What the next 50 years of reproductive rights activism can learn from the last 50
By Felicia Kornbluh,
The Washington Post
| 01. 20. 2023
In June 1973, the Southern Poverty Law Center began publicizing a case it was pursuing in defense of two Black children from Alabama, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf. The Relf sisters, 14 and 12 years old, had been sterilized on the recommendation of a nurse employed by the federal government. The girls’ mother, who reportedly could not read or write, signed consent forms for the sterilization of her two young daughters with an “X” and said later that she thought she was authorizing a form of reversible birth control, not a permanent removal of her daughters’ reproductive capacity. Relf v. Weinberger burst onto the scene just six months after Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun published his opinion for the majority in Roe v. Wade on Jan. 22, 1973, 50 years ago this week. This was a time of celebration for most feminists, and justly so: Their movement, working ardently at the grass roots and uniting across many lines of difference, had persuaded the nation’s highest court to recognize people’s need to make autonomous choices about whether to end...
Related Articles
By Jacob M. Apel, The Baltimore Sun | 08.16.2024
By Neha Kondaveeti, The Austin Chronicle | 08.16.2024
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...