This article provides a broad survey of issues facing rural communities and suggests that medicalization of poverty concepts and interventions need to be tailored to those populations. Rural poverty may be both broader and deeper than in urban areas. Those challenges seem to produce a constellation of health conditions, as rural residents struggle with unemployment and lack of opportunities. Relatedly, rural communities struggle to maintain financially viable hospitals and specialty providers. The article closes by offering a snapshot of rural-specific strategies (...) to address these issues. (shrink)

American society tends to medicalize or criminalize social problems. Criminal justice reformers have made arguments for a positive role in the relief of poverty that are similar to those aired in healthcare today. The consequences of criminalizing poverty caution against its continued medicalization.

This article considers the impact of laws and policies that determine who experiences unplanned pregnancy, who has abortions, and how economic status shapes one's response to unplanned pregnancy. There is a well-documented correlation between abortion and poverty: poor women have more abortions than do their richer sisters. Equally well-documented is the correlation between unplanned pregnancy and poverty. Finally, the high cost of motherhood for poor women and their offspring manifests in disproportionately high lifelong rates of poverty, ill-health and mortality for (...) offspring and mothers, alike. Read together, these factors offer a vivid illustration of the medicalization of poverty. (shrink)

On September 8, 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making to revise the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, widely known as the “Common Rule.” The NPRM proposes several changes to the current system, including a dramatic shift in the approach to secondary research using biospecimens and data. Under the current rules, it is relatively easy to use biospecimens and data for secondary research. This approach systematically facilitates secondary research with (...) biospecimens and data, maximizing the capacity for substantial public benefit. However, it has been criticized as insufficiently protective of the privacy and autonomy interests of biospecimen and data sources. Thus, the NPRM proposes a more restrictive regime, although more so for biospecimens than data. Both the status quo and the NPRM's proposal are critically flawed. (shrink)

In the last few years, several states have adopts laws requiring that some women seeking abortions be told that their fetus may experience pain. These measures are the latest in a growing body of specific informational requirements for abortion procedures, many steeped in scientific controversy. These laws abandon well-settled principles of informed consent -- which give discretion to medical professionals to determine what information is crucial for patients -- in favor of legislative judgments about what particular facts should be told (...) to patients and how these facts should be shared. This Article argues that, to the extent these laws go beyond flagging topics that should be discussed by health care providers and prescribe specific factual claims that must be conveyed to patients, they should be subject to non-deferential judicial review of their accuracy and fairness. Part I provides an overview of abortion informed consent jurisprudence since Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. Part II suggests a framework for analyzing challenges to specific informed consent provisions. Part II.A argues that false or misleading statements are unconstitutional under either the undue burden or rational basis standards. Part II.B proposes false advertising cases as an instructive analogue, arguing that the accuracy of informed consent provisions should be analyzed similarly. Part II.C considers the principle of judicial deference to legislative fact-finding from several angles, and argues that it should be applied in weak form, or not at all, in the informed consent context. Part III analyzes several states' mandated information on fetal pain within this framework and concludes that they are unconstitutional. (shrink)