Efficacy of the Speech Intelligibility Index as an intervention tool with pediatric cancer patients

This study evaluates the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) as a tool to describe hearing loss and predict when hearing aids would be appropriate for pediatric oncology patients who have received or are currently receiving cisplatin. The efficacy of the SII is compared to the Brock grade which is commonly used for patients with ototoxic hearing loss secondary to cisplatin treatment. The SII is a discrete measure that precisely reflects the patient’s functional hearing status and is highly correlated with the need for audiologic intervention

The Genuine Article: A Subversive Economic Perspective on the Law\u27s Procreationist Vision of Marriage

This Article provides a new perspective on the image of marriage that has emerged from the same-sex marriage debate. However flawed, the procreation rationale has enjoyed overwhelming success in recent same-sex marriage litigation. However absurd, the idea that same-sex marriage is a species of counterfeit has become so commonplace in the rhetoric surrounding same-sex marriage that it nearly escapes our notice. This Article argues that while neither the procreation rationale nor contemporary counterfeiting rhetoric makes much sense when considered in isolation, both make a great deal of sense when considered in concert. To that end, this Article looks at the historical casting of non-normative intimate relationships and reproductive practices (sodomy and miscegenation) in subversive economic terms (counterfeit) in order to explain the highly influential procreation rationale for same-sex marriage prohibitions. It ultimately suggests that the image of same-sex marriage (and same-sex reproduction) as a fraud that has emerged from the same-sex marriage debate, and from recent same-sex marriage litigation, brings us back full circle to sodomy and links up with the imagery of disgust that once surrounded sodomy regulation and the legal treatment of sexual orientation minorities through Lawrence v. Texas. It also suggests that the law’s procreationist vision of marriage might be viewed as at once hopelessly restrictive and daringly liberating

The New Maternity

Constitutional law has long assumed that mothers andfathers are fundamentally different. Maternity, that law posits, is certain, obvious, and monolithic - consolidated in an easily identifiable person who is at once a biological, social, and legal parent. Paternity, in contrast, is construed as uncertain, nonobvious, relative, and often unclear. Over time, constitutional law has grown more insistent about the obviousness of motherhood. It also has cemented its idea of maternity into a fundamental principle of sex equality law that applies in settings - like transgender rights - that have nothing to do with certain mothers and uncertain fathers. Constitutional law\u27s logic of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty invites criticism for many reasons. It channels the notion that pregnant women are presumptive mothers. It perpetuates questionable stereotypes about mothers and fathers. It determines who can be a parent and how he, she, or they ought to parent. It is in serious tension with constitutional law\u27s disestablishment idea. For all of these reasons, constitutional maternity warrants reform, and one promising pathway of reform is family law\u27s less regressive and more multidimensional vision of motherhood. Never as uncomplicated as the Supreme Court has assumed, maternity has become considerably more complex in light of the new forms of kinship enabled by alternative reproduction and its legal accommodation. During the exact time that the Supreme Court has insisted that women and men are inherently different because of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty, state family law has painted a more complicated picture. Maternity, that picture suggests, often is uncertain and nonobvious. It often is relative. Like paternity, it often is a matter of opinion - judicial opinion. Most remarkably, state family law has shown that maternity is all of these things by relying on the same body of federal constitutional doctrine that insists that mothers and fathers are fundamentally different - and fundamentally different because mothers, unlike fathers, are basic, singular, and monolithic. This Article argues that progressive advances surrounding the new maternity ought to unsettle regressive tendencies surrounding constitutional maternity. These regressive tendencies touch and burden many: from unmarried fathers and transgender individuals to nonbiological and biological mothers. This Article imagines what the new maternity emerging from family law would mean for constitutional law. The idea that the new maternity could unsettle constitutional maternity is not necessarily radical - that project has been unfolding in state courts for years. The consolidation of the new maternity in constitutional law, however, could have meaningful consequences both within and beyond the law of parenthood, destabilizing everything from parentage regimes that rest on the notion of essential biological difference to the argument that transgender discrimination is not illegal because sex is not a stereotype. [P]ater semper incertus est. [M]ater certissima est. ([T]he father is always uncertain. [The] mother is very certain.) - Roman law of parentage Maternity is a matter offact. Paternity is a matter of opinion. - American proverb [M]aternity is never uncertain. - Gossett v. Ullendorff We really have no definition of mother in our lawbooks .... Mother was believed to have been so basic that no definition was deemed necessary. -Judge Marianne O. Battan

