ethics

Within minutes of the leaking of the draft opinion from the US Supreme Court calling for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Elizabeth Constance, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Heartland Center for Reproductive Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska, was inundated with messages on social media from concerned patients. What does this mean for the embryos I have frozen, they asked her. What does it mean for the egg retrieval I have planned? “Our patients are really afraid,” says Constance. Should Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case which…

This spring, Missouri considered, but did not pass, a measure that would have criminalized out-of-state travel for an abortion, creating a bounty-hunter incentive similar to Texas’ new anti-abortion law to enforce it. Exercising “extraterritoriality,” or trying to enforce one state’s laws inside the jurisdiction of another state, would be a new frontier in abortion restriction, but in a post-Roe world, legal scholars can’t rule it out. In New York, which has declared itself a safe-harbor state for abortion, legislators…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Controversy over abortion reached a fever pitch on May 2, 2022, when the leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion was published by Politico. If the draft's key points are reflected in the final ruling, this would strike down Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision that nearly 50 years ago established the right to choose an abortion.…