The New Maternity

Constitutional law has long assumed that mothers andfathers are fundamentally different. Maternity, that law posits, is certain, obvious, and monolithic - consolidated in an easily identifiable person who is at once a biological, social, and legal parent. Paternity, in contrast, is construed as uncertain, nonobvious, relative, and often unclear. Over time, constitutional law has grown more insistent about the obviousness of motherhood. It also has cemented its idea of maternity into a fundamental principle of sex equality law that applies in settings - like transgender rights - that have nothing to do with certain mothers and uncertain fathers. Constitutional law\u27s logic of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty invites criticism for many reasons. It channels the notion that pregnant women are presumptive mothers. It perpetuates questionable stereotypes about mothers and fathers. It determines who can be a parent and how he, she, or they ought to parent. It is in serious tension with constitutional law\u27s disestablishment idea. For all of these reasons, constitutional maternity warrants reform, and one promising pathway of reform is family law\u27s less regressive and more multidimensional vision of motherhood. Never as uncomplicated as the Supreme Court has assumed, maternity has become considerably more complex in light of the new forms of kinship enabled by alternative reproduction and its legal accommodation. During the exact time that the Supreme Court has insisted that women and men are inherently different because of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty, state family law has painted a more complicated picture. Maternity, that picture suggests, often is uncertain and nonobvious. It often is relative. Like paternity, it often is a matter of opinion - judicial opinion. Most remarkably, state family law has shown that maternity is all of these things by relying on the same body of federal constitutional doctrine that insists that mothers and fathers are fundamentally different - and fundamentally different because mothers, unlike fathers, are basic, singular, and monolithic. This Article argues that progressive advances surrounding the new maternity ought to unsettle regressive tendencies surrounding constitutional maternity. These regressive tendencies touch and burden many: from unmarried fathers and transgender individuals to nonbiological and biological mothers. This Article imagines what the new maternity emerging from family law would mean for constitutional law. The idea that the new maternity could unsettle constitutional maternity is not necessarily radical - that project has been unfolding in state courts for years. The consolidation of the new maternity in constitutional law, however, could have meaningful consequences both within and beyond the law of parenthood, destabilizing everything from parentage regimes that rest on the notion of essential biological difference to the argument that transgender discrimination is not illegal because sex is not a stereotype. [P]ater semper incertus est. [M]ater certissima est. ([T]he father is always uncertain. [The] mother is very certain.) - Roman law of parentage Maternity is a matter offact. Paternity is a matter of opinion. - American proverb [M]aternity is never uncertain. - Gossett v. Ullendorff We really have no definition of mother in our lawbooks .... Mother was believed to have been so basic that no definition was deemed necessary. -Judge Marianne O. Battan

Abortion and Disgust

This Article uses disgust theory — defined as the insights on disgust by psychologists and social scientists — to critique disgust’s role in abortion lawmaking. Its starting point is a series of developments that independently highlight and call into question the relationship between abortion and disgust. First, the Supreme Court introduced disgust as a valid basis for abortion regulation in its 2007 case Gonzales v. Carhart. Second, psychologists have recently discovered a sufficiently strong association between individual disgust sensitivity and abortion opposition to suggest that disgust might drive that opposition. They have also discovered that “abortion disgust” appears to be unrelated to harm concerns — e.g., harm to the fetus — on which oppositional abortion rhetoric and restrictive abortion laws often explicitly rest. Third, legislatures around the country have passed hundreds of restrictive abortion laws in 2010 and 2011. If moral psychologists are right, then disgust underwrites most, if not all, of those laws. Taking these developments seriously, this Article synthesizes the key insights of psychology, social science, and sex equality scholarship to make two arguments, one descriptive and the other constitutional. First, abortion disgust is not a reaction to harm to the mother or to death of the fetus, but rather to perceived gender role violations by women. Second, this genealogy of abortion disgust constitutes the best reason why we ought to reject disgust as a basis for abortion regulation, allied as that emotion is to unconstitutional sex stereotyping — or what the Court has called unconstitutional “role typing.” This Article concludes by suggesting that “rejecting disgust” in abortion lawmaking might mean subjecting all abortion laws to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause, given disgust’s likely role in animating all abortion regulation